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SAGE was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative and high-quality research and teaching content. Today, we publish more than 750 journals, including those of more than 300 learned societies, more than 800 new books per year, and a growing range of library products including archives, data, case studies, reports, conference highlights, and video. SAGE remains majority-owned by our founder, and on her passing will become owned by a charitable trust that secures our continued independence.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edles, Laura Desfor.

Sociological theory in the classical era : text and readings / Laura Desfor Edles, Scott Appelrouth.— Third edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4522-0361-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sociology—History. 2. Sociology—Philosophy. 3. Sociologists—Biography. I. Appelrouth, Scott, 1965– II. Title.

HM461.E35 2015 301.01—dc23 2014031195 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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CONTENTS Preface

About the Authors

1. Introduction

What Is Sociological Theory?

Why Read Original Works?

Who Are Sociology’s Core Theorists?

How Can We Navigate Sociological Theory?

Discussion Questions

2. Karl Marx

A Biographical Sketch

Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas

Marx’s Theoretical Orientation

Readings

Discussion Questions

3. Émile Durkheim

A Biographical Sketch

Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas

Durkheim’s Theoretical Orientation

Readings

Discussion Questions

4. Max Weber

A Biographical Sketch

Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas

Weber’s Theoretical Orientation

Readings

Discussion Questions

5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Biographical Sketch

Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas

Gilman’s Theoretical Orientation

Readings

Discussion Questions

6. Georg Simmel

A Biographical Sketch

Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas

Simmel’s Theoretical Orientation

Readings

Discussion Questions

7. W. E. B. Du Bois

A Biographical Sketch

Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas

Du Bois’s Theoretical Orientation

Readings

Discussion Questions

8. George Herbert Mead

A Biographical Sketch

Intellectual Influences and Core Ideas

Mead’s Theoretical Orientation

Readings

Discussion Questions

Glossary and Terminology

References

Index

E PREFACE

very semester, we begin our sociological theory courses by telling students that we love sociological theory, and that one of our goals is to get each and every one of them to love theory too. This challenge we set for ourselves makes teaching sociological theory exciting. If

you teach “sexy” topics like the sociology of drugs, crime, or sex, students come into class expecting to be titillated. By contrast, when you teach sociological theory, students tend to come into class expecting the course to be abstract, dry, and absolutely irrelevant to their lives. The fun in teaching sociological theory is in proving students wrong. The thrill in teaching sociological theory is in helping students to see that sociological theory is absolutely central to their everyday lives—and fascinating as well. What a reward it is to have students who adamantly insisted that they “hated” theory at the beginning of the semester be “converted” into theorists by the end!

In teaching sociological theory, we use original texts. We rely on original texts in part because every time we read these works we derive new meaning from them. Core sociological works tend to become “core” precisely for this reason. However, using original readings requires that the professor spend lots of time and energy explaining issues and material that is unexplained or taken for granted by the theorist. This book was born of this process—teaching from original works and explaining them to our students. Hence, this book includes the original readings we use in our courses, as well as our interpretation and explanation of them.

Thus, this book is distinct in that it is both a reader and a text. It is unlike existing readers in several ways, however. First and foremost, this book is not just a collection of seemingly disconnected readings. Rather, in this book we provide an overarching theoretical framework within which to understand, compare, and contrast these selections. In our experience, this overarching theoretical framework is essential in explaining the relevance and excitement of sociological theory.

In addition, we discuss the social and intellectual milieu in which the selections were written, as well as their contemporary relevance. Thus, we connect these seemingly disparate works not only theoretically, but also via concrete applications to today’s world.

Finally, this theory book is unique in that we provide a variety of visuals and pedagogical devices—historical and contemporary photographs, and diagrams and charts illuminating core theoretical concepts and comparing

specific ideas—to enhance student understanding. Our thinking is, Why should only introductory-level textbooks have visual images and pedagogical aids? Most everyone, not just the youngest audiences, enjoys—and learns from—visuals.

The third edition of this book is distinct in that it includes even more visual elements, contemporary applications, and examples. It also includes additional discussion questions as well as a glossary to assist students in familiarizing themselves with the key terms.

As is often the case in book projects, this turned out to be a much bigger and thornier project than either of us first imagined. And, in the process of writing this book, we have accrued many intellectual and social debts. First, we especially thank Jerry Westby of SAGE for helping us get this project started. It is now more than a decade ago since Jerry walked into our offices at California State University, Northridge, and turned what had been a nebulous, long-standing idea into a concrete plan. Diana Axelsen, who oversaw the first edition of this book through its final stages of production, made several critical suggestions regarding the layout of the book that we continue to appreciate. In the production of this third edition, we are grateful to the reviewers who provided important ideas for improving the book and the members of the SAGE production team: Jeff Lasser, David Felts, Nicki Pachelli, and Pam Suwinsky, all of whom made the process of finalizing this edition extraordinarily smooth. We thank them for their conscientiousness and hard work.

We thank the following reviewers for their comments:

For the First Edition Cynthia Anderson University of Iowa

Jeralynn Cossman Mississippi State University

Lara Foley University of Tulsa

Paul Gingrich University of Regina

Leslie Irvine University of Colorado

Doyle McCarthy Fordham University

Martha A. Myers University of Georgia

Riad Nasser Farleigh Dickinson University

Paul Paolucci Eastern Kentucky University

Chris Ponticelli University of South Florida

Larry Ridener Pfeiffer University

Chaim Waxman Rutgers University

For the Second Edition James J. Dowd University of Georgia

Alison Faupel Emory University

Greg Fulkerson SUNY Oneonta

Gesine Hearn Idaho State University

Jacques Henry University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Gabe Ignatow University of North Texas

David Levine Florida Atlantic University

E. Dianne Mosley Texas Southern University

For the Third Edition David Arditi University of Texas at Arlington

Meghan Ashlin Rich University of Scranton

William J. Haller Clemson University

Ting Jiang Metropolitan State University of Denver

Jeanne Lorentzen Northern Michigan University

Robert Shelby University of Louisville

George Wilson University of Miami

Finally, we both thank our families—Amie, Alex, and Julia; and Mike, Benny, and Ellie—for supporting us while we spent so much time and energy on this project.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Laura Desfor Edles (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, 1990) is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Northridge. She is the author of Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy after Franco (1998) and Cultural Sociology in Practice (2002), as well as various articles on culture, theory, race/ethnicity, and social movements.

Scott Appelrouth (PhD, New York University, 2000) is Professor at California State University, Northridge. His interests include sociological theory, cultural sociology, and social movements. He has taught classical and contemporary theory at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and has published several articles in research- and teaching-oriented journals on social movements, theory, and the controversies over jazz during the 1920s and rap during the 1980s. His current research focuses on political discourse in American party platforms.

1 INTRODUCTION

SOURCE: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll; illustration by John Tenniel. (1960) New York: Penguin. Used by permission.

Key Concepts Theory

Order

Collective/individual

Action

Rational/nonrational

Enlightenment

Counter-Enlightenment “But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—”

“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something!” “I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

“A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon, in a tone of the deepest contempt. “I’ve seen a good

I

many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!”

“I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.” “I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why, then they’re a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say.”

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865/1960:54)

n the passage above, the Pigeon had a theory: Alice is a serpent because she has a long neck and eats eggs. Alice, however, had a different theory: she was a little girl. It was not the “facts” that were disputed in the above passage, however. Alice freely admitted she had a long neck

and ate eggs. So why did Alice and the Pigeon come to such different conclusions? Why didn’t the facts “speak for themselves”?

Alice and the Pigeon both interpreted the question (What is Alice?) using the categories, concepts, and assumptions with which each was familiar. It was these unarticulated concepts, assumptions, and categories that led the Pigeon and Alice to have such different conclusions.

Likewise, social life can be perplexing and complex. It is hard enough to know “the facts,” let alone to know why things are as they seem. In this regard, theory is vital to making sense of social life because it holds assorted observations and facts together (as it did for Alice and the Pigeon). Facts make sense only because we interpret them using preexisting categories and assumptions, that is, “theories.” The point is that even so-called facts are based on implicit assumptions and unacknowledged presuppositions. Whether or not we are consciously aware of them, our everyday life is filled with theories as we seek to understand the world around us. The importance of formal sociological theorizing is that it makes assumptions and categories explicit, hence makes them open to examination, scrutiny, and reformulation.

To be sure, some students find classical sociological theory as befuddling as Alice found her conversation with the Pigeon. Some students find it difficult to understand and interpret what classical theorists are saying. Indeed, some students wonder why they have to read works written more than a century ago, or why they have to study sociological theory at all. After all, they maintain, classical sociological theory is abstract and dry and has “nothing to do with my life.” So why not just study contemporary theory (or, better yet, just examine empirical “reality”), and leave the old, classical theories behind?

In this book, we seek to demonstrate the continuing relevance of classical sociological theory. We argue that the theorists whose work you will read in

this book are vital: first, because they helped chart the course of the discipline of sociology from its inception until the present time, and second, because their concepts and theories still permeate contemporary concerns. Sociologists still seek to explain such critical issues as the nature of capitalism, the basis of social solidarity or cohesion, the role of authority in social life, the benefits and dangers posed by modern bureaucracies, the dynamics of gender and racial oppression, and the nature of the “self,” to name but a few. Classical sociological theory provides a pivotal conceptual base with which to explore today’s world. To be sure, this world is more complex than it was a century ago, or for that matter, than it has been throughout most of human history, during which time individuals lived in small bands as hunter-gatherers. With agricultural and later industrial advances, however, societies grew increasingly complex. The growing complexity, in turn, led to questions about what is distinctively “modern” about contemporary life. Sociology was born as a way of thinking about just such questions; today, we face similar questions about the “postmodern” world. The concepts and ideas introduced by classical theorists enable us to ponder the causes and consequences of the incredible rate and breadth of change.

The purpose of this book is to provide students not only with core classical sociological readings, but also with a framework for comprehending them. In this introductory chapter, we discuss (1) what sociological theory is, (2) why it is important for students to read the original works of the “core” figures in sociology, (3) who these “core” theorists are, and (4) how students can develop a more critical and gratifying understanding of some of the most important ideas advanced by these theorists. To this end, we introduce a metatheoretical framework that enables students to navigate, compare, and contrast the theorists’ central ideas as well as to contemplate any social issue within our own increasingly complex world.

WHAT IS SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY?

Theory is a system of generalized statements or propositions about phenomena. There are two additional features, however, that together distinguish scientific theories from other idea systems such as those found in religion or philosophy. Scientific theories

1. explain and predict the phenomena in question, and

2. produce testable and thus falsifiable hypotheses.

Universal laws are intended to explain and predict events occurring in the natural or physical world. For instance, Isaac Newton established three laws

of motion. The first law, the law of inertia, states that objects in motion will remain in motion and objects at rest will remain at rest, unless acted on by another force. In its explanation and predictions regarding the movement of objects, this law extends beyond the boundaries of time and space. For their part, sociologists seek to develop or refine general statements about some aspect of social life. For example, a long-standing (although not uncontested) sociological theory predicts that as a society becomes more modern, the salience of religion will decline. Similar to Newton’s law of inertia, the secularization theory, as it is called, is not restricted in its scope to any one time period or population. Instead, it is an abstract proposition that can be tested in any society once the key concepts making up the theory—“modern” and “religion”—are defined, and once observable measures are specified. Thus, sociological theories share certain characteristics with theories

developed in other branches of science. However, there are significant differences between social and other scientific theories (i.e., theories in the social sciences as opposed to the natural sciences) as well. First, sociological theories tend to be more evaluative and critical than theories in the natural sciences. Sociological theories are often rooted in implicit moral assumptions that contrast with traditional notions of scientific objectivity. In other words, it is often supposed that the pursuit of scientific knowledge should be free from value judgments or moral assessments, that the first and foremost concern of science is to uncover what is, not what ought to be. Indeed, such objectivity is often cast as a defining feature of science, one that separates it from other forms of knowledge based on tradition, religion, or philosophy. But sociologists tend to be interested not only in understanding the workings of society, but also in realizing a more just or equitable social order. As you will see, the work of the core classical theorists is shaped in important respects by their own moral sensibilities regarding the condition of modern societies and what the future may bring. Thus, sociological theorizing at times falls short of the “ideal” science practiced more closely (though still imperfectly) by “hard” sciences like physics, biology, or chemistry. For some observers, this failure to conform consistently to the ideals of either science or philosophy is a primary reason for the discipline’s troublesome identity crisis and “ugly duckling” status within the academic world. For others, it represents the opportunity to develop a unique understanding of social life.

A second difference between sociological theories and those found in other scientific disciplines stems from the nature of their respective subjects. Societies are always in the process of change, while the changes themselves can be spurred by any number of causes including internal conflicts, wars with other countries, scientific or technological advances, or through the expansion of economic markets that in turn spread foreign cultures and goods.

As a result, it is more difficult to fashion universal laws to explain societal dynamics. Moreover, we must also bear in mind that humans, unlike other animals or naturally occurring elements in the physical world, are motivated to act by a complex array of social and psychological forces. Our behaviors are not the product of any one principle; instead, they can be driven by self- interest, altruism, loyalty, passion, tradition, or habit, to name but a few factors. From these remarks, you can see the difficulties inherent in developing universal laws of societal development and individual behavior, despite our earlier example of the secularization theory as well as other efforts to forge such laws.

These two aspects of sociological theory (the significance of moral assumptions and the nature of the subject matter) are responsible, in part, for the form in which much sociological theory is written. Although some theorists construct formal propositions or laws to explain and predict social events and individual actions, more often theories are developed through storylike narratives. Thus, few of the original readings included in this volume contain explicitly stated propositions. One of the intellectual challenges you will face in studying the selections is to uncover the general propositions embedded in the texts. Regardless of the style in which they are presented, however, the theories (or narratives) you will explore in this text answer the most central social questions, while revealing taken-for-granted truths and encouraging you to examine who you are and where we, as a society, are headed.

WHY READ ORIGINAL WORKS?

Some professors agree with students that original works are just too hard to decipher. These professors use secondary textbooks that interpret and simplify the ideas of core theorists. Their argument is that you simply cannot capture students’ attention using original works; students must be engaged in order to understand, and secondary texts ultimately lead to a better grasp of the covered theories.

However, there is a significant problem with reading only interpretations of original works: The secondary and original texts are not the same. Secondary texts do not simply translate what the theorist wrote into simpler terms; rather, in order to simplify, they must revise what an author has said.

The problems that can arise from even the most faithfully produced interpretations can be illustrated by the “telephone game.” Recall that childhood game where you and your friends sit in a circle. One person thinks of a message and whispers it to the next person, who passes the message on to

the next person, until the last person in the circle announces the message aloud. Usually, everyone roars with laughter because the message at the end typically is nothing like the one circulated at the beginning. This is because the message inadvertently is misinterpreted and changed as it goes around. In the telephone game, the goal is to repeat exactly what has been said to

you. Yet, misinterpretations and modifications are commonplace. Consider now a secondary text in which the goal is not to restate exactly what originally was written, but to take the original source and make it “easier” to understand. Although this process of simplification perhaps allows you to understand the secondary text, you are at least one step removed from what the original author wrote.1 At the same time, you have no way of actually knowing what was written in the original work. Moreover, when you start thinking and writing about the material presented in the secondary reading, you are not one, but two steps removed from the original text. If the purpose of a course in classical sociological theory is to grapple with the ideas that preoccupied the core figures of the field—the ideas and analyses that would come to shape the direction of sociology for more than a century—then studying original works must be a cornerstone of the course.

To this end, we provide excerpts from the original writings of those we consider to be sociology’s core classical theorists. If students are to understand Karl Marx’s writings, they must read Marx, and not a simplified interpretation of his ideas. They must learn to study for themselves what the initiators of sociology have said about some of the most fundamental social issues, the relevance of which is timeless.

Yet, we also provide in this book a secondary interpretation of the theorists’ overall frameworks and the selected readings. Our intent is to provide a guide (albeit simplified) for understanding the original works. The secondary interpretation will help you navigate the different writing styles often resulting from the particular historical, contextual, and geographical locations in which the theorists were rooted.

WHO ARE SOCIOLOGY’S CORE THEORISTS?

Our conviction that students should read the core classical sociological theorists raises an important question: Who are the core theorists? After all, the discipline of sociology has been influenced by dozens of philosophers and social thinkers. Given this fact, is it right to hold up a handful of scholars as the core theorists of sociology? Doesn’t this lead to the canonization of a few “dead, white, European men”?

In our view, the answer is yes, it is right (or at least not wrong) to cast a select group of intellectuals as the core writers in the discipline; and yes, this is, to an extent, the canonization of a few dead, white, European men. On the other hand, it is these thinkers from whom later social theorists (who are not all dead, white, European, or male) primarily have drawn for inspiration and insight. To better understand our rationale for including some theorists while excluding others, it is important first to briefly consider the historical context that set the stage for the development of sociology as a discipline.

The Enlightenment Many of the seeds for what would become sociology were first planted

during the Enlightenment, a period of remarkable intellectual development that originated in Europe during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (see Figure 1.1). The development of civil society (open spaces of debate relatively free from government control) and the quickening pace of the modern world enabled a newly emerging mass of literate citizens to think about the economic, political, and cultural conditions that shaped society. As a result, a number of long-standing ideas and beliefs about social life were turned upside down. The Enlightenment, however, was not so much a fixed set of ideas as it was a new attitude, a new method of thought. One of the most important aspects of this new attitude was an emphasis on reason, which demanded the questioning and reexamination of received ideas and values regarding the physical world, human nature, and their relationship to God.

Figure 1.1 Historical Eras: A Partial Timeline

Before this period, there were no institutionalized academic disciplines seeking to explain the workings of the natural and social worlds. Aside from folklore, there were only the interpretations of nature and humanity sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Based on myth and faith, such explanations of the conditions of existence took on a taken-for-granted quality that largely isolated them from criticism (Lemert 1993; Seidman 1994). Enlightenment intellectuals challenged myth- and faith-based truths by subjecting them to the dictates of reason and its close cousin, science.

Scientific thought had itself only begun to emerge in the fifteenth century through the efforts of astronomers and scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Bacon (see Figure 1.1). Copernicus’s discovery in the early sixteenth century that the Earth orbited the sun directly contradicted the literal understanding of the Bible, which placed the Earth at the center of the universe. With his inventive improvement to the telescope, Galileo confirmed Copernicus’s heliocentric view the following century. Galileo’s contemporary, Sir Francis Bacon, developed an experimental, inductive approach to analyzing the natural world for which he has come to be known as the “father of the scientific method.” In advocating the triumph of reasoned investigation over faith, these early scientists and the Enlightenment intellectuals who followed in their footsteps rebuked existing knowledge as fraught with prejudice and mindless tradition (Seidman 1994:20–21). Not surprisingly, such views were dangerous because they challenged the authority of religious beliefs and those charged with advancing them. Indeed, Galileo was convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church, had his work banned, and spent the last ten years of his life under house arrest for advocating a heliocentric view of the universe. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Enlightenment thinkers did

not set out to disprove the existence of God; with few exceptions, there were no admitted atheists during this period of European history. But though they did not deny that the universe was divinely created, they did deny that God and his work were inscrutable. Instead, they viewed the universe as a mechanical system composed of matter in motion that obeyed natural laws that could be uncovered by means of methodical observation and empirical research. Thus, when Newton developed his theory of gravity, a giant leap forward in the development of mathematics and physics, he was offering proof of God’s existence. For Newton, only the intelligence of a divine power could have ordered the universe so perfectly around the sun as to prevent the planets from colliding under forces of gravity (Armstrong 1994:303). Similarly, Rene Descartes was convinced that reason and mathematics could provide certainty of God whose existence could be demonstrated rationally, much like a geometric proof. Faith and reason for these individuals were not irreconcilable. The heresy committed by the Enlightenment thinkers was their attempt to solve the mystery of God’s design of the natural world through the methodical, empirical discovery of eternal laws. Miracles were for the ignorant and superstitious.

Later Enlightenment thinkers, inspired by growing sophistication within the fields of physics and mathematics, would begin to advance a view of science that sought to uncover not God’s imprint in the universe but, rather, the natural laws of matter that ordered the universe independent of the will of a

divine Creator. Scientific inquiry was no longer tied to proving God’s existence. Belief in the existence of God was becoming more a private matter of conviction and conscience that could not be subjected to rational proof, but rested instead on faith. Some of the most renowned physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers of modern Western societies, from Pascal and Spinoza to Kant, Diderot, and Hume, would come to see God as a comforting idea that could offer certainty and meaning in the world or as a way to represent the summation of the causal laws and principles that ordered the universe. God, however, was not understood as a transcendent, omniscient Being who was responsible for the design of the universe and all that happens in it. And if the existence of God could not be logically or scientifically proven, then faith in his existence mattered little in explanations of reality (Armstrong 1994:311–15, 341–43). There was no longer any room left in reason and science for God.

The rise of science and empiricism ushered in by the Enlightenment would give birth to sociology in the mid-nineteenth century. The central idea behind the emerging discipline was that society could be the subject of scientific examination in the same manner as biological organisms or the physical properties of material objects. Indeed, the French intellectual Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who coined the term “sociology” in 1839, also used the term “social physics” to refer to this new discipline and his organic conceptualization of society (see Significant Others box in chapter 3). The term “social physics” reflects the Enlightenment view that the discipline of sociology parallels other natural sciences. Comte argued that, like natural scientists, sociologists should uncover, rationally and scientifically, the laws of the social world.2 For Enlighteners, the main difference between scientific knowledge and either theological explanation or mere conjecture is that scientific knowledge can be tested. Thus, for Comte, the new science of society—sociology—involved (1) the analysis of the central elements and functions of social systems, using (2) concrete historical and comparative methods in order to (3) establish testable generalizations about them (Fletcher 1966:14).3

However, it was the French theorist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), discussed in chapter 3, who arguably was most instrumental in laying the groundwork for the emerging discipline of sociology. Durkheim emphasized that while the primary domain of psychology is to understand processes internal to the individual (e.g., personality or instincts), the primary domain of sociology is “social facts”: that is, conditions and circumstances external to the individual that nevertheless determine that individual’s course of action. As a scientist, Durkheim advocated a systematic and methodical examination of social facts and their impact on individuals.

Interestingly, sociology reflects a complex mix of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment ideas (Seidman 1994). In the late eighteenth century, a conservative reaction to the Enlightenment took place. Under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the unabashed embrace of rationality, technology, and progress was challenged. Against the emphasis on reason, counter-Enlighteners highlighted the significance of nonrational factors such as tradition, emotions, ritual, and ceremony. Most important, counter- Enlighteners were concerned that the accelerating pace of industrialization and urbanization and the growing pervasiveness of bureaucratization were producing profoundly disorganizing effects. In one of his most important works, The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau argued that in order to have a free and equal society, there must be a genuine social contract in which everyone participates in creating laws for the good of society. Thus, rather than being oppressed by impersonal bureaucracy and laws imposed from above, people would willingly obey the laws because they had helped make them. Rousseau also challenged the age of reason, echoing Blaise Pascal’s view that the heart has reasons that reason does not know. When left to themselves, our rational faculties leave us lifeless and cold, uncertain and unsure (see McMahon 2001:35).

In a parallel way, as you will see in chapter 3, Durkheim was interested in both objective or external social facts and the more subjective elements of society, such as feelings of solidarity or commitment to a moral code. Akin to Rousseau, Durkheim believed that it was these subjective elements that ultimately held societies together. Similarly, Karl Marx (1818–1883), who is another of sociology’s core figures (though he saw himself as an economist and social critic), fashioned an economic philosophy that was at once rooted in science and humanist prophecy. As you will see in chapter 2, Marx analyzed not only the economic dynamics of capitalism, but also the social and moral problems inherent to the capitalist system. Additionally, as you will see in chapter 4, another of sociology’s core theorists, Max Weber (1864– 1920), combined a methodical, scientific approach with a concern about both the material conditions and idea systems of modern societies.

Economic and Political Revolutions Thus far, we have discussed how the discipline of sociology emerged

within a specific intellectual environment. But of course, the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment were both the cause and the effect of a host of social and political developments that also affected the newly emerging discipline of sociology. Tremendous economic, political, and religious transformations had been taking place in Western Europe since the sixteenth century. The new discipline of sociology sought to explain scientifically both

the causes and the effects of such extraordinary social change.

One of the most important of these changes was the Industrial Revolution, a period of enormous change that began in England in the eighteenth century. The term “Industrial Revolution” refers to the application of power-driven machinery to agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing. Although industrialization began in remote times and continues today, this process completely transformed Europe in the eighteenth century. It turned Europe from a predominantly agricultural to a predominantly industrial society. It not only radically altered how goods were produced and distributed but galvanized the system of capitalism as well.

Before the advance of modern industrialization, social life in Europe revolved around the family and kinship networks defined by blood and marriage relations. The family served as the fundamental unit for socializing individuals into the moral codes that reinforced expected patterns of behavior. In addition to its educational role, the family was also the center of production and thus responsible for the material well-being of its members. Family members grew their own food, managed their own livestock, built their own shelters, welled their own water, and made their own clothes. In short, the family depended on the skills and ingenuity of its members, and those in the broader kinship network of which it was a part, for its survival. The family as a separate private sphere, distinct from and dependent on external economic and political institutions, did not yet exist. Likewise, the idea that one may embark on a “career” or envision alternative futures such that “anything is possible,” was inconceivable (Brown 1987:48).

Figure 1.2 London Population, 1600–1901

The rise of industrialization, however, dramatically reshaped the organization of society. Most of the world’s population was rural before the Industrial Revolution, but by the mid-nineteenth century, half of the population of England lived in cities. As shown in Figure 1.2, the population of London grew from less than a million in 1800 to more than six and a half million in 1901. So too throughout Europe the population was becoming increasingly urban. By the end of the nineteenth century, half of the population of Europe lived in cities. Moreover, while there were scarcely any cities in Europe with populations of 100,000 in 1800, there were more than 150 cities that size a century later. This massive internal migration resulted from large numbers of people leaving farms and agricultural work to become wage earners in factories in the rapidly growing cities. The shift to factory production and wage labor meant that families were no longer the center of economic activity. Instead of producing their own goods for their own needs, families depended for their survival on impersonal labor and commodity markets. At the same time, states were establishing public bureaucracies, staffed by trained “functionaries,” to provide a standardized education for children and to adjudicate disputes, punish rule violators, and guarantee recently enshrined individual rights. As a result of these transformations, the family was becoming increasingly privatized; its range of influence confined more and more to its own closed doors. The receding sway of family and community morality was coupled with the decline of the Church and religious worldviews. In their place came markets and bureaucratic organizations speaking their language of competition, profit, individual success, and instrumental efficiency. With the reorganization of society around the twin pillars of mass production and commerce, the “seven deadly sins became lively capitalist virtues: avarice became acumen; sloth, leisure; and pride, ambition” (Brown 1987:57).

The shift from agricultural to factory production had particularly profound effects on individuals. Technological changes brought ever-more-efficient machines and a growing routinization of tasks. For instance, with the introduction of the power loom in the textile industry, an unskilled worker could produce three and a half times as much as could the best handloom weaver. However, this rise in efficiency came at a tremendous human cost. Mechanized production reduced both the number of jobs available and the technical skills needed for work in the factory. Workers engaged in increasingly specialized and repetitive tasks that deprived them of meaningful connections with other workers, with the commodities they produced, and even with their own abilities. As work became more uniform, so did the workers themselves who were as interchangeable as the mass-produced commodities they produced. A few profited enormously, but most worked

long hours for low wages. Accidents were frequent and often quite serious. Workers were harshly punished and their wages were docked for the slightest mistakes. Women and children worked alongside men in noisy, unsafe conditions. Most factories were dirty, poorly ventilated and lit, and dangerous. From the 1760s onward, labor disputes began to result in sporadic outbreaks of violent resistance. Perhaps most famously were the episodes of machine- breaking that occurred in England in what has since become known as the Luddite disturbances (see Photo 1.1).

As you will read in chapter 2, Karl Marx was particularly concerned about the economic changes and disorganizing social effects that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Marx not only wrote articles and books on the harsh conditions faced by workers under capitalism, but also was a political activist who helped organize revolutionary labor movements to provoke broad social change. Émile Durkheim, whose work we discuss in chapter 3, likewise examined the effects brought on by a growing division of labor that simultaneously led to increasing individuality and the erosion of family and community bonds.

© Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy

Photo 1.1 This publicly distributed illustration shows frame-breakers, or Luddites, smashing a Jacquard loom in the 19th century. Machine-breaking was criminalized by Parliament as early as 1721, but Luddites met a heated response, and Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act of 1812 which enabled the death penalty for machine-breakers.

As you will read in chapter 4, Max Weber also explored the social transformations taking place in European society in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. In contrast to Marx, however, Weber argued that it was not only economic structures (e.g., capitalism), but also organizational structures—most importantly bureaucracies—that profoundly affected social relations. Indeed, in one of the most famous metaphors in all of sociology, Weber compared modern society to an “iron cage.” Weber also examined the systems of meaning or ideas, particularly those associated with the growing rationalization of society, that both induced and resulted from such profound structural change. The Enlightenment ignited political reverberations as well. For instance,

the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called into question the authority of kings whose rule was justified by divine right. In his masterpiece of political philosophy, Leviathan (1651), he subscribed to a then-radical view that championed the natural equality of all individuals and insisted that individuals’ rights, social cooperation, and prosperity were best ensured through a strong central government that ruled through the consent of the people. His compatriot, John Locke, the “father of liberalism,” advocated the overturning of arbitrary, despotic monarchies, by revolution if necessary. Replacing them would be governments based on rational, impersonal laws designed to protect free and equal citizens’ rights to “life, liberty and estate.” Locke’s views on human nature, reason, equality, and rule by popular consent would inspire many of the leading figures of the American Revolution.

Consequently, the eighteenth century ushered in tremendous political transformations throughout Europe. One of the most significant political events of that time was the French Revolution, which shook France between 1787 and 1799 and toppled the ancien régime, or old rule, that for centuries had consolidated wealth, land, and power in the hands of the clergy and a nobility based on heredity. Inspired in large part by Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), the basic principle of the French Revolution, as contained in its primary manifesto, “La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen” (“The Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen”), was that “all men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The French revolutionaries called for “liberty, fraternity, and equality.” Spurred by the philosophies of the Enlightenment, they sought to substitute reason for tradition, and equal rights for privilege. Political order could no longer be justified on the basis of a sacred, inviolable relation between rulers and subjects. Because the revolutionaries sought to build a constitutional government from the bottom up, the French Revolution stimulated profound political rethinking about the nature of government and its proper relation to its citizens, and set the stage for democratic uprisings throughout Europe.

However, the French Revolution sparked a bloody aftermath, making it

clear that even democratic revolutions involve tremendous social disruption and that heinous deeds can be done in the name of freedom. The public beheading of King Louis XVI in the Place de la Révolution (“Revolution Square”) ushered in what would come to be called the “Reign of Terror.” Led by Maximilien Robespierre, radical democrats rounded up and executed anyone—whether on the left or right of the political spectrum—suspected of being opposed to the revolution. In the months between September 1793 (when Robespierre took power) and July 1794 (when Robespierre was overthrown and executed), revolutionary zealots, under the auspices of the newly created ”Committee of Public Safety,” arrested about 300,000 people, executed some 17,000, and imprisoned thousands more. It was during this radical period of the Republic that the guillotine, adopted as an efficient and merciful method of execution, became the symbol of the Terror. While the years following the French Revolution by no means drew a straight line to creating a democratically elected government guaranteeing the rights and equality of all, its effects nevertheless reverberated across the continent. The legitimacy of monarchial rule and inherited privilege that had undergirded European societies for centuries was now challenged by a worldview that sought to place the direction of political and economic life into the hands of individuals armed with the capacity to reason.

The Ins and Outs of Classical Canons Thus far, we have argued that the central figures at the heart of classical

sociological theory all sought to explain the extraordinary economic, political, and social transformations taking place in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Yet, concerns about the nature of social bonds and how these bonds can be maintained in the face of extant social change existed long before the eighteenth century and in many places, not only in Western Europe. Indeed, in the late fourteenth century, Abdel Rahman Ibn-Khaldun (1332–1406), born in Tunis, Tunisia, in North Africa, thought and wrote extensively on subjects that have much in common with contemporary sociology (Martindale 1981:134–36; Ritzer 2000:10). And long before the fourteenth century, Plato (ca. 428–ca. 347 bc), Aristotle (384–22 bc), and Thucydides (ca. 460–ca. 400 bc) wrote about the nature of war, the origins of the family and the state, and the relationship between religion and the government—topics that have since become central to sociology (Seidman 1994:19). Aristotle, for example, emphasized that human beings were naturally political animals—zoon politikon (Martin 1999:157). He sought to identify the essence that made a stone a stone or a society a society (Ashe 1999:89). For that matter, well before Aristotle’s time, Confucius (551–479 bc) developed a theory for understanding Chinese society. Akin to Aristotle, Confucius maintained that government is the center of people’s lives and that all other considerations

derive from it. According to Confucius, a good government must be concerned with three things: sufficient food, a sufficient army, and the confidence of the people (Jaspers 1957/1962:47). These premodern thinkers are better understood as philosophers, however,

and not as sociologists. Both Aristotle and Confucius were less concerned with explaining social dynamics than with prescribing a perfected, moral social world. As a result, their ideas are guided less by a scientific pursuit of knowledge than by an ideological commitment to a specific set of values. Moreover, in contrast to modern sociologists, premodern thinkers tended to see the universe as a static, hierarchical order in which all beings, human and otherwise, have a more or less fixed and proper place and purpose, and they sought to identify the “natural” moral structure of the universe (Seidman 1994:19).

Our key point here is that, while the ideas of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim are today at the heart of the classical sociological theoretical canon, this does not mean that they are inherently better or more original than those of other intellectuals who wrote before or after them. Rather, it is to say that, for specific historical, social, and cultural as well as intellectual reasons, their works have helped define the discipline of sociology, and that sociologists refine, rework, and challenge their ideas to this day.

For that matter, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim have not always been considered the core theorists in sociology. On the contrary, until 1940, Weber and Durkheim were not especially adulated by American sociologists (Bierstedt 1981). Until that time, discussions of their work were largely absent from texts. Marx was not included in the canon until the 1960s. Meanwhile, even a cursory look at mid-century sociological theory textbooks reveals an array of important “core figures,” including Sumner, Sorokin, Sorel, Pareto, Le Play, Ammon, Veblen, de Tocqueville, Cooley, Spencer, Tönnies, and Martineau. Although an extended discussion of all of these theorists is outside the scope of this volume, we provide a brief look at some of these scholars in the Significant Others boxes of the chapters that follow.

In the second half of this book, we focus on several writers who for social or cultural reasons were underappreciated as sociologists in their day. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), for example, was well known as a writer and radical feminist in her time, but not as a sociologist (Degler 1966:vii). It was not until the 1960s that there was a formalized sociological area called “feminist theory.” Gilman sought to explain the basis of gender inequality in modern industrial society. She explored the fundamental questions that would become the heart of feminist social theory some 50 years later, when writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan

popularized these same concerns.

Georg Simmel (1858–1918), a German sociologist, wrote works that would later become pivotal in sociology, though his career was consistently stymied both because of the unusual breadth and content of his work and because of his Jewish background.4 Simmel sought to uncover the basic forms of social interaction, such as “exchange,” “conflict,” and “domination,” that take place between individuals. Above all, Simmel underscored the contradictions of modern life. For instance, he emphasized how individuals strive both to conform to social groups and, at the same time, to distinguish themselves from others. Simmel’s provocative work is gaining more and more relevance in today’s world, in which contradictions and ironies abound.

While anti-Semitism prevented Simmel from receiving his full due, and sexism impeded Gilman (as well as other women scholars) from achieving hers, the forces of racism in the United States forestalled the sociological career of the African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). Not surprisingly, it was this very racism that would become Du Bois’s most pressing scholarly concern. Du Bois sought to develop a sociological theory about the interpenetration of race and class in America at a time when most sociologists ignored or glossed over the issue of racism. Although underappreciated in his day, Du Bois’s insights are at the heart of contemporary sociological theories of race relations.

We conclude this book with the work of the social philosopher George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). Mead laid the foundation for symbolic interactionism, which has been one of the major perspectives in sociological theory since the middle of the twentieth century. Mead challenged prevailing psychological theories about the mind by highlighting the social basis of thinking and communication. Mead’s provocative work on the emergent, symbolic dimensions of human interaction continue to shape virtually all social, psychological, and symbolic interactionist research today.

HOW CAN WE NAVIGATE SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY?

Thus far, we have (1) explained the imperativeness of sociological theory, (2) argued that students should read original theoretical works, and (3) discussed the theorists whom we consider to be at the heart of classical sociological theory. Now we come to the fourth question: How can we best navigate the wide range of ideas that these theorists bring to the fore? To this end, in this section we explain the metatheoretical framework or “map” that we use in this book to explore and compare and contrast the work of each theorist.

The Questions of “Order” and “Action” Our framework revolves around two central questions that social theorists

and philosophers have grappled with since well before the establishment of sociology as an institutionalized discipline: the questions of order and action (Alexander 1987). Indeed, these two questions have been a cornerstone in social thought at least since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers. The first question (illustrated in Figure 1.3) is that of order. It asks what accounts for the patterns or predictability of behavior that leads us to experience social life as routine. Or, expressed somewhat differently, how do we explain the fact that social life is not random, chaotic, or disconnected, but instead demonstrates the existence of an ordered social universe? The second question (illustrated in Figure 1.4) is that of action. It considers the factors that motivate individuals or groups to act. The question of action, then, turns our attention to the forces held to be responsible for steering individual or group behavior in a particular direction.

Figure 1.3 Basic Theoretical Continuum as to the Nature of Social Order

Figure 1.4 Basic Theoretical Continuum as to the Nature of Social Action

Similar to how the north−south, east−west coordinates allow you to orient

yourself to the details on a street map, our analytical map is anchored by four coordinates that assist you in navigating the details of the theories presented in this volume. In this case, the coordinates situate the answers to the two questions. Thus, to the question of order, one answer is that the patterns of social life are the product of structural arrangements or historical conditions that confront individuals or groups. As such, preexisting social arrangements produce the apparent orderliness of social life because individuals and groups are pursuing trajectories that, in a sense, are not of their own making. Society is thus pictured as an overarching system that works down on individuals and groups to determine the shape of the social order. Society is understood as a reality sui generis that operates according to its own logic distinct from the will of individuals. This orientation has assumed many different names— macro, holistic, objectivist, structuralist, and the label we use here, collective (or collectivist).

By contrast, the other answer to the question of order is that social order is a product of ongoing interactions between individuals and groups. Here, it is individuals and groups creating, re-creating, or altering the social order that works up to produce society. This position grants more autonomy to actors, because they are seen as relatively free to reproduce the patterns and routines of social life (i.e., the social order) or transform them. Over time, this orientation has earned several names as well—micro, elementarism, subjectivist, and the label we adopt here, individual (or individualist). (See Figure 1.3.)

Turning to the question of action, we again find two answers, labeled here nonrational and rational.5 Specifically, if the motivation for action is primarily nonrational, the individual takes his bearings from subjective ideals, symbolic codes, values, morals, norms, traditions, the quest for meaning, unconscious desires, or emotional states, or a combination of these. While the nonrationalist orientation is relatively broad in capturing a number of motivating forces, the rationalist orientation is far less encompassing. It contends that individual and group actions are motivated primarily by the attempt to maximize rewards while minimizing costs. Here, individuals and groups are viewed essentially as calculating and strategic as they seek to achieve the “selfish” goal of improving their positions. Here, actors are seen as taking their bearings from the external conditions in which they find themselves rather than from internal ideals.

Intersecting the two questions and their answers, we can create a four- celled map on which we are able to plot the basic theoretical orientation of the social thinkers featured in this book (see Figure 1.5). The four cells are identified as collective–nonrational, collective–rational, individual–

nonrational, and individual–rational. We cannot overemphasize that these four coordinates are “ideal types”; theorists and theories are never “pure,” that is, situated completely in one cell. Implicitly or explicitly, or both, theorists inevitably incorporate more than one orientation in their work. These coordinates (or cells in the table) are best understood as endpoints to a continuum on which theories typically occupy a position somewhere between the extremes. Multidimensionality and ambiguity are reflected in our maps by the lack of fixed points.

In addition, it is important to note that this map is something you apply to the theories under consideration. Although each theorist addresses the questions of order and action, they generally did not use these terms in their writing. For that matter, their approaches to order and action tend to be implicit rather than explicit in their work. Thus, at times you will have to read between the lines to determine a theorist’s position on these fundamental questions. Although this may pose some challenges, it also expands your opportunities for learning.

Consequently, not everyone views each theorist in exactly the same light. Moreover, even within one major work a theorist may draw from both ends of the continuum. In each chapter, we discuss the ambiguities and alternative interpretations within the body of work of each theorist. Nevertheless, these maps enable you to (1) recognize the general tendencies that exist within each theorist’s body of work, and (2) compare and contrast (and argue about) thinkers’ general theoretical orientations. (For further examples as to the flexibility of this framework, see the discussion questions at the end of the chapter.)

Figure 1.5 Theorists’ Basic Orientation

NOTE: This diagram reflects the basic theoretical orientation of each thinker. However, every theorist in this volume is far more nuanced and multidimensional than this simple figure lets on. The point is not to fix each theorist in a predetermined box, but rather to provide a means for illuminating and discussing each theorist’s orientation relative to one another and within their various works.

*Our placement of Du Bois on the nonrational side of the continuum reflects the excerpts in this volume that were chosen because of their theoretical significance. In our view, it is his understanding of racial consciousness that constitutes his single most important theoretical contribution. However, he continually underscored the intertwined, structural underpinnings of race and class that, in the latter part of his life, led him to adopt a predominantly rationalist, Marxist-inspired orientation. In our view, however, Du Bois’s later work has more empirical than theoretical significance.

Put another way, when navigating the forest of theory, individual theorists are like trees. Our analytic map is a tool or device for locating the trees within the forest so you can enter and leave having developed a better sense of direction or, in this case, having learned far more than might otherwise have been the case. By enabling you to compare theorists’ positions on two crucial issues, their work is likely to be seen less as a collection of separate, unrelated ideas. Bear in mind, however, that the map is only a tool. Its simplicity does not capture the complexities of the theories or of social life itself.

In sum, it is essential to remember that this four-cell table is an analytical device that helps us understand and compare and contrast theorists better, but it does not mirror or reflect reality. The production and reproduction of the social world is never a function of either individuals or social structures, but rather a complex combination of both. So too, motivation is never completely rational or completely nonrational. To demonstrate this point as well as how our analytical map on action and order works in general, we turn to a very simple example.

Table 1.1 Why Do People Stop at Red Traffic Lights? Basic Approaches to Order and Action

Consider this question: Why do people stop at red traffic lights? First, in terms of action, the answer to this question resides on a continuum with rational and nonrational orientations serving as the endpoints. On the one hand, you might say people stop at red traffic lights because it is in their best interest to avoid getting a ticket or having an accident. This answer reflects a rationalist response; it demonstrates that rationalist motivations involve the individual taking her bearings from outside herself. (See Table 1.1.) The action (stopping at the red light) proceeds primarily in light of external conditions (e.g., a police officer that could ticket you, oncoming cars that could hit you).

A nonrationalist answer to his question is that people stop at red traffic lights because they believe it is good and right to follow the law. Here, the individual takes his bearings from morals or values from within himself, rather than from external conditions (e.g., oncoming cars). Interestingly, if this moral or normative imperative is the only motivation for action, the individual will stop at the traffic light even if there is no police car or oncoming cars in sight. By contrast, if one’s only motivation for action is rationalist and there are absolutely no visible dangers (i.e., no police officers or other cars in sight and hence no possibility of getting a ticket or having an accident), the driver will not stop at the red light: instead, she will go.

Another nonrationalist answer to the question “Why do people stop at red traffic lights?” involves “habits.” (See Table 1.1.) By definition, habits are relatively unconscious: that is, we do not think about them. They come “automatically” not from strategic calculations or external circumstances, but from within; that is why they are typically considered nonrational. Interestingly, habits may or may not have their roots in morality. Some habits

are “folkways” or routinized ways people do things in a particular society (e.g., paying your bills by mail rather than in person, driving on the right side of the road), while other habits are attached to sacred values (e.g., putting your hand over your heart when you salute the flag). Getting back to our example, say you are driving in your car on a deserted road at 2:00 in the morning and you automatically stop at a red traffic light out of habit. Your friend riding with you might say, “Why are you stopping? There’s not a car in sight.” If your action were motivated simply from habit and not a moral imperative to follow the law, you might say, “Hey you’re right!” and drive through the red light.

Of course, actions often have—indeed, they usually have—both rational and nonrational dimensions. For instance, in this previous example, you might have interpreted your friend’s question, “Why are you stopping? There’s not a car in sight,” to mean, “Don’t be a goody-goody—let’s go!” In other words, you may have succumbed to peer pressure even though you knew it was wrong to do so. If such was the case, you may have wittingly or unwittingly believed your ego, or your sense of self, was on the line. Thus, it was not so much that rational trumped nonrational motivation as it was that you acted out of the external pressure from your friend and internal pressure to do the “cool” thing and be the particular type of person you want to be. If such were the case, your action is a complex combination of conditions both outside and within yourself.

Indeed, a basic premise of this book is that because social life is extremely complex, a complete social theory must account for multiple sources of action and levels of social order. Theorists must be able to account for the wide variety of components (e.g., individual predispositions, personality and emotions, social and symbolic structures) constitutive of this world. Thus, for instance, our rationalist response to the question as to why people stop at red traffic lights—that people stop simply because they don’t want to get a ticket or get into an accident—is, in fact, incomplete. It is undercut by a series of unacknowledged nonrational motivations. There is a whole host of information that undergirds the very ability of an individual to make this choice. For example, before one can even begin to make the decision as to whether to stop for the red light, one must know that normally (and legally) “red” means “stop” and “green” means “go.” That we know and take for granted that “red” means “stop” and “green” means “go” and then consciously think about and decide to override that cultural knowledge (and norm) indicates that even at our most rationalist moments we are still using the tools of a largely taken-for-granted, symbolic, or nonrational realm (see Table 1.1).

Now let’s turn to the issue of order.

If we say “People stop at red lights because they don’t want to get a ticket,” this can be said to reflect a collectivist approach to order if we are emphasizing there is a coercive state apparatus (e.g., the law, police) that hems in behavior. If such is the case, we are emphasizing that external social structures precede and shape individual choice.

If we say “People stop because they believe it is good and right to follow the law,” we might be taking a collectivist approach to order as well. Here we assume individuals are socialized to obey the law. We emphasize that specific social or collective morals and norms are internalized by individuals and reproduced in their everyday behavior. Similarly, if we emphasize it is only because of the preexisting symbolic code in which “red” means “stop” and “green” means “go” that individuals can decide what to do, then we would be taking a collectivist approach. These versions of order and action are illustrated in Table 1.1.

On the other hand, that people stop at red traffic lights because they don’t want to get into an accident or get a ticket also might reflect an individualist approach to order, if the assumption is that the individual determines his action using his own free will, and that from this the traffic system is born. Another important individualist albeit nonrationalist answer to this question emphasizes the role of emotions. For instance, one might fear getting a ticket, and—to the extent the fear comes from within the individual rather than from the actual external circumstances—we can say this fear represents a nonrational motivating force at the level of the individual.

In this book, you will see that the core sociological theorists hold a wide variety of views on the action/order continuum even within their own work. Overall, however, each theorist can be said to have a basic or general theoretical orientation. For instance, Marx was interested above all in the collectivist and rationalist conditions behind and within order and action, while Durkheim, especially in his later work, was most interested in the collectivist and nonrationalist realms. Thus, juxtaposing Figure 1.3 and Table 1.1, you can see that if we were to resurrect Marx and Durkheim from their graves and ask them the hypothetical question, “Why do people stop at red traffic lights?” Marx would be more likely to emphasize the rationalist motivation behind this act (“They seek to avoid getting a ticket”), while Durkheim would be more likely to emphasize the nonrational motivation (“They consider it the ‘right’ thing to do”). Both, however, would emphasize that these seemingly individualist acts are actually rooted in collective social and cultural structures (i.e., it is the law with its coercive and moral force that undergirds individual behavior). Meanwhile, at the more individualist end of

the continuum, Mead would probably emphasize the immediate ideational process in which individuals interpret the meanings for and consequences of each possible action. (Note, though, that obviously each of these theorists is far more complex and multidimensional than this simple example lets on.)

Of course, the purpose of this book is not to examine the work of core sociological theorists in order to figure out how they might answer a hypothetical question about red traffic lights. Rather, the purpose of this book is to examine the central issues these theorists themselves raise and to analyze the particular theoretical stances they take as they explore these concerns. It is to this task that we now turn.

Discussion Questions 1. Explain the difference between “primary” and “secondary”

theoretical sources. What are the advantages and disadvantages of reading each type of work?

2. The metatheoretical framework we introduce in this chapter is useful not only for navigating classical sociological theory, but also for thinking about virtually any social issue. Using Table 1.1 as a reference, devise your own question, and then give hypothetical answers that reflect the four different basic theoretical orientations: individual/rational, individual/nonrational, collective/rational, and collective/nonrational. For instance, why do 16-year-olds stay in (or drop out of) high school? Why might a man or woman stay in a situation of domestic violence? What are possible explanations for gender inequality? What are possible causal explanations for the Holocaust? What are the various arguments for and against affirmative action? What are the central arguments for and against capital punishment? Why are you reading this book?

3. Numerous works of fiction speak to the social conditions that early sociologists were examining. For instance, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) portrays the hardships of the Industrial Revolution, while Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables addresses the political and social dynamics of the French Revolution. Read either of these works (or watch the movies or play), and discuss the tremendous social changes they highlight.

4. Consider the alleged conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway:

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: “The rich are different than you and me.”

E. HEMINGWAY: “Yes, they have more money.”

How does this brief exchange relate to the metatheoretical framework used in this book? Use concrete examples to explain.

5. Consider the following famous quote attributed to John Stuart Mill:

“One person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who have only interests.”

How does this quote relate to the metatheoretical framework used in this book? Use concrete examples to explain. To what extent do you agree or disagree with Mill? How so?

1Further complicating the matter is that many of the original works that make up the core of sociological theory were written in a language other than English. Language translation is itself an imperfect exercise.

2Physics is often considered the most scientific and rational of all the natural sciences because it focuses on the basic elements of matter and energy and their interactions. 3Of course, the scientists of the Enlightenment were not uninfluenced by subjectivity or morality. Rather, as Seidman (1994:30–31) points out, paradoxically, the Enlighteners sacralized science, progress, and reason; they deified the creators of science such as Galileo and Newton and fervently believed that science could resolve all social problems and restore social order, which is itself a type of faith.

4Durkheim was also Jewish (indeed, he was the son of a rabbi), but anti-Semitism did not significantly impede Durkheim’s career. In fact, it was Durkheim’s eloquent article, “Individualism and Intellectuals” (1898) on the Dreyfus affair (a political scandal that emerged after a Jewish staff officer named Captain Alfred Dreyfus was erroneously court-martialed for selling secrets to the German Embassy in Paris) that shot him to prominence and eventually brought Durkheim his first academic appointment in Paris. In sum, German anti-Semitism was much more harmful to Georg Simmel than French anti-Semitism was to Durkheim. 5The terms “rational” and “nonrational” are problematic in that they have a commonsensical usage at odds with how theorists use these terms. By “rational” we do not mean “good and smart” and by “nonrational” we do not mean irrational, nonsensical, or stupid (Alexander 1987:11). Despite these problems, however, we continue to use the terms “rational” and “nonrational” because (although it is outside the scope of this discussion) the semantic alternatives (subjectivist, idealist, internal, etc.) are even more problematic.

2 KARL MARX (1818–1883)

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Key Concepts Class

Bourgeoisie

Proletariat

Forces and relations of production

Capital

Surplus value

Alienation

Labor theory of value

Exploitation

Class consciousness

Commodity fetishism

H The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

(Marx and Engels 1848/1978:473)

ave you ever worked at a job that left you feeling empty inside? Or that you were “just a number,” that even though you do your job, you might be easily replaced by another worker or a machine? Perhaps you have worked as a telemarketer, reading a script and

selling a product that, in all likelihood, you had never seen or used. Or perhaps you have worked in a fast-food restaurant, or in a large factory or corporation. Or maybe you are one of the millions of “crowdworkers” who perform piecework “microtasks” on your home computer for CrowdFlower, CloudCrowd, or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk virtual assembly lines. While you may earn as little as $2 an hour and have no connection to the finished product, for Lukas Biewald, founder and CEO of CrowdFlower, this modern, utopian “workplace” represents an escape from the Dark Ages, when, “Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to finds someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore” (Biewald 2014:28).

This is precisely the type of situation that greatly concerned Karl Marx. Marx sought to explain the nature of the capitalist economies that came to the fore in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He maintained that the economic deficiencies and social injustices inherent to capitalism would ultimately lead to the breakdown of capitalist societies and the creation of a communist society in which, freed from all exploitation, individuals could reach their full potential. Yet Marx was not an academic writing in an ivory tower: he was an activist, a revolutionary committed to the overthrow of capitalism. And as you will see shortly, Marx paid a personal price for his revolutionary activities.

Though Marx’s prediction that capitalism would be replaced by communism has not come true (some would say, “not yet”), his critique of capitalism continues to resonate with contemporary society. His discussions regarding the concentration of wealth, the growth of monopoly capitalism, business’s unscrupulous pursuit of profit (demonstrated, for instance, by the recent scandals surrounding Barclays, UBS, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Bernard Madoff, to name but a few), the relationship between government economic policy and the interests of the capitalist class, and the alienation experienced in the workplace, all speak to concerns that affect almost everyone, even today. Indeed, who has not felt at one time or another that his job was solely a means to an end—a paycheck, money—instead of an avenue

for fulfilling his aspirations or cultivating his talents? Who has not felt as though she were an expendable commodity, a means, or tool in the production of a good or the provision of a service where even her emotions must be manufactured for the sake of the job? Clearly, Marx’s ideas are as relevant today as they were more than a century ago.

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, a commercial city in southwestern Germany’s Rhineland.1 Descended from a line of rabbis on both sides of his family, Marx’s father, Heinrich, was a secularly educated lawyer. Though Heinrich did not actively practice Judaism, he was subject to anti- Semitism. With France’s ceding of the Rhineland to Prussia after the defeat of Napoleon, Jews living in the region were faced with a repeal of the civil rights granted under French rule. In order to keep his legal practice, Heinrich converted to Lutheranism in 1817. As a result, Karl was afforded the comforts of a middle-class home.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Marx pursued a secular education. He enrolled as a law student at the University of Bonn in 1835, then transferred the following year to the University of Berlin. In addition to studying law, Marx devoted himself to the study of history and philosophy. While in Berlin, Marx also joined the Young Hegelians, a group of radical thinkers who developed a powerful critique of the philosophy of Georg W. F. Hegel (1770– 1831), the dominant German intellectual figure of the day and one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century. Marx constructed the basis of his theoretical system, historical materialism, by inverting Hegel’s philosophy of social change. (See pp. 36–38 for a brief sketch of Hegel’s philosophy and its relation to Marx’s theory.)

In 1841, Marx earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. However, his ambitions for an academic career ended when the Berlin ministry of education blacklisted him for his radical views.2 Having established little in the way of career prospects during his student years, Marx accepted an offer to write for the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper published in Cologne.

Marx soon worked his way up to become editor of the newspaper. Writing on the social conditions in Prussia, Marx criticized the government’s treatment of the poor and exposed the harsh conditions of peasants working in the Moselle wine-producing region. However, Marx’s condemnation of the authorities brought on the censors, and he was forced to resign his post.

Soon after, Marx married his childhood love, Jenny Von Westphalen, the daughter of a Prussian baron. The two moved to Paris in the fall of 1843. At the time, Paris was the center of European intellectual and political movements. While there, Marx became acquainted with a number of leading socialist writers and revolutionaries. Of particular importance to his intellectual development were the works of the French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon and (1760–1825) and his followers. Saint-Simon’s ideas led to the creation of Christian Socialism, a movement that sought to organize modern industrial society according to the social principles espoused by Christianity. In their efforts to counter the exploitation and egoistic competition that accompany industrial capitalism, Saint-Simonians advocated that industry and commerce be guided according to an ethic of brotherhood and cooperation. By instituting common ownership of society’s productive forces and an end to rights of inheritance, they believed that the powers of science and industry could be marshaled to create a more just society free from poverty.

Marx also studied the work of the seminal political economists Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Ricardo (1772–1823). Smith’s book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) represents the first systematic examination of the relationship between government policy and a nation’s economic growth. As such, it played a central role in defining the field of political economy. (See p. 26 for summary remarks on Smith’s views.) For his part, Ricardo, building on Smith’s earlier works, would further refine the study of economics. He wrote on a number of subjects, including the condition of wages, the source of value, taxation, and the production and distribution of goods. A leading economist in his day, Ricardo’s writings were influential in shaping England’s economic policies. It was from his critique of these writers that Marx would develop his humanist philosophy and economic theories.

During his time in Paris, Marx also began what would become a lifelong collaboration and friendship with Friedrich Engels, whom he met while serving as editor of the Zeitung. Marx’s stay in France was short-lived, however, and again it was his journalism that sparked the ire of government authorities. In January 1845, he was expelled from the country at the request of the Prussian government for his antiroyalist articles. Unable to return to his home country (Prussia), Marx renounced his Prussian citizenship and settled in Brussels, where he lived with his family until 1848. In Brussels, Marx extended his ties to revolutionary working-class movements through associations with members of the League of the Just and the Communist League. Moreover, it was while living in Brussels that Marx and Engels produced two of their most important early works, The German Ideology (see

reading that follows) and The Communist Manifesto (see reading that follows). In 1848, workers and peasants began staging revolts throughout much of Europe. As the revolution spread, Marx and Engels left Brussels and headed for Cologne to serve as coeditors of the radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a paper devoted to furthering the revolutionary cause. For his part in the protests, Marx was charged with inciting rebellion and defaming the Prussian royal family. Though acquitted, Marx was forced to leave the country. He returned to Paris, but soon was pressured by the French government to leave the country as well, so Marx and his family moved to London in 1849.

In London, Marx turned his attention more fully to the study of economics. Spending some 60 hours per week in the British Museum, Marx produced a number of important works, including Capital (see reading that follows), considered a masterpiece critique of capitalist economic principles and their human costs. Marx also continued his political activism.

From 1851 to 1862, he was a regular contributor to the New York Daily Tribune, writing on such issues as political upheavals in France, the Civil War in the United States, Britain’s colonization of India, and the hidden causes of war.3 In 1864, Marx helped found and direct the International Working Men’s Association, a socialist movement committed to ending the inequities and alienation or “loss of self” experienced under capitalism. The International had branches across the European continent and the United States, and Marx’s popular writing and activism gave him an international audience for his ideas.

Yet, the revolutionary workers’ movements were floundering. In 1876, the International disintegrated and Marx was barely able to support himself and his wife as they struggled against failing health. Jenny died on December 2, 1881, and Marx himself died on March 14, 1883.

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES AND CORE IDEAS

The revolutionary spirit that inflamed Marx’s work cannot be understood outside the backdrop of the sweeping economic and social changes occurring during this period. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution that began in Britain 100 years earlier was spreading throughout Western Europe. Technological advances in transportation, communication, and manufacturing spurred an explosion in commercial markets for goods. The result was the birth of modern capitalism and the rise of middle-class owners of capital, or the bourgeoisie, to economic and political power. In the wake of these changes came a radical reorganization of both work and domestic life. With the rapid expansion of industry, agricultural work

declined, forcing families to move from rural areas to the growing urban centers. It would not take long for the size of the manufacturing labor force to rival and then surpass the numbers working in agriculture. Nowhere were the disorganizing effects of the Industrial Revolution and

the growth of capitalism more readily apparent than in Manchester, England. In the first half of the nineteenth century Manchester’s population exploded by 1,000 percent as it rapidly became a major industrial city.4 The excessive rate of population growth meant that families had to live in makeshift housing without heat or light and in dismal sanitary conditions that fueled the spread of disease. The conditions in the mechanized factories were no better. The factories were poorly ventilated and lit and often dangerous, and factory owners disciplined workers to the monotonous rhythms of mass production. A 70-hour workweek was not uncommon for men and women, and children as young as six often worked as much as 50 hours a week. Yet, the wages earned by laborers left families on the brink of beggary. The appalling living and work standards led Engels to describe Manchester as “Hell upon Earth.”

Courtesy of the Library of Congress; photographer Lewis Wickes Hine

Photo 2.1 Sordid Factory Conditions: A Young Girl Working as a Spinner in a U.S. Textile Mill, circa 1910

Although it may no longer be in Manchester, Hell upon Earth has by no means disappeared. In a 2012 Pulitzer Prize−winning series, the New York Times brought to light the working conditions in the Chinese manufacturing plants that produce Apple’s iPad and iPhone. Apple’s overseas suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits, forcing them to speed up their employees’ work pace and extend their working hours, while substituting

substandard chemicals and equipment for more expensive alternatives. Many of the 70,000 workers at the Foxconn plant in the Chengdu province live in three-room company dorms crammed with 20 people. The overcrowded living conditions are exacerbated by harsh working environments that include excessive overtime, seven-day shifts, constant standing that swells workers’ legs until they could hardly walk, and the use of child laborers. Faced with such dire conditions, at least 18 Foxconn workers attempted suicide over a two-year period, some by leaping from facility buildings. Ventilation systems that were known to be substandard failed to properly filter the accumulation of aluminum dust in factories, directly contributing to two explosions within seven months at iPad factories that left 4 dead and 77 injured. In a separate incident, 137 workers at an Apple supplier were injured from using n-hexane —a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis—to clean iPhone screens. The chemical was used because it evaporates three times faster than rubbing alcohol, thus allowing employees to clean more iPhone screens per minute.

National Labor Committee

Photo 2.2 Workers’ Dormitory in a Chinese Tech Factory Tech factories typically run 24 hours a day and employ thousands of workers who sleep in shifts in overcrowded rooms.

Although Apple’s revenue in 2011 exceeded $108 billion, earning the company more than $400,000 in profit per employee, many workers in its Chinese factories earn less than $17 a day for their grueling shifts; those with a college degree and overtime pay can earn as much as $22 a day. Yet, its top employees have reaped the biggest rewards. In 2010, Apple CEO Timothy

Cook was granted a compensation package with a total value of $59 million. In 2011, after the explosions, suicide attempts, and revelations of multiple labor and environmental violations, Apple’s board of directors gave Cook a pay raise and stock options that after vesting over a 10-year period will be worth $427 million at their then-current value.

How is it that such conditions continue to persist? One answer may be found in a national survey conducted by the New York Times in 2011, in which 56 percent of the respondents were unable to think of anything negative about Apple. Fourteen percent remarked that the worst thing about Apple was that its products were too expensive. Only 2 percent mentioned overseas labor practices. As long as “customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China,” things won’t get much better (China 2012).

It was in reaction to such dire economic and social conditions that Marx sought to forge a theoretical model intended not only to interpret the world but also to change it. In doing so, he centered his analysis on economic classes. For Marx, classes are groups of individuals who share a common position in relation to the means or forces of production. These refer to the raw materials, technology, machines, factories, and land that are necessary in the production of goods. Each class is distinguished by what it owns with regard to the means of production. Marx argued, “Wage labourers, capitalists and landowners constitute [the] three big classes of modern society based upon the capitalist mode of production.” Thus, under capitalism, there are “the owners merely of labour-power, owners of capital, and landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit, and ground-rent” (Marx 1867/1978:441).5

Private ownership of the means of production leads to class relations based on domination and exploitation. Although wage earners are free to quit or refuse a particular job, they nevertheless must sell their labor power to someone in the capitalist class in order to live. This is because laborers have only their ability to work to exchange for money that can then be used to purchase the goods necessary for their survival. However, the amount of wages paid is far exceeded by the profits reaped by those who control the productive forces. As a result, classes are pitted against each other in a struggle to control the means of production, the distribution of resources, and profits.

For Marx, this class struggle is the catalyst for social change and the prime mover of history. This is because any mode of production based on private property (e.g., slavery, feudalism, capitalism) bears the seeds of its own destruction by igniting ongoing economic conflicts that inevitably will sweep

away existing social arrangements and give birth to new classes of oppressors and the oppressed. Indeed, as Marx states in one of the most famous passages in The Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels 1848/1978:473; see reading that follows).

Marx developed his theory in reaction to laissez-faire capitalism, an economic system based on individual competition for markets. It emerged out of the destruction of feudalism, in which peasant agricultural production was based on subsistence standards in the service to lords, and the collapse of merchant and craft guilds, where all aspects of commerce and industry were tightly controlled by monopolistic professional organizations. The basic premise behind this form of capitalism, as outlined by Adam Smith, is that any and all should be free to enter and compete in the marketplace of goods and services. Under the guiding force of the “invisible hand,” the best products at the lowest prices will prevail, and a “universal opulence [will] extend itself to the lowest ranks of the people” (Smith 1776/1990:6). Without the interference of regulations that artificially distort supply and demand and disturb the natural adjusting of prices, the economy will be controlled by those in the best position to dictate its course of development: consumers and producers. Exchanges between buyers and sellers are rooted not in appeals to the others’ “humanity but to their self-love . . . [by showing] them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them” (ibid.:8). The potentially destructive drive for selfishly bettering one’s lot is checked, however, by a rationally controlled competition for markets that discourages deceptive business practices, because whatever gains a seller can win through illicit means will be nullified as soon as the market uncovers them. According to Smith, a “system of perfect liberty” is thus created that both generates greater wealth for all and promotes the general well-being of society.

Marx shared much of Smith’s analysis of economics. For instance, both viewed history as unfolding through evolutionary stages in economic organization and understood the central role of governments to be protecting the privilege of the wealthy through upholding the right to private property. Nevertheless, important differences separate the two theories. Most notable is Marx’s insistence that, far from establishing a system of perfect liberty, private ownership of the means of production necessarily leads to the alienation of workers. They sell not only their labor power but also their souls. They have no control over the product they are producing, while their work is devoid of any redeeming human qualities. Although capitalism produces self-betterment for owners of capital, it necessarily prevents workers from realizing their essential human capacity to engage in creative labor.

Indeed, in highly mechanized factories, a worker’s task might be so mundane and repetitive (e.g., “Insert bolt A into widget B”) that she seems to become part of the machine itself. For example, a student once said she worked in a job in which she had a scanner attached to her arm. Her job was simply to stand by a conveyer belt in which boxes of various sizes came by. She stuck her arm out and “read” the boxes with her scanner arm. Her individual human potential was completely irrelevant to her job. She was just a “cog in a wheel” of mechanization. Marx maintained that when human actions are no different from those of a machine, the individual is dehumanized.

Moreover, according to Marx, capitalism is inherently exploitative. It is the labor power of workers that produces the products to be sold by the owners of businesses. Workers mine the raw materials, tend to the machines, and assemble the products. Yet, it is the owner who takes for himself the profits generated by the sale of goods. Meanwhile, workers’ wages hover around subsistence levels, allowing them to purchase only the necessities—sold at a profit by capitalists—that will enable them to return to work the next day. One of Marx’s near-contemporaries, Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), an American sociologist and economist, held a similar view on the nature of the relationship between owners and workers. (See the Significant Others box that follows.)

From the point of view of the business owner, capitalism is a “dog-eat-dog” system in which he can never rest on his laurels. Business owners must always watch the bottom line in order to compete for market dominance because someone can always come along and create either a better or newer product, or the same product at a lower price. Thus, a business owner must constantly think strategically and work to increase her market share or reduce her costs, or both. One of the basic truths of capitalism is that it takes money to make money, and the more money a business owner has at her disposal, the more ability she has to generate profit-making schemes. For instance, a capitalist might invest in the development of a new product (Apple’s iPad is but one example) or invest in cost-saving technologies in the form of machines or advanced software that can increase profit either directly (by keeping more money for herself) or indirectly (by enabling the her to lower the price and sell more of her products). A wealthy capitalist might choose to temporarily underprice her product (i.e., sell it below the cost of its production) in an effort to force his competitors out of business. (For example, Amazon’s dominance in the book-selling industry has played a major role in the demise of independent and chain bookstores.) Once the competition is eliminated and a monopoly is established, the product can be priced as high as the market will bear.

© Bettmann/Corbis

Photo 2.3 Many of Charlie Chaplin’s silent films during the 1920s and 1930s offered a comedic—and quite critical—look at the industrial order. Here, in a scene from Modern Times (1936), Chaplin is literally a “cog in a machine.”

Figure 2.1 Wealth in the United States

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau.

Though competition between capitalists may lead to greater levels of productivity, it also results in a concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer

hands. Since 1980, labor productivity (defined as the amount of goods and services produced by one hour of labor) in the United States has increased nearly 80 percent, while average annual wages have increased by only 10 percent. In fact, the past decade has witnessed a decline in median income by some 12 percent. Meanwhile, the average income of the top 1 percent has increased by a whopping 275 percent! (U.S. Department of Labor; Bureau of Labor Statistics; Congressional Budget Office, 2011) The wealthiest 1 percent of US households now accounts for nearly 36 percent of the nation’s wealth (see Figure 2.1). This is roughly equal to the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent. Consider another astounding statistic: the combined wealth of America’s richest 400 individuals is now more than the combined wealth of the poorest 150 million individuals—that is nearly half the country’s entire population (forbes.com). The business owners who are unable to compete successfully for a share of

the market find themselves joining the swelling ranks of propertyless wage earners: the proletariat. This adds to the revolutionary potential of the working-class movement in two ways. First, the proletariat is transformed into an overwhelming majority of the population, making its class interests an irresistible force for change. Second, as Marx points out, the former capitalists bring with them a level of education and understanding not possessed by the typical wage laborer. This breeds political consequences as the former members of the bourgeoisie translate their economic resentment into a radicalization of the proletariat by educating the workers with regard to both the nature of capitalist accumulation and the workers’ essential role in overthrowing the system of their oppression.

Significant Others

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929): The Leisure Class and Conspicuous Consumption Though Karl Marx’s ideas would remain largely on the periphery of sociology until the 1960s, his ideas nevertheless inspired a legion of scholars even before his death. One early student of Marx’s theories was Thorstein Veblen, the son of Norwegian immigrants. Veblen was born in Wisconsin. His parents, like so many others of that time and place, were poor tenant farmers who came to America seeking to better their lives. Fortunately, after a number of years of hardship and thrift, the Veblens were able to attain a modest lifestyle working as family farmers. Thorstein’s humble upbringing, however, contrasted sharply with the vast fortunes being reaped by America’s robber barons, who ruthlessly dominated the nation’s budding industrial economy.

Veblen’s cognizance of the nation’s gross inequities of wealth found expression in his writings, most notably The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904). As a sociologist and economist, Veblen, in his scholarly analyses, did not pretend to value the neutrality often associated with scientific endeavors. Instead, his work presents a highly critical picture of modern capitalism and the well-to-do, the “leisure class,” who benefit most from the economic system built on “waste.” Though the efficiency of mechanized production is capable of creating a surplus of goods that could in turn provide a decent standard of living for all, Veblen argued that “parasitic” business leaders “sabotaged” the industrial system in their quest for personal profit.

Though Veblen by no means embraced Marxist models of society and social change in their entirety, his work nevertheless contains important parallels with some of Marx’s key ideas. For instance, his assertion that the state of a society’s technological development forms the foundation for its “schemes of thought” bears a pronounced resemblance to Marx’s distinction between the economic base and superstructure. Additionally, Veblen’s analysis of the modern-day conflict between “business” (those who make money) and “industry” (those who make “things”) recalls Marx’s own two-class model of capitalist society and its attendant moral critique of the exploitation of workers and the clash between the forces and relations of production. However, it was his twin notions of “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure” that would come to have the greatest impact on sociology.

Veblen here calls our attention to the “waste” of both money and time that individuals of all social classes engage in as a means for improving their self-esteem and elevating their status in the community. Whether it’s purchasing expensive cars or clothes when inexpensive brands will suffice, or dedicating oneself to learning the finer points of golf or dining etiquette, such practices signal an underlying competitive attempt to best others and secure one’s position in the status order.

This was precisely the purpose of Marx’s political activities: he sought to generate class consciousness—an awareness on the part of the working class of its common relationship to the means of production and common source of the workers’ oppressive conditions. Marx believed that this awareness was a vital key for sparking a revolution that would create a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” transforming it from a wage-earning, propertyless mass into the ruling class. Unlike all previous class-based revolutions, however, this one would be fought in the interests of the vast majority of the population and not for the benefit of a few, because the particular class interests of the proletariat

had come to represent the universal interests of humanity. The epoch of capitalism was a necessary stage in this evolution—and the last historical period rooted in competitive class conflict (see Figure 2.2). Capitalism, with its unleashing of immense economic productivity, had created the capital and technology needed to sustain a communist society—the final stage of history —capable of providing for the needs of all of its inhabitants.

Figure 2.2 Marx’s Model of Social Change: The Communist Revolution

Using the power of the state to abolish private ownership of the means of production, the proletariat would wrest control of society’s productive forces from the hands of the bourgeoisie and create a centralized, socialist economy. Socialism, however, would be but a temporary phase. Without private ownership of the means of production, society would no longer be divided along class lines; without antagonistic class interests and the struggle over resources, the social conditions that produce conflict, exploitation, and alienation would no longer exist. The disappearance of classes and their struggle for resources would render obsolete the state whose primary charge is to secure the right to private property. Finally, without class conflict—the fuel that ignites social change—the dialectical progression of human history comes to a utopian end. With the production of goods controlled collectively and not by private business elites, individuals would be free to cultivate their natural talents and actualize their full potential.6 (You will read more about this below, in the excerpt from The Communist Manifesto.)

As indicated previously, this evolutionary type of thinking was typical of Enlightenment intellectuals. Today, however, many consider Marx’s “end of prehistory” vision of communism as the least viable part of his theory. Although the internal contradictions of capitalism are real, they have been checked by a number of practices, including ongoing government intervention in the economy, the continued expansion of markets (i.e., Western-dominated

globalization), and cost-saving advances in production and organizational technologies.

MARX’s THEORETICAL ORIENTATION

In terms of our metatheoretical framework, Figure 2.3 illustrates how Marx’s work is predominantly collectivist and rationalist in orientation. Of course, as discussed previously, the action/order dimensions are intended to serve as heuristic devices. Certainly, there are elements of Marx’s theory that do not fit neatly into this particular “box.” Nevertheless, Marx pursued themes that, taken as a whole, underscored his vision of a social order shaped by broad historical transitions and classes of actors (collectivist) pitted against one another in a struggle to realize their economic interests (rationalist).

Regarding the question of order, Marx saw human societies as evolving toward an ultimate, utopian end—a process spurred by class conflict. It is the struggle to control the forces of production and the distribution of resources and profits they create that leads classes—not individuals—to become the prime movers of history from one stage of development to the next (see Figure 2.4). Each historical stage implodes upon itself in a revolution that casts aside one ruling class for another.

Figure 2.3 Marx’s Basic Theoretical Orientation

Figure 2.4 Marx’s Historical Materialism

Of course, one might counter that it is individuals who join labor unions, manage factories, merge corporations, and devise industry strategies. Though this is perhaps true on one level, throughout his work Marx emphasized the structural parameters that inhibit and shape individual decisions and actions. On this point Marx stated in one of his most famous passages that, although “men make their own history . . . they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx 1852/1978:595). Individuals do not chart their paths on roads not yet built. Instead, we think and act within the limits established by existing “circumstances.” The circumstances of greatest import is that individuals are born into societies where the forces and relations of production—available technology to extract and develop resources and the property relations that govern ownership of resources—that make up “material life” are already established independent of their will. From this existing economic or material base is born a “superstructure” or “the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general” (Marx 1859/1978:4). The superstructure, in short, consists of everything noneconomic in nature, such as a society’s legal, political, and educational systems, as well as its stock of commonsense knowledge (see Figure 2.5). As a result, an individual’s very consciousness— how she views the world, develops her educational and career aspirations, and defines her economic interests and political preferences—is not determined by the individual’s own subjectivity. Instead, ideas about the world and one’s place in it are structured by, or built into, the objective class position an individual occupies: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (ibid.). Who we are and what we become are less the outcome of exercising of our conscious free will than etched into our class position. And while there are capitalists and laborers who seemingly do not pursue their antagonistic class interests, such exceptions to the rule do not disprove it.

Figure 2.5 Marx: Base and Superstructure

In terms of the motivation for action, Marx’s work is primarily rationalist. This tendency is most clearly reflected in his emphasis on class-based interests. According to Marx, humans are separated from other animals due to our innate need to realize our full potential through engaging in creative labor. It is through freely developed “conscious life-activity” (Marx 1844/1978:76) that women and men are able to develop their “true” selves and forge meaningful relationships with others. It is in the process of production and in the objects that result that women and men realize themselves and their significance in a world that they create. (The corruption of the link between labor and self-realization by capitalism is addressed most fully in the selection “Alienated Labour,” below.)

Because self-fulfillment, one’s “being,” is accomplished through labor and economic activity, it is in the individual’s interest to control the production process because it is the setting for meeting this most essential of human needs. Thus, the crucial arena for the struggle to achieve one’s full human potential is the network of economic relationships: the manufacturing, distribution, and sale of goods, and the selling of one’s labor. Even if individuals are unaware of their true class interests, they will still be moved by them. For recall that interests are a reflection of one’s objective position in relation to the process of production; they are not spawned by one’s subjective disposition. The essential point here is that Marx’s model presupposes that our actions are driven by our attempts to maximize our interests. (See Figure 2.6.) Of course, whether or not we are truly as rationalistic as Marx maintains is a point of great theoretical debate.

Significant Others

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937): Hegemony and the Ruling Ideas Antonio Gramsci was an Italian philosopher, journalist, and political activist who spent much of his adult life ardently supporting the revolutionary cause of the working class. His foray into politics began in earnest in 1915 when he became a member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and published critical essays in the party’s official paper L’Avanti. In 1919, he cofounded the periodical, The New Order: A Weekly Review of Socialist Culture. Covering political events across Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union, the paper was widely influential among Italy’s radical Left. After an internal split within the PSI in 1921, Gramsci became a prominent member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), serving first in the party’s central committee and then as a delegate to the Communist International in Moscow. He would go on to be elected to the party’s Chamber of Deputies and later rise to the position of general secretary.

Gramsci would pay a heavy cost for his political activism. His sympathies with the Bolshevik revolution and its leaders, and his alliance with his country’s workers’ movements, made him an enemy of Italy’s newly formed fascist government. In 1926, Gramsci was arrested for his political activities and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He would serve only 11 years in prison, however, before dying of a brain hemorrhage in April 1937.

Despite the harsh conditions of his imprisonment and his fragile health, Gramsci produced 29 notebooks—some 3,000 pages—of political and philosophical analysis. The notebooks were smuggled out, but none was published until several years after the end of World War II. It would be another 20 years before the notebooks were compiled and published in English, under the title Prison Notebooks. The notebooks reveal one of Gramsci’s central concerns: to explain why Europe’s working class failed to spearhead a socialist revolution, and how, in Italy and elsewhere, it could act against its own class interests by supporting a fascist regime. In addressing these issues, Gramsci confronted an oft-noted weakness in Marx’s historical materialism: the role of ideas in preventing or advancing revolutionary change. Asserting, “The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class,” Marx portended that the proletariat, with its numbers increasing, would come to recognize its class interests and unite to overthrow the bourgeoisie and the conditions of alienation and

exploitation that serve the capitalists’ narrow ambitions for profit. Yet, despite the fact that the material or economic conditions were ripe for a revolutionary movement across much of Europe, no successful challenge to the ruling powers was mounted.

To account for the lack of revolutionary foment on the part of the working class, Gramsci emphasized the role of ideas in establishing “hegemony,” or domination, over subaltern classes. For Gramsci, the bourgeoisie maintained its dominance not primarily through force or coercion, but through the willing, “spontaneous” consent of the ruled. This consent was the outgrowth of the proletariat adopting as its own the values, beliefs, and attitudes that serve the interests of the ruling class. In other words, the working class is socialized (particularly through the educational system) into accepting a bourgeois ideology as an unquestioned or commonsense view of the world and their place in it. As a result, the working class aligns itself with the status quo, thus granting legitimacy to social and economic arrangements that perpetuate their own exploitation.

Recognizing that economic crises alone could not spark a socialist revolution, Gramsci was convinced that in order for the proletariat to unmask the real sources of its oppression and generate a unified, popular revolt, it must first develop its own “organic” consciousness, or counter hegemony. This counter hegemony would articulate the real interests and needs of the masses. Moreover, he insisted that this counter ideology must originate from within the masses; to be effective in provoking revolutionary change, it cannot be imposed on them by bourgeois “traditional” intellectuals who remain detached from the everyday realities of working-class life. Declaring “All men are intellectuals,” Gramsci sought to encourage the development of “organic” intellectuals from within the ranks of the working class through his political journalism and active participation in the workers’ movement. Such individuals are intellectuals not in the sense of their profession or social function, but in terms of their “directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong” (Gramsci 1971:3). In this way, the factory worker and truck driver, the financial accountant and government bureaucrat, are all potential intellectuals. Indeed, the intellectuals most capable of contributing to progressive social change were not those of the “traditional” or professional type—writers, artists, scientists, philosophers—but rather those who engage in “praxis,” connecting theoretical insights to an active attempt to fashion a more just society. For Gramsci, this was the “new intellectual” drawn from the working class:

In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labour even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual. The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator. . . . One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer “ideologically” the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals. (Gramsci 1971:10)

Figure 2.6 Marx’s Core Concepts

Readings Marx’s writings included here are divided into four sections. The first section centers on his “materialist conception of history,” developed in reaction to the works of the German idealist philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). The second section offers his critique of the human costs of capitalism. The third section contains Marx’s call for the inevitable communist revolution that will usher in the “end of prehistory” and, with it, the end of alienation, private property, and oppressive government. In the fourth set of readings, we move from Marx’s prophecy of emancipation to his theory of economics. Here you will read his analyses of the sources of value and the nature of commodities. The final reading offers Engels’s analysis of the subordinate role of women within the family, forms of class conflict, and the rise of the state as an alienating power for containing class antagonisms and preserving the dominance of property holders.

Introduction to The German Ideology Written in 1845–46, The German Ideology presents the most detailed account of Marx’s theory of history. In it, Marx set out to reformulate the work of the eminent German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel. In contrast to previous philosophers who focused on explaining the roots of stability in the physical and social worlds (i.e., why things seemingly stayed the same), Hegel saw change as the motor of history. For Hegel, change was driven by a dialectical process in which a given state of being or idea contains within it the seeds of an opposing state of being or opposing idea. The resolution of the conflict produces yet a new state of being or idea. This synthesis, in turn, forms the basis of a new contradiction, thus continuing the process of change.

As an example, consider the division of gender roles. Traditionally, women and the roles they perform have been devalued relative to the positions occupied by men. Thus, the notion that a “woman’s place is in the home” serves as a justification for male dominance in economic and political affairs. Out of the ideas that sustained the oppression of women was born the opposing view that women are in fact superior to men. From this vantage, it is alleged, for instance, that women’s innate compassion or empathy better qualifies them for positions of leadership compared to the innate aggression said to characterize men. From the clash of these opposing ideas, a synthesis or state of being has evolved in which neither women nor men are considered superior to the other, but instead are viewed as equals. Ideas about equality then create the reality of equality as women have entered into roles formerly reserved for men and men have begun to perform more traditionally “feminine” tasks.

Is society thus faced with a never-ending challenging of ideas as one “truth” replaces another in the evolution of history? Hegel’s answer is a definitive “no.” He expressed, instead, a belief in the ultimate perfectibility of the consciousness of humankind. Such perfection occurs through the progressive realization of “Absolute Idea” as revealed by God. In other words, every idea (thesis) is a distorted expression of an all-embracing “Spirit” or “Mind” (God) that inevitably produces an opposite idea (antithesis). The two contradictory ideas are unified to form a synthesis that in turn becomes the basis for a new idea (thesis). Progress and history itself come to an end as the contradictions between our ideas about reality and the “Truth” of reality as designed by God are finally resolved. In arguing that the evolution of human history proceeds purposively according to an immanent or predestined design, Hegel offers a teleological vision shared with both Christian theology and Enlightenment philosophy. (As you will read, Marx, too, fashioned a teleological theory, but one that casts communism as the end

toward which history progresses.)

If this seems abstract, it is because it is! Perhaps we can clarify Hegel’s dialectic idealism a bit further. The essence of reality lies in thought or ideas because it is only in and through the concepts that order our experiences that experiences, as such, are known. Reality is a product of our conceptual categories that make up our consciousness and thus has no existence independent of our own construction of it. As our ideas or knowledge changes, so does our reality. The stages of history or reality are then defined by progressive stages in the negation of the prevailing conceptual ordering of experience. The utopian aspect of this development is found in the assertion that humankind’s knowledge will reach the perfected state of “Pure Reason” or “Absolute Idea” in which freedom is achieved through the awareness that one’s self is made whole through a unity with others, that the particular and “finite” are expressions of the transcendent Reality of the universal and “infinite.”

In contending that history is marked by a distortion of “Truth” or “Pure Reason,” it follows that our consciousness is alienated from Spirit (God), the universal that is the source of our particular conceptions of reality. The condition of alienation thus stems from a religiously grounded misunderstanding. At its core, this misunderstanding comes from the failure to recognize that man and Spirit are one. Instead, man exists as an “unhappy soul,” placing in God all that is good and righteous, while seeing in himself only that which is base and sinful. God becomes an alien, all-knowing, powerful force separated from ignorant, powerless man. Yet, as consciousness evolves through the historical dialectic, it advances closer to utopia in the form of an absolute self-knowledge that recognizes that Reality is a whole formed by the synthesis of finite man and infinite Spirit. No longer plagued by the alienation that comes from a distorted view of the essence of mankind, man, in unity with Mind, can order the world in a rational way freed from corrupted relations of self-imposed domination.1

The German Ideology reflects both Marx’s indebtedness to and break from Hegel’s philosophy. On the one hand, akin to Hegel, Marx depicts the unfolding of history as a progressive, dialectical process that culminates in a utopia of freedom and self-realization. In other words, like Hegel, Marx argues that each successive period in societal evolution is a necessary consequence of the preceding stage; and Marx projects a millennial significance onto the process itself, claiming that social development ends in a “necessary” utopia free of conflict and exploitation.

On the other hand, Marx breaks decisively from Hegel by insisting that it is material existence, not consciousness, that fuels historical change and the

inevitable march toward freedom. Thus, Marx sought to take Hegel’s idealism, which had the evolution of history “standing on its head,” and “turn it right side up” in order to discover the real basis of the progression of human societies. Theoretically, this inversion is of utmost significance because it reflects a shift from a nonrationalist to a rationalist theoretical orientation.

The German Ideology is a pivotal writing because it offers the fullest treatment of Marx’s materialist conception of history. It is in Marx’s theory of historical materialism that we find one of his most important philosophical contributions, namely his conviction that ideas or interests have no existence independent of physical reality (see Figures 2.4 and 2.5). In numerous passages, you will see Marx’s rejection of Hegel’s notion that ideas determine experience in favor of the materialist view that experience determines ideas. For instance, Marx asserts, “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process” (Marx and Engels 1846/1978:154). And again, “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (ibid.:155). In short, Marx argues that the essence of individuals, what they truly are and how they see the world, is determined by their material, economic conditions—“both with what they produce and with how they produce”—in which they live out their very existence (ibid.:150; emphasis in original).

Moreover, to argue that experience determines consciousness yields a radical conclusion: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx and Engels 1846/1978:172). In other words, Marx maintains that the dominant economic class controls not only a society’s means of material production, but the production of ideas as well. To illustrate this point, consider, for instance, the idea of individual equality. From where did it spring? The notion of equality is by no means universal. Not only do some contemporary societies reject the concept of equality, but even those societies that do guarantee such rights (the United States, France, England, to name but a few) have not always done so. How are we then to account for the development of this principle? The answer, in short, lies in the development of capitalism. As an economic system, capitalism is based on the notion of “freedom”—workers are “free” to find work or to quit their job. Entrepreneurs are “free” to open or close their businesses. In order for competitive capitalism to develop to its fullest productive capacities, individuals must be able to move, work, and invest their capital freely. This ability is expressed through the idea of individual equality. Thus, the concept of equality is born out of the capitalist mode of production and the nature of the social relationships it demands. It is an idea advanced by the bourgeoisie to sanction individualism that, in turn, justifies and sustains the economic conditions in which they themselves are the dominant force. In short, it serves

the economic and political interests of the ruling class. By way of another example, how is the “idea” of health care understood in the United States? Is health care considered a right to which all citizens are entitled, or is it a commodity to be bought and sold for a corporate profit like any other good on the capitalist market?

From The German Ideology (1845–1846) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. The premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, orohydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production. . . .

The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognised. But

not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative of productive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labour.

The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another.

The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e., the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.

The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture. In the latter case it pre-supposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the growth of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of war and of barter.

The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal ownership we already find movable, and later also immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their

community, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership. It is the communal private property which compels the active citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this communal ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the same measure as, in particular, immovable private property evolves. The division of labour is already more developed. We already find the antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism between those states which represent town interests and those which represent country interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens and slaves is now completely developed. . . .

The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with them. The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of landownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal ownership, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions of production.

This feudal system of landownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades. Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person. The necessity for association against the organised robber nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escaped serfs swarming into the

rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country.

Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by the restricted conditions of production—the small-scale and primitive cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility, clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns, no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the peasants themselves emerged. In industry there was no division of labour at all in the individual trades themselves, and very little between them. The separation of industry and commerce was found already in existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later, when the towns entered into mutual relations. . . .

The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e., as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse

corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness. . . .

The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co- operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co- operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force.” Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society, hence, that the “history of humanity” must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange. . . . Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a “history” independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which would especially hold men together.

Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses “consciousness”;i but, even so, not inherent, not “pure” consciousness. From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being “burdened” with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into “relations” with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion).

We see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere, the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men’s restricted relation to nature, just because nature is as yet hardly modified historically; and, on the other hand, man’s consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one. This sheep- like or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops the division of labour, which was originally nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or “naturally” by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g., physical strength), needs, accidents, etc., etc. Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour

appearsii From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc., comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces of production. . . .

With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood: while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle

in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

And out of this very contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration—such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour on a larger scale, and other interests—and especially, as we shall enlarge upon later, on the classes, already determined by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men separate out, and of which one dominates all the others. It follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another. . . . Further, it follows that every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in the first moment it is forced to do. Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest (in fact the general is the illusory form of communal life), the latter will be imposed on them as an interest “alien” to them, and “independent” of them, as in its turn a particular, peculiar “general” interest; or they themselves must remain within this discord, as in democracy. On the other hand, too, the practical struggle of these particular interests, which constantly really run counter to the communal and illusory communal interests, makes practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory “general” interest in the form of the State. The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.

This “estrangement” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the

philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e., a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. How otherwise could for instance property have had a history at all, have taken on different forms, and landed property, for example, according to the different premises given, have proceeded in France from parcellation to centralisation in the hands of a few, in England from centralisation in the hands of a few to parcellation, as is actually the case today? Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand— a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an

ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers—the utterly precarious position of labour-power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life—presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals, i.e., existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil society. The latter, as is clear from what we have said above, has as its premises and basis the simple family and the multiple, the so-called tribe, and the more precise determinants of this society are enumerated in our remarks above. Already here we see how this civil society is the true source and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states.

Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and, insofar, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other hand again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, and inwardly must organise itself as State. The term “civil society” [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]iii emerged in the eighteenth century, when property relationships had already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name. . . .

This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., etc., and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too,

the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc., but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does not end by being resolved into “self-consciousness” as “spirit of the spirit,” but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man,” and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as “self- consciousness” and the “Unique.” These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existing productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then, but against the very “production of life” till then, the “total activity” on which it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves. . . .

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who

lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”

The division of labour, which we have already seen above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter sufficient has already been said above.

If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up

against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e., ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.iv It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class. When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only insofar as they became bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its turn, aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all previous classes which sought to rule.

This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as class rule in general ceases to be the form in which society is organised, that is to say, as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as general or the “general interest” as ruling

SOURCE: Excerpts from “The German Ideology: Part I,” translated by Robert Tucker, from The Marx- Engels Reader, Second Edition, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, edited by Robert C. Tucker. Copyright © 1978, 1972 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

iMarginal note by Marx: “Men have history because they must produce their life, and because they must produce it moreover in a certain way: this is determined by their physical organisation: their consciousness is determined in just the same way.” iiMarginal note by Marx: “The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.”

iiiBurgerliche Gesellschaft can mean either “bourgeois society” or “civil society.” ivMarginal note by Marx: “Universality corresponds to (1) the class versus the estate, (2) the

competition, world-wide intercourse, etc., (3) the great numerical strength of the ruling class, (4) the illusion of the common interests (in the beginning this illusion is true), (5) the delusion of the ideologists and the division of labour.”

Introduction to Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

In the essay “Alienated Labour” (taken from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), Marx examines the condition of alienation or estrangement. For Marx, alienation is inherent in capitalism, because the process of production and the results of our labor confront us as a dominating power. It stems not from religiously rooted errors of consciousness, as Hegel argued, but from the material conditions in which we apply our essential productive capacities. For, contrary to Hegel’s assertion, God does not create man and his ideas. Instead, it is man who creates the idea of God.

How is it that alienation is a necessary feature of capitalism? For the wage earner, work is alienating because it serves solely to provide the means (i.e., money) for maintaining her physical existence. Instead of labor representing an end in itself—an activity that expresses our capacity to shape our lives and our relationships with others—private ownership of the means of production reduces the role of the worker to that of a cog in a machine. The worker is an expendable object that performs routinized tasks. Put in another way, for Marx, working just for money—and not for the creative potential of labor itself—is akin to selling your soul.

The wage earner has little, if any, control over the production process. The types of materials or machines to be used, how to divide the necessary tasks, and the rate at which goods are to be manufactured are all determined by the owner of the factory or business. The worker is thus subject to the demands of the production process; it confronts her as an alienating power that controls her labor. Because the worker is alienated in her role as producer, she can only be but alienated from that which the process of her labor produces. In turn, the product opposes the worker as an object over which she has no control. The questions of where and how it is sold and how much to charge are determined by the capitalist. More profoundly, the worker is dependent on the object for her very existence. It is only for her labor expended in producing the object that she earns a wage and is thus able to survive. If the object disappears—when the factory closes or technology renders the worker’s labor obsolete—through no fault of her own she is left clinging to survival.

Because the worker is alienated from the process of production as well as

the product of his labor, he becomes inescapably alienated from himself. The wage earner spends two-thirds of his waking hours engaged in a meaningless activity, save its providing him with the means of subsistence. Torn away from the object of his labor, he is unable to realize the essence of his creative nature or “species being” through his work. Finally, the worker is alienated from the rest of humanity and becomes just another commodity to be bought and sold. To himself and others he is more like an animal or a machine than a human. Tragically, Marx asserts that the worker is free only in the performance of his “animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating . . . and in his human functions [labor] he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal” (Marx 1844/1978:74).

In “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society” (also taken from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts), Marx extends his critique of capitalist production to money itself. Here he describes how the possessor of money can be transformed into anything money can buy; how one’s individuality is determined not by his own characteristics or capacities, but by the power of money to transform what he wants to be into what he is. Money is a medium capable of being exchanged not only for a specific good or service, but also for traits such as beauty, talent, or honesty. It is not simply something that we earn, spend, or save—rather, it does things, it makes us who and what we are. Money is “the alienating ability of mankind” (Marx 1844/1978:104, emphasis in the original) that bonds us to life itself and to our relationships with others, not through our innate qualities, but through what we have the power to buy.

Significantly, this concern with the subjective consequences of the capitalist system reflects a nonrationalist dimension to Marx’s argument that contrasts with his overall rationalist theoretical orientation. In “Alienated Labour,” Marx does not focus on the nature of class interests and the struggle to realize them (though it certainly would be in our interest to reform, if not abolish, the productive arrangements he describes). Rather, he describes a “way of being,” a sensibility imposed on workers and capitalists alike by the properties inherent to capitalism. Indeed, the nonrationalist logic of this essay is highlighted further by the fact that Marx is constructing a moral critique as much as a scientific argument concerning the degradation wreaked by capitalism.

From Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Karl Marx

ALIENATED LABOUR We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land—likewise division of labour, competition, the concept of exchange- value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that finally the distinction between capitalist and land-rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory-worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes—the property-owners and the propertyless workers. . . .

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the essential connection between private property, avarice, and the separation of labour, capital and landed property; between exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of men, monopoly and competition, etc.; the connection between this whole estrangement and the money-system.

Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. He assumes in the form of fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce—namely, the necessary relationship between two things—between, for example, division of labour and exchange. Theology in the same way explains the origin of evil by the fall of man: that is, it assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.

We proceed from an actual economic fact.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity—and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces—labour’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an

object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

So much does labour’s realization appear as loss of reality that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object which he can get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, capital.

All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker’s lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and therein at the estrangement, the loss of the object, his product.

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.

But just as nature provides labor with the means of life in the sense that labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense—i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.

Thus the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world,

sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour—to be his labour’s means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

Thus in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labour, i.e., in that he receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

(The laws of political economy express the estrangement of the worker in his object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labour becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labour becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s bondsman.)

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things— but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines—but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence—but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.

The direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relationship—and confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later.

When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labour we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production.

Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker’s relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production—within the producing activity itself. How

would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity of production. If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour?

First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual—that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—in the same way the worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all other human activity and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal.

We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labour, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature as an alien

world antagonistically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labour to the act of production within the labour process. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life or what is life other than activity—as an activity which is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as we had previously the estrangement of the thing.

We have yet a third aspect of estranged labour to deduce from the two already considered.

Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but—and this is only another way of expressing it—but also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, the air, light, etc., constitute a part of human consciousness in the realm of theory, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art—his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make it palatable and digestible—so too in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, or whatever it may be. The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life- engendering life. The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life- activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life-activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.

In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty.

It is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his

real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.

The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that the species life becomes for him a means.

Estranged labour turns thus:

(3) Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted by himself, he is confronted by the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labour and object of labour.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labour each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the position in which he finds himself as a worker.

We took our departure from a fact of political economy—the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated the concept of this fact —estranged, alienated labour. We have analysed this concept—hence analysing merely a fact of political economy.

Let us now see, further, how in real life the concept of estranged, alienated labour must express and present itself.

If the product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?

If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom, then, does it belong?

To a being other than me.

Who is this being?

The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labour. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labour and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the produce in favour of these powers.

The alien being, to whom labour and the produce of labour belongs, in whose service labour is done and for whose benefit the produce of labour is provided, can only be man himself.

If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must be delight and his life’s joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

We must bear in mind the above-stated proposition that man’s relation to himself only becomes objective and real for him through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If his own activity is to him an unfree activity, then he is treating it as activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man.

Every self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labour man not only engenders his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also engenders the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he begets his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; just as he

begets his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he begets the dominion of the one who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges from himself his own activity, so he confers to the stranger activity which is not his own.

Till now we have only considered this relationship from the standpoint of the worker and later we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.

Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relation to it of the capitalist, or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour. Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour—i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.

True, it is a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) from political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.

Only at the very culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, re-emerge, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that secondly it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.

This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts.

(1) Political economy starts from labour as the real soul of production; yet to labour it gives nothing, and to private property everything. From this contradiction Proudhon has concluded in favour of labour and against private property. We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labour.

We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical: where the product, the object of labour pays for labour itself, the wage is but a necessary consequence of labour’s estrangement, for after all in

the wage of labour, labour does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this point later, and meanwhile will only deduce some conclusions.

A forcing-up of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that the higher wages, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.

Indeed, even the equality of wages demanded by Proudhon only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one aspect must therefore mean the downfall of the other.

(2) From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it further follows that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone was at stake but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation—and it contains this, because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation. . . .

THE POWER OF MONEY IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY

If man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the [narrower] sense, but truly ontological affirmations of essential being (of nature), and if they are only really affirmed because their object exists for them as an object of sense, then it is clear:

(1) That they have by no means merely one mode of affirmation, but rather that the distinctive character of their existence, of their life, is constituted by the distinctive mode of their affirmation. In what manner the object exists for them, is the characteristic mode of their gratification.

(2) Whenever the sensuous affirmation is the direct annulment of the object in its independent form (as in eating, drinking, working up of the object, etc.), this is the affirmation of the object.

(3) In so far as man, and hence also his feeling, etc., are human, the affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own enjoyment.

(4) Only through developed industry—i.e., through the medium of private

property—does the ontological essence of human passion come to be both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man’s establishment of himself by practical activity. (5) The meaning of private property—liberated from its estrangement—is

the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and as objects of activity.

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as the almighty being. Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person. “What, man! confound it, hands and feet

And head and backside, all are yours! And what we take while life is sweet,

Is that to be declared not ours? Six stallions, say, I can afford.

Is not their strength my property? I tear along, a sporting lord,

As if their legs belonged to me.”

(Mephistopheles, in Faust)i

Shakespeare in Timon of Athens: “Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! . . .

Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.

. . . Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,

Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave

Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed; Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves

And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench: This is it

That makes the wappen’d widow wed again; She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores

Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices

To the April day again. . . . Damned earth,

Thou common whore of mankind, that putt’st odds

Among the rout of nations.”ii

And also later: “O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce

Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!

Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer, Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow

That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God! That solder’st close impossibilities,

And mak’st them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue, To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!

Think thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue Set them into confounding odds, that beasts

May have the world in empire!”iii

Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage from Goethe.

That which is for me through the medium of money—that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy)—that am I, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my properties and essential powers—the properties and powers of its possessor. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, in my character as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and therefore so is its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid? Besides, he can buy talented people for himself, and is he who has power over the talented not more talented than the talented? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money therefore transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of

divorce? It is the true agent of divorce as well as the true binding agent—the [universal]iv galvano-chemical power of Society.

Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:

(1) It is the visible divinity—the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and overturning of things: it makes brothers of impossibilities.

(2) It is the common whore, the common pimp of people and nations.

The overturning and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization of impossibilities—the divine power of money—lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not —turns it, that is, into its contrary.

If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail- coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or willed existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, money is the truly creative power.

No doubt demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the others, and which therefore remains for me unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the imagined which exists merely within me and the imagined as it is for me outside me as a real object.

If I have no money for travel, I have no need—that is, no real and self- realizing need—to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study—that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Being the external, common medium and faculty for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image (a faculty not springing from man as man or from human society as society), money transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract conceits and therefore imperfections—into

tormenting chimeras—just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras— essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual—into real powers and faculties.

In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general overturning of individualities which turns them into their contrary and adds contradictory attributes to their attributes.

Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy.

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things—the world upside-down—the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities.

He who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent—a misfortune.

SOURCE: Excerpts from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, first published in German, 1932, translated by Robert Tucker from The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, edited by Robert C. Tucker. Copyright © 1978, 1972 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

iGoethe, Faust, (Part I–Faust’s Study, III), translated by Philip Wayne (Penguin, 1949), p. 91. iiShakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3. Marx quotes the Schlegel-Tieck German translation. (Marx’s emphasis.)

iiiIbid.

ivAn end of the page is torn out of the manuscript [Trans.].

Introduction to The Communist Manifesto In 1847, the Communist League, an association formed by radical workers in 1836, commissioned Marx and Engels to write a political tract outlining the organization’s program. The result was the now-famous Communist Manifesto (also called The Manifesto of the Communist Party), which you will read below. In contrast to other readings in this volume, the Manifesto is a deliberately adversarial work intended to inspire allegiance to the movement’s cause. Though it had only modest impact at the time of its publication in 1848, shortly afterward workers and peasants staged revolts throughout much of Europe, including France, Germany, and Italy.

Notwithstanding its origins as a political tract, The Communist Manifesto is of great theoretical significance. In it, you will again encounter Marx’s theory of historical materialism and his inversion of Hegel’s idealism. You will also see Marx’s commitment to the Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of humanity, which in his view will be realized through an inevitable communist revolution. The Manifesto also describes the economic processes that led to the ascendancy of the capitalist class and that eventually will produce its own “grave-diggers”—a class-conscious proletariat.

Indeed, much of the Manifesto is a “scientific prophecy” detailing the downfall of the capitalist class and the rise of the proletariat. As such, it represents a penetrating theory of social change. The eventual collapse of capitalism will occur much in the way as previous economic systems: the social relations of production (how productive activity is organized and the laws governing property ownership) will become a “fetter” or obstacle to the continued development of the means of production (i.e., machinery, technology). The result is an “epidemic of overproduction” (Marx and Engels 1848/1978:478) in which the bourgeoisie “chokes” on the overabundance of goods produced by ever-increasing industrial efficiency. The final crisis of capitalism is thus a necessary consequence of the technological progress that was itself spurred by the capitalist class’s private ownership of the means of production and the goods produced.

As an example of how technology—the forces of production—advances more quickly than changes in the laws governing the relations of production —that is, ownership of property, consider the recent debates on music file sharing over the Internet, which is itself an updated version of the 1980s

debate over the development of portable cassette players and “blank” tapes that could be used to record albums. Though by no means spelling the doom of capitalism, the controversy nevertheless highlights the contradictions that arise between the forces and relations of production. Computer and communication technologies have been developed that enable a virtually infinite number of users to simultaneously share data stored on their hard drives. To avail themselves of this capability, users must first connect to a central terminal that serves as a temporary holding station. Napster was such a central terminal for sharing music files. The company itself did not own or control the files; it simply provided a conduit for the individuals who did. However, because the company provided a singular, “tangible” site for the free exchange of music, lawyers for the record companies were able to successfully argue that Napster—and not the individual users—circumvented copyright regulations despite the fact that it did not “steal” the files for its own use.

This advancement in computer technology undermines current laws governing copyright ownership and the rights that accompany proprietorship. Internet users can download and thus possess music with unparalleled ease and speed without having to pay for it, making it impossible for the owners of the copyrights to fully control the distribution of their property. (Although cassette tapes and albums have been copied for decades, the convenience with which such “pirated” versions are made and the scope of their distribution pales in comparison to that of file sharing on the Internet.) This, of course, runs completely counter to a legal cornerstone of capitalism, namely, that owners must be compensated for the use of their “private” property. However, the social relations of production—the laws of ownership—do not prevent individuals from sharing the products that they have purchased and thus rightfully own, and someone at some point purchased the music that now is stored on their hard drive. However, to the extent that current laws are enforced or rewritten in an effort to combat the infringement of property rights, the social relations of production become a “fetter” to the full development of advances in technology. More generally, technological innovations have been and will continue to be a source of disruption in the music industry (and other industries as well) and a “persistent threat to the established ways of exploiting musical materials to yield a profit” (Martin 1995:257). With the “age of manufacture” having come to an end for the music industry, “companies (and company profits) are no longer organised around making things, but depend on the creation of rights” (Frith 1987, quoted in Martin 1995:258). For that matter, with the advent of more recent software and recording technologies, one no longer needs to be a musician, or know anything about music, in order to write and record a piano sonata, a pop

song with a six-piece “band,” or a string concerto.

Returning to our theoretical discussion of the dynamics of capitalism, capitalists must forever seek to eliminate their competitors, create new markets, destroy some of their products, or cut back their productive capacity in order to minimize the oversupply of goods that results from increasingly sophisticated means of production. If production is reduced, however, capitalists, in turn, will be forced to reduce their work force and, with it, their source of profit, as well as the size of the market able to purchase their goods. Yet, the bourgeoisie is confronted not only with these economic realities of capitalism, but also with political consequences, because competition creates an obstacle to class unity and to the ability to implement coherent economic policies that will ensure its dominance. And so the cycle continues.

Meanwhile, factory conditions themselves facilitate the development of a revolutionary class consciousness through which workers come to realize the true source of their alienation and the possibility of breaking free from the chains of their enslavement. Placed side by side in their performance of tedious, monotonous tasks, the physical settings of factories increase the contact between the workers, making it easier to communicate and spread allegiance to the proletariat’s cause. Urging “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” Marx warns that the communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling class tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. (Marx and Engels 1848/1978:500)

Yet, the question remains: Why would the establishment of a communist economy create a more humane society? At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, the communist utopia hinges on the abolishment of private property. Marx maintains that once the means of production become collectively owned, exploitation of the worker is no longer possible. This is because the surplus value (i.e., profit) produced by the worker is not appropriated or siphoned off by an individual owner. Instead, it is distributed among the workers themselves. Alienation is also ended because the worker, now a part owner of the enterprise, is able to direct the production process and maintain control over the products she creates. In turn, the worker is no longer estranged from herself and the species being. Finally, the competition for profit that characterizes bourgeois capitalism is brought to a close and, with it, recurring economic crises. Periods of “boom or bust” and their accompanying disruptions to employment are replaced by a more stable form of economic planning that produces according to the needs of the population and not the whims of an unpredictable market. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”

(Marx and Engels 1848/1978:491).

The economic crisis continuing to unfold is a textbook example of the continuing relevance and prescience of Marx’s ideas. The Great Recession of 2007−9 was America’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In 2010, a record high of nearly 14 million workers were unemployed; those still employed were left with no choice but to accept steep cuts in pay and benefits. The United States, however, was and is by no means alone in experiencing the dramatic downturn. Just as Marx predicted, the spread of capitalism has ensured that the economic crises cannot be confined to any one country’s borders, but necessarily must reach across the entire globe. With a shrinking demand for goods, sales of commodities have plummeted worldwide, leaving capitalists to “choke” on their supplies as warehouses are filled to capacity with unshipped goods. To compensate, companies have fired workers, scaled back production, and slashed prices in order to sell their products. But what of the workers, the proletariat? Millions of people are still looking for jobs, struggling to meet their basic needs (as are many millions who are employed). Nevertheless, production across all sectors of the economy has slowed to a virtual halt, but not because the machines are broken or somehow malfunctioning, or because there are not enough skilled laborers available to carry out the required tasks. Production has been stopped artificially by capitalists, and they must do so in order to prevent glutting the market with their goods while preserving whatever profits they are still able to earn. The relations of production—private ownership and its accompanying drive for private profit—have become a fetter to the forces of production, despite the fact that millions are living in increasingly desperate conditions. And while the Great Recession technically ended in the United States in June 2009, according to Robert Reich, economist and former Secretary of Labor, 95 percent of the postcrisis economic gains have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population.

Although the causes of the Great Recession are complex, many analysts have pointed to the dominant role played by the bundling of individual home loans into mortgage-backed securities that were then sold to investors. When the housing bubble that made investment in these financial instruments profitable burst, banks and investment companies around the world were left holding assets with rapidly declining values. However, the very corporations who invented and sold this new form of security are unable to root out the problems caused by these “troubled assets” because the originally bundled securities have been rebundled and traded so frequently that it has become impossible to determine the value of the securities as well as who owns a specific asset. Capitalists, like a “sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called upon by his spells” (Marx and

Engels 1848/1978:478), created a financial instrument that they are incapable of controlling and that has metastasized to the point where it threatens the stability of the global capitalist economy.

To stem the tide of the fallout, governments have intensified their intervention in their respective economies. In the United States, intervention primarily took the form of giving billions of taxpayer dollars to the very financial institutions that were largely responsible for creating the crisis, with little oversight or accountability for how the funds will be used. Though government officials decided to use public funds to purchase the troubled assets from the banks and investment companies, it is impossible for taxpayers to know whether or not they paid a fair price for them because the value of the assets cannot be determined. At the same time, the government provided comparatively little funds that would allow homeowners to renegotiate their overvalued mortgages, prompting some observers to claim that the government is concerned only with the well-being of Wall Street and not Main Street. In rescuing the “moneyed interests” while letting drown millions of struggling homeowners, a ring of truth is sounded in Marx’s assertion, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels 1848/1978:475). Yet, to avoid a complete economic collapse, the capitalists and the state have no choice but to appeal to the public—the proletariat—“to ask for its help, and thus drag it into the political arena” (ibid.:481), in turn supplying it with a political and intellectual education that will later be used as a weapon against them.

From The Communist Manifesto (1848) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact.

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the

whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANSi

The history of all hitherto existing societyii is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-masteriii and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants

of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild- masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even

manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune;iv here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France), afterward, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi- feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy

water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw

material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what

earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over- production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of

new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor,v is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of

men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the work of people of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois condition of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more

fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the Ten- Hours Bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the

whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the

interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working- class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property,

but the abolition of bourgeois property generally, but modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labour create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is, therefore, not only personal; it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.

Let us now take wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage-laborer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and

reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the communistic abolition of buying and selling, or the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine- tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non- existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality

vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion [than] that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with

the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical and juridicial ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.”

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois

production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the banks of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class

antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

SOURCE: Marx/Engels Internet Archive.

iBy bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live. [Engels, English edition of 1888] iiThat is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primaeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in: “Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats” [The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State], 2nd edition, Stuttgart 1886. [Engels, English edition of 1888]

iiiGuild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, English edition of 1888] iv“Commune” was the name taken, in France, by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France. [Engels, English edition of 1888] This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or wrested their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, German edition of 1890]

vSubsequently Marx pointed out that the worker sells not his labor but his labor power.

Introduction to Capital In this section, we turn to what many consider Marx’s masterpiece of

economic analysis: Capital. Here, we provide excerpts from two chapters: “Commodities” and “The General Formula for Capital.”

In “Commodities,” Marx explores the sources of value by asking what determines the worth or price of goods bought and sold on the market. In answering this question, Marx again borrowed from the work of Adam Smith to draw a distinction between “use-value” and “exchange-value.” Use-value refers to the utility of a commodity or its ability to satisfy wants.1 A commodity has use-value only if it is consumed or otherwise put to use. For

instance, a one-legged stool cannot readily satisfy a person’s desire to sit; therefore, it has no use-value for most individuals. The use-value of a commodity, however, does not determine its actual price; although the usefulness of a commodity may differ between individuals (maybe you really find sitting on a one-legged stool to be more comfortable), the cost of the good does not likewise change (we’ll all pay the same price for it). Moreover, because use-value refers to the qualities of commodities—what they consist of—it cannot establish a quantifiable standard for measuring the price of goods. After all, how can one quantify and compare the usefulness of a light bulb with that of a fork? Determining their equivalent values would require developing a standardized scale of “usefulness” on which goods could be located.

As a measure of quantity, however, exchange-value, on the other hand, does express equivalencies—how much of a given commodity (e.g., corn) it takes to equal the value of another commodity (e.g., iron). Because exchange- value is derived from the trade of commodities, it cannot be a property inherent in the commodity itself. Instead, it is dependent on what goods are being exchanged. For instance, one DVD player might be exchanged fairly for one guitar, two jackets, or three CD burners. Thus, a DVD player has not one, but many exchange-values. But if different quantities of different commodities with different use values can nevertheless be equal in exchange- value, then the value of the commodities must be determined by something else separate from yet common to the commodities themselves.

For Marx, this common “something else” is labor. In Marx’s labor theory of value (which he appropriated from Adam Smith and David Ricardo), the value of an object is determined ultimately by the amount of labor time (hours, weeks, months, etc.) that it took to produce it. “Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. . . . As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour-time” (Marx 1867/1978:306). By equating the value of goods with labor time, Marx not only outlined the economic principles that purportedly guide exchange, he also unmasked the root source of exploitation inherent in capitalist production.

In a capitalist economy, those who do not own the means of production have no choice but to sell their labor power in order to survive. The worker’s labor power is thus treated as a commodity exchanged, in this case, for a wage. But at what rate is the worker paid? What determines the exchange- value of labor? Like all other commodities, the value of labor power is a function of the amount of labor time necessary to produce itself. In other

words, the value of labor power is equivalent to the costs incurred by the worker for food, clothing, shelter, training, and other goods necessary to ensure both the survival of his family and his return to work the next day.

However, the length of the working day exceeds the time needed on the job in order for the worker to reproduce his labor power. Say, for instance, that in six hours of work a laborer is able to produce for the capitalist the equivalent value of what he needs in order to support his family and return to work. Because the worker’s wage is equal to the value of the goods necessary for his family’s survival, he is paid, in this case, for six hours’ worth of labor. Yet, the capitalist employs the worker for a longer duration, say 12 hours a day. During these additional six hours, the worker produces surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value is the difference between what workers earn for their labor and the value of the goods that they produce. Surplus value is thus the source of the capitalist’s profit: the capitalist pays the worker less than the value of what she actually produces. Human labor is thus the one commodity that is exchanged for its value while being capable of producing more than its value.

To illustrate this concept more clearly, consider a simplified example of a furniture manufacturing plant employing 100 workers. A worker paid $10 an hour to assemble tables would earn $400 for a 40-hour workweek. Annually, the worker would earn $20,800. This annual wage would barely keep a family of four out of poverty, to say nothing of attaining the “American Dream.” Let’s assume the worker assembles 100 tables over the course of a year, each sold on the market for $300. The worker thus generates $30,000 for the owner of the plant. The nearly $10,000 difference between wages earned and money generated is appropriated by the capitalist both to reinvest in her business and to support her own family. While this may not seem like a significant difference, recall that the plant employs 100 workers, each of whose labor produces roughly $30,000 in sales. Now the owner is appropriating nearly $1 million in surplus value over the course of only one year, while the workers, whose labor produced the goods sold on the market for a profit, cling with their families to a near-poverty existence.

Additionally, private ownership of the means of the production allows the owner to control the production process and appropriate the products, thus enabling him to take this profit solely for himself. In turn, surplus value is also the source of the capitalists’ exploitation of the worker because the worker gives more than is given in return without having any voice in this relationship of exchange.

In his effort to increase his profit and market share, the capitalist has two principal means at his disposal: increasing “absolute” or increasing “relative”

surplus value. He can increase his absolute surplus value by extending the working day. The increase in hours on the job, in turn, increases the productivity of his workforce. With wages remaining constant, greater productivity yields higher profits for the capitalist. During Marx’s time, 12- and 14-hour working days were not uncommon, and capitalists routinely opposed legislation aimed at reducing laborers’ hours.

Capitalists can also increase their relative surplus value. This stems from increasing the productivity of labor by instituting timesaving procedures. With a decrease in the time and thus the cost of production, a capitalist is able to produce more goods that in turn can be sold for a lower price. This will enable him to undersell his competitors and capture a larger share of the market. For instance, production efficiency can be improved as capitalists specialize their labor force by reorganizing workers and the allocation of tasks. Specialization simplifies a worker’s role in the production process so that, rather than performing a variety of tasks, his contribution is reduced to one or two operations. Often this entails adopting an assembly line system of manufacturing such as Henry Ford did when he revolutionized the automobile industry in the early twentieth century. However, although specialization increases efficiency by enabling more products to be produced in less time, it also leads to the routinization of labor and the workers’ loss of self-fulfilment.

Similarly, in their competition for markets, capitalists can turn to more sophisticated machines and technology to enable laborers to produce more goods in less time. To the extent that mechanized production decreases the necessary labor time, surplus value is increased, along with the level of worker alienation and exploitation.

Although a machine may be able to run 24 hours a day (and does not need insurance or bathroom breaks), mechanized production has its costs. In the short run, it can lead to a reduction in profits, despite the higher volume of productivity, because machines take the place of workers who are the capitalists’ source of surplus value. Increasing productivity as a means for selling commodities more cheaply than one’s competitors sell also compels a capitalist to sell more products and dominate a larger share of the market. Without selling more commodities, the capitalist cannot offset the lower selling price and the expense of adopting more costly machines, to say nothing of turning a profit. Moreover, as the capitalist’s competitors begin to make use of the new technology, she is forced to seek—and pay for—ever- newer and more efficient machines, lest she suffer the very fate she intends to inflict on others.

The competition for markets and the need to increase productivity bear long-run costs, as well. Specialization and mechanization force more workers

into unstable employment and a marginal existence. Needed to perform only the most monotonous of unskilled tasks, workers become easily replaceable and expendable. Indeed, “it is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers,” because doing so increases their relative surplus value and accumulation of capital (Marx 1867/1978:425. (See Figure 2.2 and the statistics on worker productivity and the distribution of income/wealth cited earlier). As a result, an “industrial reserve army” of unemployed and underemployed laborers is created, the ranks of which swell as the employed segments of the proletariat are overworked. Thus, despite the increasing levels of productivity and growth in the amount of wealth controlled by the capitalists, the market for their products begins to shrink as a growing “relative surplus population” of laborers is left unable to afford little more than the necessities for survival. At the same time, the increasing competition for jobs due to the expanding industrial reserve army combines with the marginalization of skills to decrease the wages of those fortunate enough to be employed. Meanwhile, competition between capitalists forever breeds greater specialization and mechanization, and all that follows in their wake. Recurring crises of overproduction and “boom or bust” are thus endemic to the capitalist system, while economic recessions and depressed wages become more severe.2

In this chapter, Marx also reworks his earlier analysis of alienation in the form of the “fetishism of commodities.” Recall that alienation, according to Marx, is a dehumanizing consequence of the worker’s estrangement or separation from the means of production and the goods produced (see our previous discussion of “Alienated Labour”). Similarly, commodity fetishism refers to the distorted relationship existing between individuals and the production and consumption of goods. However, in fetishizing commodities, Marx argues that we treat the goods we buy as if they have “magical” powers. We lose sight of the fact that we create commodities and, in doing so, grant them a power over us that in reality they do not hold.

To illustrate this point, perhaps you can think of how products directed at our personal appearance are marketed. Advertisements for shampoos, lotions, deodorants, toothpastes, and the like routinely convey the message that interpersonal “success” is dependent on our using these products. Boy gets girl because he buys a specific brand of mouthwash. Girl gets boy because she uses a toothpaste that whitens her teeth. Likewise, driving a particular type of car or drinking a particular brand of soft drink or beer magically transforms us into the type of person who uses the products; an association linking person and product that is the hallmark of modern advertising. In each instance, our accomplishments and failures are derived not from who we are

as individuals, but magically from what we buy as consumers. As a result, our social interactions as well as our sense of self are mediated through or steered by the qualities we associate with products, not by our individual qualities. When we fetishize commodities, we relate to images, not people. (Compare Marx’s argument here with the one made earlier in the excerpt from “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society.”)

Not only are commodities fetishized, but so too is the process of commodity production. When we blame machines for replacing our jobs or for our feelings of alienation, we endow them with human qualities of conscious intent or will. In turn, we fail to recognize that it is the owner of the means of production who is responsible for transforming the production process, not the machines. Thus, if the introduction of new technology increases the speed of the labor process or alters how that process is organized among workers, fetishizing commodity production prevents laborers from holding capitalists accountable for their growing dissatisfaction. Instead, workers will assign the source of their increasing exploitation not to the capitalists who benefit from it, but to the new technology. This carries with it important political consequences, because the intrinsically social nature of the production process is veiled, making workers less able to effectively press their class-based interests for change. As we noted in chapter 1, the Luddites were one such group of handicraft workers who in early nineteenth-century England destroyed the textile machines that rendered their skilled labor obsolete, displacing them with cheap, unskilled laborers. Their protests were met with repressive government actions that included hangings and imprisonment in exile.

Finally, in “The General Formula for Capital,” Marx describes the cycle or circulation of commodities peculiar to capitalism. Unlike other economic arrangements, production under capitalism is driven by the quest for increasing profits and capital for reinvestment, not toward simply fulfilling needs or wants established through tradition. Guiding the profit motive is a cycle of exchange Marx labeled “M-C-M.” By definition, the capitalist enters into economic exchange already possessing capital (raw materials, machinery for production) or, more generally, money (M). Seeking to expand her business and profits, the capitalist converts her money into a commodity (C) by purchasing additional machinery, raw materials, or labor. The capitalist then uses these commodities to produce other commodities that are then sold for money (M). Hence, the meaning of the slogan, “It takes money to make money.”

For the proletariat, the cycle of exchange takes an inverse path. Take a typical wage earner, for example. The worker enters into the labor market

possessing only his labor power, which he sells as a commodity (C). His commodity, labor, is then exchanged for money (M) or a wage. The worker then takes the money and spends it on the commodities (C) necessary to his survival. The circulation of commodities here follows the pattern C-M-C. The worker sells his one commodity in order to purchase goods he does not otherwise possess. Such a pattern of exchange cannot generate a profit. Instead, it is a cycle of economic activity that provides solely for the satisfaction of basic needs and a subsistence level of existence. It is a cycle that must be repeated daily as the commodities bought by the worker—food, fuel, clothing, shelter—tied as they are to survival, are more or less immediately consumed or in need of continual replacement. Rent is paid not once, but monthly. Clothes are bought not once, but regularly, when worn out or outgrown. Food is bought and consumed on a daily basis. As a result, unless the worker cuts back on necessities there is no opportunity to save and build a “nest egg.”

From Capital (1867) Karl Marx

COMMODITIES

The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value (The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value)

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.

Every useful thing, as iron, paper, etc., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. So also is the establishment of socially recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.

The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use-value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities.i Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange-value.

Exchange-value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms. Let us consider the matter a little more closely.

A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, etc.—in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange-value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold, etc., each represent the exchange-value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, etc., must, as exchange-values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange-values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange-value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.

Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things—in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third.

A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate

and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange-values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.

This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use-values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use-value. Then one use-value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says, “one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value. . . . An hundred pounds’ worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.” As use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange-values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value.

If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use-value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all: all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour-power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour-power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are—Values.

We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange-value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But if we

abstract from their use-value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange-value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange-value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour-time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.

Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour- power. The total labour-power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour-power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. Each individual commodity, in this connexion, is to be considered as an average sample of its class. Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one

is to that necessary for the production of the other. “As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour-time.”

The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour- time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production, and by physical conditions. For example, the same amount of labour in favourable seasons is embodied in 8 bushels of corn, and in unfavourable, only in four. The same labour extracts from rich mines more metal than from poor mines. Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth’s surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour-time. Consequently much labour is represented in a small compass. Jacob doubts whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. According to Eschwege, the total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years, ending in 1823, had not realised the price of one-and-a-half years’ average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds cost much more labour, and therefore represented more value. With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would embody itself in more diamonds, and their value would fall. If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks. In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour-time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versa, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour-time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it.

A thing can be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, etc. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use- values for others, social use-values. (And not only for others, without more. The medieval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe- corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will

serve as a use-value, by means of an exchange.)ii Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value. . . .

The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, etc. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the groundwork for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour-time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development. And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour- power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally, the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take

the form of a social relation between the products.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quā commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that

of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz., expenditure of human labour-power or human labour in the abstract. The two- fold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in

their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value—this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their own? in what proportions the products are exchangeable? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re- acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange-relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears. The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of

their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money-form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.

The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production. . . .

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulę, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulę appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as

productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.

To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange-value. Since exchange- value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange.

The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same pre-dominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers but were natural objects with strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, whenever it treats of capital? How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?

But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the commodity-form. Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist. “Value”—(i.e., exchange-value) “is a property of things, riches”—(i.e., use-value) “of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.” “Riches” (use-value) “are the attribute of men, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable. . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable” as a pearl or diamond. So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-by lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use-value of objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as

objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails here to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal, that, “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by Nature.”

THE GENERAL FORMULA FOR CAPITAL

The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.

If we abstract from the material substance of the circulation of commodities, that is, from the exchange of the various use-values, and consider only the economic forms produced by this process of circulation, we find its final result to be money: this final product of the circulation of commodities is the first form in which capital appears.

As a matter of history, capital, as opposed to landed property, invariably takes the form at first of money; it appears as moneyed wealth, as the capital of the merchant and of the usurer. But we have no need to refer to the origin of capital in order to discover that the first form of appearance of capital is money. We can see it daily under our very eyes. All new capital, to commence with, comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital.

The first distinction we notice between money that is money only, and money that is capital, is nothing more than a difference in their form of circulation.

The simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C—M—C, the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But alongside of this form we find another specifically different form: M—C—M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby transformed into, becomes capital, and is already potentially capital.

Now let us examine the circuit M—C—M a little closer. It consists, like the other, of two antithetical phases. In the first phase, M—C, or the purchase, the

money is changed into a commodity. In the second phase, C—M, or the sale, the commodity is changed back again into money. The combination of these two phases constitutes the single movement whereby money is exchanged for a commodity, and the same commodity is again exchanged for money; whereby a commodity is bought in order to be sold, or, neglecting the distinction in form between buying and selling, whereby a commodity is bought with a commodity. The result, in which the phases of the process vanish, is the exchange of money for money, M—M. If I purchase 2,000 lbs. of cotton for £100, and resell the 2,000 lbs. of cotton for £110, I have, in fact, exchanged £100 for £110, money for money. Now it is evident that the circuit M—C—M would be absurd and without

meaning if the intention were to exchange by this means two equal sums of money, £100 for £100. The miser’s plan would be far simpler and surer; he sticks to his £100 instead of exposing it to the dangers of circulation. And yet, whether the merchant who has paid £100 for his cotton sells it for £110, or lets it go for £100, or even £50, his money has, at all events, gone through a characteristic and original movement, quite different in kind from that which it goes through in the hands of the peasant who sells corn, and with the money thus set free buys clothes. We have therefore to examine first the distinguishing characteristics of the forms of the circuits M—C—M and C— M—C, and in doing this the real difference that underlies the mere difference of form will reveal itself.

Let us see, in the first place, what the two forms have in common.

Both circuits are resolvable into the same two antithetical phases, C—M, a sale, and M—C, a purchase. In each of these phases the same material elements—a commodity, and money, and the same economic dramatis personae, a buyer and a seller—confront one another. Each circuit is the unity of the same two antithetical phases, and in each case this unity is brought about by the intervention of three contracting parties, of whom one only sells, another only buys, while the third both buys and sells.

What, however, first and foremost distinguishes the circuit C—M—C from the circuit M—C—M, is the inverted order of succession of the two phases. The simple circulation of commodities begins with a sale and ends with a purchase, while the circulation of money as capital begins with a purchase and ends with a sale. In the one case both the starting-point and the goal are commodities, in the other they are money. In the first form the movement is brought about by the intervention of money, in the second by that of a commodity.

In the circulation C—M—C, the money is in the end converted into a commodity, that serves as a use-value; it is spent once for all. In the inverted

form, M—C—M, on the contrary, the buyer lays out money in order that, as a seller, he may recover money. By the purchase of his commodity he throws money into circulation, in order to withdraw it again by the sale of the same commodity. He lets the money go, but only with the sly intention of getting it back again. The money, therefore, is not spent, it is merely advance.

In the circuit C—M—C, the same piece of money changes its place twice. The seller gets it from the buyer and pays it away to another seller. The complete circulation, which begins with the receipt, concludes with the payment, of money for commodities. It is the very contrary in the circuit M— C—M. Here it is not the piece of money that changes its place twice, but the commodity. The buyer takes it from the hands of the seller and passes it into the hands of another buyer. Just as in the simple circulation of commodities the double change of place of the same piece of money effects its passage from one hand into another, so here the double change of place of the same commodity brings about the reflux of the money to its point of departure.

Such reflux is not dependent on the commodity being sold for more than was paid for it. This circumstance influences only the amount of the money that comes back. The reflux itself takes place, so soon as the purchased commodity is resold, in other words, so soon as the circuit M—C—M is completed. We have here, therefore, a palpable difference between the circulation of money as capital, and its circulation as mere money.

The circuit C—M—C comes completely to an end, so soon as the money brought in by the sale of one commodity is abstracted again by the purchase of another.

If, nevertheless, there follow a reflux of money to its starting-point, this can only happen through a renewal or repetition of the operation. If I sell a quarter of corn of £3, and with this £3 buy clothes, the money, so far as I am concerned, is spent and done with. It belongs to the clothes merchant. If I now sell a second quarter of corn, money indeed flows back to me, not however as a sequel to the first transaction, but in consequence of its repetition. The money again leaves me, so soon as I complete this second transaction by a fresh purchase. Therefore, in the circuit C—M—C, the expenditure of money has nothing to do with its reflux. On the other hand, in M—C—M, the reflux of the money is conditioned by the very mode of its expenditure. Without this reflux, the operation fails, or the process is interrupted and incomplete, owing to the absence of its complementary and final phase, the sale.

The circuit C—M—C starts with one commodity, and finishes with another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of wants, in one word, use-value, is its end and aim. The circuit M—C—M, on the contrary, commences with money and ends with

money. Its leading motive, and the goal that attracts it, is therefore mere exchange-value.

In the simple circulation of commodities, the two extremes of the circuit have the same economic form. They are both commodities, and commodities of equal value. But they are also use-values differing in their qualities, as, for example, corn and clothes. The exchange of products, of the different materials in which the labour of society is embodied, forms here the basis of the movement. It is otherwise in the circulation M—C—M, which at first sight appears purposeless, because tautological. Both extremes have the same economic form. They are both money, and therefore are not qualitatively different use-values; for money is but the converted form of commodities, in which their particular use-values vanish. To exchange £100 for cotton, and then this same cotton again for £110, is merely is roundabout way of exchanging money for money, the same for the same, and appears to be an operation just as purposeless as it is absurd. One sum of money is distinguishable from another only by its amount. The character and tendency of the process M—C—M, is therefore not due to any qualitative difference between its extremes, both being money, but solely to their quantitative difference. More money is withdrawn from circulation at the finish than was thrown into it at the start. The cotton that was bought for £100 is perhaps resold for £100 £ +10 or £110. The exact form of this process is therefore M —C—M,’ where M’+ ?M = M the original sum advanced, plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call “surplus-value.” The value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but adds to itself a surplus-value or expands itself. It is this movement that converts it into capital.

Of course, it is also possible, that in C—M—C, the two extremes C—C, say corn and clothes, may represent different quantities of value. The farmer may sell his corn above its value, or may buy the clothes at less than their value. He may, on the other hand, “be done” by the clothes merchant. Yet, in the form of circulation now under consideration, such differences in value are purely accidental. The fact that the corn and the clothes are equivalents, does not deprive the process of all meaning, as it does in M—C—M. The equivalence of their values is rather a necessary condition to its normal course.

The repetition or renewal of the act of selling in order to buy, is kept within bounds by the very object it aims at, namely, consumption or the satisfaction of definite wants, an aim that lies altogether outside the sphere of circulation. But when we buy in order to sell, we, on the contrary, begin and end with the same thing, money, exchange-value; and thereby the movement becomes

interminable. No doubt, M becomes M + ?M, £100 become £110. But when viewed in their qualitative aspect alone, £110 are the same as £100, namely money; and considered quantitatively, £110 is, like £100, a sum of definite and limited value. If now, the £110 be spent as money, they cease to play their part. They are no longer capital. Withdrawn from circulation, they become petrified into a hoard, and though they remained in that state till doomsday, not a single farthing would accrue to them. If, then, the expansion of value is once aimed at, there is just the same inducement to augment the value of the £110 as that of the £100; for both are but limited expressions for exchange- value, and therefore both have the same vocation to approach, by quantitative increase, as near as possible to absolute wealth. Momentarily, indeed, the value originally advanced, the £100, is distinguishable from the surplus-value of £10 that is annexed to it during circulation; but the distinction vanishes immediately. At the end of the process, we do not receive with one hand the original £100, and with the other, the surplus-value of £10. We simply get a value of £110, which is in exactly the same condition and fitness for commencing the expanding process, as the original £100 was. Money ends the movement only to begin it again.iii Therefore, the final result of every separate circuit, in which a purchase and consequent sale are completed, forms of itself the starting-point of a new circuit. The simple circulation of commodities—selling in order to buy—is a means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with circulation, namely, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.

As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M—C—M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use- values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit- making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange- value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by

constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.

The independent form, i.e., the money-form, which the value of commodities assumes in the case of simple circulation, serves only one purpose, namely, their exchange, and vanishes in the final result of the movement. On the other hand, in the circulation M—C—M, both the money and the commodity represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form to the other without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes an automatically active character. If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is money: Capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus- value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form of money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its own spontaneous generation. It began by being £100, it is now £110, and so on. But the money itself is only one of the two forms of value. Unless it takes the form of some commodity, it does not become capital. There is here no antagonism, as in the case of hoarding, between the money and commodities. The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.

In simple circulation, C—M—C, the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values, i.e., the form of money; but that same value now in the circulation M—C—M, or the circulation of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay,

more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; as the father differentiates himself from himself quā the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.

Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh. M—M,’ money which begets money, such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the Mercantilists.

Buying in order to sell, or, more accurately, buying in order to sell dearer, M—C—M,’ appears certainly to be a form peculiar to one kind of capital alone, namely merchants’ capital. But industrial capital too is money, that is changed into commodities, and by the sale of these commodities, is re- converted into more money.

The events that take place outside the sphere of circulation, in the interval between the buying and selling, do not affect the form of this movement. Lastly, in the case of interest- bearing capital, the circulation M—C—M’ appears abridged. We have its result without the intermediate stage, in the form M—M,’ “en style lapidaire” so to say, money that is worth more money, value that is greater than itself.

M—C—M’ is therefore in reality the general formula of capital as it appears prima facie within the sphere of circulation.

SOURCE: Marx/Engels Internet Archive.

iIn bourgeois societies the economic fictio juris prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of commodities. [Marx] iiI am inserting the parenthesis because its omission has often given rise to the misunderstanding that every product that is consumed by someone other than its producer is considered in Marx a commodity. [Engels, 4th German edition]

iii“Capital is divisible . . . into the original capital and the profit, the increment to the capital . . . although in practice this profit is immediately turned into capital, and set in motion with the original.” (F. Engels, “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie, in the “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx.” Paris, 1844, p. 99.) [Marx]

Introduction to Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

One year after Marx’s death in 1883, Friedrich Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, a work in which he examined the relationship between the evolution of family structures and class-based societies, and the emergence of the state as an institution that governs in the interests of the economically powerful. Much of his argument is based on Ancient Society, a book written by the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan that was published in 1877. Marx himself had intended to produce a manuscript based on Morgan’s work, and Engels incorporated many of the notes Marx had prepared on the subject. Following their earlier collaborations, Engels rearticulates here their materialist conception of history whereby the organization of societies is determined by both the production of the means of existence and the reproduction of the species; that is, “by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other” (Engels 1884/1942:5).

Following Morgan’s analysis, Engels argued that prehistoric societies had passed through two stages of development—savagery and barbarism. The period of savagery was characterized by communally organized hunting and gathering societies. All the members of a “gen” or clan participated in securing their survival free from any form of exploitation. In this natural, classless state, families were likewise communally organized through group marriages in which men had multiple wives, wives had multiple husbands, and the children belonged to all. This early stage of human existence disappeared as the gathering of nuts and fruits, the use of simple stone tools, and hunting with primitive bows and arrows gave way to more sophisticated and dependable means of producing the necessities of life. With these changes, human societies transitioned to barbarism, a stage marked by the domestication and breeding of animals for food, the development of irrigation techniques for the cultivation of crops, and, later, iron plows for tilling large fields.

In conjunction with this evolution in production, clan organization changed as well, as group marriages were replaced by the “pairing family” consisting of one man, one woman, and their children. The advent of the pairing family effected a new division of labor in which the man took responsibility for obtaining food and, with it, ownership of the means of production. Thus, it was the husband who owned the cattle and the instruments of labor necessary for maintaining the family’s physical existence. With their survival dependent on the man, the family was now organized under paternal power in which the

wife and the children become subject to the rule and exploitation of the husband. The man’s power was further consolidated through overturning “mother-right” lines of descent. Laws of inheritance would henceforth be assigned through the male, not the female. For Engels, the significance of this change cannot be overstated. Indeed, it represents, “the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children” (Engels 1884/1942:50, emphasis in the original).

Continual population growth and advances in production techniques and labor ushered in the transition from barbarism to civilization—the period of industry. The increase in production and wealth made possible by technological developments was accompanied by a parallel increase in the amount of work extracted from the members of the gens. To offset the new demands for labor, “the first great division of labor arose” and with it, “the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited” (Engels 1884/1942:147).

The transition from barbarism to civilization also marks the transition from the pairing family to the monogamous family. Like the pairing family that preceded it, the monogamous family is based on the unquestioned supremacy of the man. Yet, far from being based on love, monogamous marriages were “the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions—on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property” (Engels 1884/1942:57). Monogamy was necessary to ensure that the wealth possessed by the man, made possible only by developments in the forces of production, would be inherited by his offspring alone. Thus, paternity needed to be ensured, making women, and only women, subject to the demands of monogamy, while men were free to engage in polygamous relations. Monogamous marriage stripped women of the freedom, honor, and respect naturally accorded during the “backward” period of barbarism. The “advances” of civilization in their stead have regulated the wife to “domestic slavery.” Yet Engels maintained that under communism and its abolishment of classes of every type, husbands would be stripped of their economic supremacy and with it their dominance within the family. Just as one class will no longer be able to subjugate another, the family will no longer be founded on “the subjugation of the one sex by the other” (ibid.:58).

It should be noted, however, that many anthropologists and historians contend that Engels’s portrayal of the premodern family is ethnographically and historically inaccurate. Virtually all known human societies have been male dominant to some extent, though the extent and types of dominance vary

significantly (Lane 1990:10). Even communes that intentionally seek to institute complete gender equality often end up reverting to a gendered division of labor (e.g., Rothman 1995). Nevertheless, what is remarkable about Engels’s work is not only that he pointedly raises the issue of the subordination of women, but also that he traces it directly to material causes, explicitly maintaining that the alleged inferiority of women is anything but biological.

This materialist perspective is likewise evident in Engels’s contention that increasing productivity and the development of classes brought changes not only to the organization of the family, but also to the organization of the broader social order. Societies existing during the periods of savagery and barbarism were based on kinship with members of a given clan tied together by blood. However, with growing populations and expanding trade and commerce, homogenous clans gave way to heterogeneous communities whose members were divided by differences in wealth, and thus into exploiting and exploited classes. The common concerns that had united kinship groups were submerged under the eruption of divisive class antagonisms. The clash of interests could not be contained by the “gentile constitution” that to this point had governed the communistic, tribal societies through long-standing, widely shared customs. Such a society could only exist either in the continuous open fight of these classes against one another, or else under the rule of a third power, which, apparently standing above the warring classes, suppressed their open conflict and allowed the class struggle to be fought out at most in the economic field, in so-called legal form. The gentile constitution was finished. It had been shattered by the division of labor and its result, the cleavage of society into classes. It was replaced by the state. (Engels 1884/1942:154, emphasis in the original)

The state was now the decisive center of power within the civilized society, the boundaries of which were marked by territory, not blood. To secure its defense against foreign enemies and to maintain domestic order, the state compelled its citizens to pay taxes. Yet the instruments of protection—the armies, police forces, and prisons—served the interests not of society as a whole, but rather the interests of the dominant economic class. Thus, the state provided the ruling class with the political means for oppressing and exploiting the subordinate class and ensuring its continued economic dominance. The inevitable communist revolution, however, will bring an end to class struggle as its basis, private property, is abolished. In turn, the state, whose primary charge is to protect the property rights of the ruling class, will be rendered obsolete. “The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax” (Engels 1884/1942:158).

From The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)

Friedrich Engels

THE FAMILY

The Pairing Family

[T]he history of the family in primitive times consists in the progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole tribe, within which the two sexes have a common conjugal relation. The continuous exclusion, first of nearer, then of more and more remote relatives, and at last even of relatives by marriage, ends by making any kind of group marriage practically impossible. Finally, there remains only the single, still loosely linked pair, the molecule with whose dissolution marriage itself ceases. This in itself shows what a small part individual sex-love, in the modern sense of the word, played in the rise of monogamy. . . . Whereas in the earlier forms of the family men never lacked women, but, on the contrary, had too many rather than too few, women had now become scarce and highly sought after. Hence it is with the pairing marriage that there begins the capture and purchase of women— widespread symptoms, but no more than symptoms, of the much deeper change that had occurred. . . .

The pairing family, itself too weak and unstable to make an independent household necessary or even desirable, in no wise destroys the communistic household inherited from earlier times. Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in the house; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to the impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty, means that the women—the mothers—are held in high respect. One of the most absurd notions taken over from eighteenth-century enlightenment is that in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man. Among all savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to a certain extent of the upper stage also, the position of women is not only free, but honorable. . . .

The communistic household, in which most or all of the women belong to one and the same gens, while the men come from various gentes, is the material foundation of that supremacy of the women which was general in primitive times. . . . The division of labor between the two sexes is determined by quite other causes than by the position of woman in society. Among peoples where the women have to work far harder than we think suitable, there is often much more real respect for women than among our

Europeans. The lady of civilization, surrounded by false homage and estranged from all real work, has an infinitely lower social position than the hard-working woman of barbarism, who was regarded among her people as a real lady . . . and who was also a lady in character. . . .

The first beginnings of the pairing family appear on the dividing line between savagery and barbarism. . . . The pairing family is the form characteristic of barbarism, as group marriage is characteristic of savagery and monogamy of civilization. . . . In the single pair the group was already reduced to its final unit, its two-atom molecule: one man and one woman. Natural selection, with its progressive exclusions from the marriage community, had accomplished its task; there was nothing more for it to do in this direction. Unless new, social forces came into play, there was no reason why a new form of family should arise from the single pair. But these new forces did come into play. . . .

Pairing marriage had brought a new element into the family. By the side of the natural mother of the child it placed its natural and attested father, with a better warrant of paternity, probably, than that of many a “father” today. According to the division of labor within the family at that time, it was the man’s part to obtain food and the instruments of labor necessary for the purpose. He therefore also owned the instruments of labor, and in the event of husband and wife separating, he took them with him, just as she retained her household goods. Therefore, according to the social custom of the time, the man was also the owner of the new source of subsistence, the cattle, and later of the new instruments of labor, the slaves. But according to the custom of the same society, his children could not inherit from him. . . .

Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the man’s position in the family more important than the woman’s, and on the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to overthrow, in favor of his children, the traditional order of inheritance. This, however, was impossible so long as descent was reckoned according to mother-right. Mother-right, therefore, had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today. For this revolution—one of the most decisive ever experienced by humanity—could take place without disturbing a single one of the living members of a gens. All could remain as they were. A simple decree sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father. The reckoning of descent in the female line and the matriarchal law of inheritance were thereby overthrown, and the male line of descent and the paternal law of inheritance were substituted for them. As to how and when this revolution

took place among civilized peoples, we have no knowledge. It falls entirely within prehistoric times. . . .

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. . . .

The establishment of the exclusive supremacy of the man shows its effects first in the patriarchal family, which now emerges as an intermediate form. Its essential characteristic is not polygamy, of which more later, but “the organization of a number of persons, bond and free, into a family, under paternal power, for the purpose of holding lands, and for the care of flocks and herds” (Morgan [Ancient Society] 1877:474).

Its essential features are the incorporation of unfree persons, and paternal power; hence the perfect type of this form of family is the Roman. The original meaning of the word “family” (familia) is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present-day philistine; among the Romans it did not at first even refer to the married pair and their children, but only to the slaves. Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man. . . . The term was invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of life and death over them all. . . .

Such a form of family shows the transition of the pairing family to monogamy. In order to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights.

The Monogamous Family

It develops out of the pairing family . . . in the transitional period between the upper and middle stages of barbarism; its decisive victory is one of the signs that civilization is beginning. It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. It is distinguished from pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie, which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish. As a rule, it is now only the man who can dissolve it, and put away his wife. The right of conjugal infidelity also remains secured to him, at any rate by custom (the Code Napoleon explicitly accords it to the husband as long as he does not bring his concubine into the house), and as social life develops he exercises his right more and more;

should the wife recall the old form of sexual life and attempt to revive it, she is punished more severely than ever. . . .

We meet this new form of the family in all its severity among the Greeks. While the position of the goddesses in their mythology, as Marx points out, brings before us an earlier period when the position of women was freer and more respected, in the heroic age we find the woman already being humiliated by the domination of the man and by competition from girl slaves. . . . In Homer young women are booty and are handed over to the pleasure of the conquerors, the handsomest being picked by the commanders in order of rank; the entire Iliad, it will be remembered, turns on the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon over one of these slaves. If a hero is of any importance, Homer also mentions the captive girl with whom he shares his tent and his bed. These girls were also taken back to Greece and brought under the same roof as the wife, as Cassandra was brought by Agamemnon in Aeschylus. . . . The legitimate wife was expected to put up with all this, but herself to remain strictly chaste and faithful. In the heroic age a Greek woman is, indeed, more respected than in the period of civilization, but to her husband she is after all nothing but the mother of his legitimate children and heirs, his chief housekeeper and the supervisor of his female slaves, whom he can and does take as concubines if he so fancies. It is the existence of slavery side by side with monogamy, the presence of young, beautiful slaves belonging unreservedly to the man, that stamps monogamy from the very beginning with its specific character of monogamy for the woman only, but not for the man. And that is the character it still has today. . . .

[Athenian] girls only learned spinning, weaving, and sewing, and at most a little reading and writing. They lived more or less behind locked doors and had no company except other women. The women’s apartments formed a separate part of the house, on the upper floor or at the back, where men, especially strangers, could not easily enter, and to which the women retired when men visited the house. They never went out without being accompanied by a female slave; indoors they were kept under regular guard. . . . In Euripides a woman is called an oikourema, a thing (the word is neuter) for looking after the house, and, apart from her business of bearing children, that was all she was for the Athenian—his chief female domestic servant. The man had his athletics and his public business, from which women were barred; in addition, he often had female slaves at his disposal and during the most flourishing days of Athens an extensive system of prostitution which the state at least favored. . . .

This is the origin of monogamy as far as we can trace it back among the most civilized and highly developed people of antiquity. It was not in any way

the fruit of individual sex-love, with which it had nothing whatever to do; marriages remained as before marriages of convenience. It was the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions—on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property. The Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly: the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own. Otherwise, marriage was a burden, a duty which had to be performed, whether one liked it or not, to gods, state, and one’s ancestors. . . .

Thus when monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history, it is not as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. Quite the contrary. Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period. In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, [the German Ideology] I find the words: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others. It is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied. . . .

Thus, wherever the monogamous family remains true to its historical origin and clearly reveals the antagonism between the man and the woman expressed in the man’s exclusive supremacy, it exhibits in miniature the same oppositions and contradictions as those in which society has been moving, without power to resolve or overcome them, ever since it split into classes at the beginning of civilization. I am speaking here, of course, only of those cases of monogamous marriage where matrimonial life actually proceeds according to the original character of the whole institution, but where the wife rebels against the husband’s supremacy. . . .

Nowadays there are two ways of concluding a bourgeois marriage. In Catholic countries the parents, as before, procure a suitable wife for their young bourgeois son, and the consequence is, of course, the fullest development of the contradiction inherent in monogamy: the husband

abandons himself to hetaerism and the wife to adultery. Probably the only reason why the Catholic Church abolished divorce was because it had convinced itself that there is no more a cure for adultery than there is for death. In Protestant countries, on the other hand, the rule is that the son of a bourgeois family is allowed to choose a wife from his own class with more or less freedom; hence there may be a certain element of love in the marriage, as, indeed, in accordance with Protestant hypocrisy, is always assumed, for decency’s sake. Here the husband’s hetaerism is a more sleepy kind of business, and adultery by the wife is less the rule. But since, in every kind of marriage, people remain what they were before, and since the bourgeois of Protestant countries are mostly philistines, all that this Protestant monogamy achieves, taking the average of the best cases, is a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as “domestic bliss.” . . .

In both cases, however, the marriage is conditioned by the class position of the parties and is to that extent always a marriage of convenience. In both cases this marriage of convenience turns often enough into crassest prostitution—sometimes of both partners, but far more commonly of the woman, who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery. . . . Sex-love in the relationship with a woman becomes, and can only become, the real rule among the oppressed classes, which means today among the proletariat—whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not. But here all the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away. Here there is no property, for the preservation and inheritance of which monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no incentive to make this male supremacy effective. What is more, there are no means of making it so. Bourgeois law, which protects this supremacy, exists only for the possessing class and their dealings with the proletarians. The law costs money and, on account of the worker’s poverty, it has no validity for his relation to his wife. Here quite other personal and social conditions decide. And now that large- scale industry has taken the wife out of the home onto the labor market and into the factory, and made her often the bread-winner of the family, no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household—except, perhaps, for something of the brutality towards women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy. The proletarian family is therefore no longer monogamous in the strict sense, even where there is passionate love and firmest loyalty on both sides, and maybe all the blessings of religious and civil authority. Here, therefore, the eternal attendants of monogamy, hetaerism and adultery, play only an almost vanishing part. The wife has in fact regained the right to dissolve the marriage, and if two people cannot get on with one another, they prefer to separate. In short, proletarian marriage is monogamous

in the etymological sense of the word, but not at all in its historical sense.

Our jurists, of course, find that progress in legislation is leaving women with no further ground of complaint. Modern civilized systems of law increasingly acknowledge, first, that for a marriage to be legal, it must be a contract freely entered into by both partners, and, second, that also in the married state both partners must stand on a common footing of equal rights and duties. If both these demands are consistently carried out, say the jurists, women have all they can ask.

This typically legalist method of argument is exactly the same as that which the radical republican bourgeois uses to put the proletarian in his place. The labor contract is to be freely entered into by both partners. But it is considered to have been freely entered into as soon as the law makes both parties equal on paper. The power conferred on the one party by the difference of class position, the pressure thereby brought to bear on the other party—the real economic position of both—that is not the law’s business. Again, for the duration of the labor contract both parties are to have equal rights, in so far as one or the other does not expressly surrender them. That economic relations compel the worker to surrender even the last semblance of equal rights—here again, that is no concern of the law. . . .

As regards the legal equality of husband and wife in marriage, the position is no better. The legal inequality of the two partners, bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions, is not the cause but the effect of the economic oppression of the woman. In the old communistic household, which comprised many couples and their children, the task entrusted to the women of managing the household was as much a public and socially necessary industry as the procuring of food by the men. With the patriarchal family, and still more with the single monogamous family, a change came. Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production. Not until the coming of modern large-scale industry was the road to social production opened to her again—and then only to the proletarian wife. But it was opened in such a manner that, if she carries out her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties. And the wife’s position in the factory is the position of women in all branches of business, right up to medicine and the law. The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.

In the great majority of cases today, at least in the possessing classes, the

husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy, without any need for special legal titles and privileges. Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. In the industrial world, the specific character of the economic oppression burdening the proletariat is visible in all its sharpness only when all special legal privileges of the capitalist class have been abolished and complete legal equality of both classes established. The democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the fight can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society. . . .

We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear just as surely as those of its complement—prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual’s man —and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on the part of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, heritable wealth—the means of production—into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Having arisen from economic causes, will monogamy then disappear when these causes disappear?

One might answer, not without reason: far from disappearing, it will, on the contrary, be realized completely. For with the transformation of the means of production into social property there will disappear also wage-labor, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a certain—statistically calculable— number of women to surrender themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of collapsing, at last becomes a reality—also for men.

In any case, therefore, the position of men will be very much altered. But the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children

becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the “consequences,” which today is the most essential social—moral as well as economic—factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame? And, finally, have we not seen that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society? Can prostitution disappear without dragging monogamy with it into the abyss? . . .

In the vast majority of cases . . . marriage remained, up to the close of the middle ages, what it had been from the start—a matter which was not decided by the partners. In the beginning, people were already born married—married to an entire group of the opposite sex. In the later forms of group marriage similar relations probably existed, but with the group continually contracting. In the pairing marriage it was customary for the mothers to settle the marriages of their children; here, too, the decisive considerations are the new ties of kinship, which are to give the young pair a stronger position in the gens and tribe. And when, with the preponderance of private over communal property and the interest in its bequeathal, father-right and monogamy gained supremacy, the dependence of marriages on economic considerations became complete. The form of marriage by purchase disappears, the actual practice is steadily extended until not only the woman but also the man acquires a price —not according to his personal qualities, but according to his property. That the mutual affection of the people concerned should be the one paramount reason for marriage, outweighing everything else, was and always had been absolutely unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes; that sort of thing only happened in romance—or among the oppressed classes, who did not count.

Such was the state of things encountered by capitalist production when it began to prepare itself, after the epoch of geographical discoveries, to win world power by world trade and manufacture. One would suppose that this manner of marriage exactly suited it, and so it did. And yet—there are no limits to the irony of history—capitalist production itself was to make the decisive breach in it. By changing all things into commodities, it dissolved all inherited and traditional relationships, and, in place of time-honored custom and historic right, it set up purchase and sale, “free” contract. And the English jurist, H. S. Maine, thought he had made a tremendous discovery when he said that our whole progress in comparison with former epochs consisted in the fact that we had passed “from status to contract,” from inherited to freely contracted conditions—which, in so far as it is correct, was already in The

Communist Manifesto.

But a contract requires people who can dispose freely of their persons, actions, and possessions, and meet each other on the footing of equal rights. To create these “free” and “equal” people was one of the main tasks of capitalist production. Even though at the start it was carried out only half- consciously, and under a religious disguise at that, from the time of the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation the principle was established that man is only fully responsible for his actions when he acts with complete freedom of will, and that it is a moral duty to resist all coercion to an immoral act. But how did this fit in with the hitherto existing practice in the arrangement of marriages? Marriage, according to the bourgeois conception, was a contract, a legal transaction, and the most important one of all, because it disposed of two human beings, body and mind, for life. Formally, it is true, the contract at that time was entered into voluntarily: without the assent of the persons concerned, nothing could be done. But everyone knew only too well how this assent was obtained and who were the real contracting parties in the marriage. But if real freedom of decision was required for all other contracts, then why not for this? Had not the two young people to be coupled also the right to dispose freely of themselves, of their bodies and organs? Had not chivalry brought sex-love into fashion, and was not its proper bourgeois form, in contrast to chivalry’s adulterous love, the love of husband and wife? And if it was the duty of married people to love each other, was it not equally the duty of lovers to marry each other and nobody else? Did not this right of the lovers stand higher than the right of parents, relations, and other traditional marriage-brokers and matchmakers? If the right of free, personal discrimination broke boldly into the Church and religion, how should it halt before the intolerable claim of the older generation to dispose of the body, soul, property, happiness, and unhappiness of the younger generation? . . .

So it came about that the rising bourgeoisie, especially in Protestant countries, where existing conditions had been most severely shaken, increasingly recognized freedom of contract also in marriage, and carried it into effect in the manner described. Marriage remained class marriage, but within the class the partners were conceded a certain degree of freedom of choice. And on paper, in ethical theory and in poetic description, nothing was more immutably established than that every marriage is immoral which does not rest on mutual sexual love and really free agreement of husband and wife. In short, the love marriage was proclaimed as a human right, and indeed not only as a droit de l’homme, one of the rights of man, but also, for once in a way, as droit de la femme?,” one of the rights of woman. . . .

And as sexual love is by its nature exclusive—although at present this

exclusiveness is fully realized only in the woman—the marriage based on sexual love is by its nature individual marriage. We have seen how right Bachofen [Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), Swiss anthropologist and sociologist] was in regarding the advance from group marriage to individual marriage as primarily due to the women. Only the step from pairing marriage to monogamy can be put down to the credit of the men, and historically the essence of this was to make the position of the women worse and the infidelities of the men easier. If now the economic considerations also disappear which made women put up with the habitual infidelity of their husbands—concern for their own means of existence and still more for their children’s future—then, according to all previous experience, the equality of woman thereby achieved will tend infinitely more to make men really monogamous than to make women polyandrous.

But what will quite certainly disappear from monogamy are all the features stamped upon it through its origin in property relations; these are, in the first place, supremacy of the man, and, secondly, indissolubility. The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear of itself. The indissolubility of marriage is partly a consequence of the economic situation in which monogamy arose, partly tradition from the period when the connection between this economic situation and monogamy was not yet fully understood and was carried to extremes under a religious form. Today it is already broken through at a thousand points. If only the marriage based on love is moral, then also only the marriage in which love continues. But the intense emotion of individual sex-love varies very much in duration from one individual to another, especially among men, and if affection definitely comes to an end or is supplanted by a new passionate love, separation is a benefit for both partners as well as for society—only people will then be spared having to wade through the useless mire of a divorce case.

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual—and

that will be the end of it. . . .

BARBARISM, CIVILIZATION, AND THE STATE

With the herds and the other new riches, a revolution came over the family. To procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he produced and owned the means of doing so. The herds were the new means of producing these necessities; the taming of the animals in the first instance and their later tending were the man’s work. To him, therefore, belonged the cattle, and to him the commodities and the slaves received in exchange for cattle. All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man; the woman shared in its enjoyment, but had no part in its ownership. . . . The division of labor within the family had regulated the division of property between the man and the woman. That division of labor had remained the same; and yet it now turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house—that her activity was confined to domestic labor— this same cause now ensured the man’s supremacy in the house: the domestic labor of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra. We can already see from this that to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which does not merely permit of the employment of female labor over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labor by changing it more and more into a public industry. . . .

The next step leads us to the upper stage of barbarism. . . . The town, with its houses of stone or brick, encircled by stone walls, towers and ramparts, became the central seat of the tribe or the confederacy of tribes—an enormous architectural advance, but also a sign of growing danger and need for protection. Wealth increased rapidly, but as the wealth of individuals. The products of weaving, metal-work and the other handicrafts, which were becoming more and more differentiated, displayed growing variety and skill. In addition to corn, leguminous plants and fruit, agriculture now provided wine and oil, the preparation of which had been learned. Such manifold activities were no longer within the scope of one and the same individual; the second great division of labor took place: handicraft separated from

agriculture. The continuous increase of production and simultaneously of the productivity of labor heightened the value of human labor-power. Slavery, which during the preceding period was still in its beginnings and sporadic, now becomes an essential constituent part of the social system; slaves no longer merely help with production—they are driven by dozens to work in the fields and the workshops. . . . Civilization consolidates and intensifies all these existing divisions of

labor, particularly by sharpening the opposition between town and country (the town may economically dominate the country, as in antiquity, or the country the town, as in the middle ages), and it adds a third division of labor, peculiar to itself and of decisive importance: it creates a class which no longer concerns itself with production, but only with the exchange of the products— the merchants. Hitherto whenever classes had begun to form, it had always been exclusively in the field of production; the persons engaged in production were separated into those who directed and those who executed, or else into large-scale and small-scale producers. Now for the first time a class appears which, without in any way participating in production, captures the direction of production as a whole and economically subjugates the producers; which makes itself into an indispensable middleman between any two producers and exploits them both. Under the pretext that they save the producers the trouble and risk of exchange, extend the sale of their products to distant markets and are therefore the most useful class of the population, a class of parasites comes into being, “genuine social ichneumons,” who, as a reward for their actually very insignificant services, skim all the cream off production at home and abroad, rapidly amass enormous wealth and correspondingly social influence, and for that reason receive under civilization ever higher honors and ever greater control of production, until at last they also bring forth a product of their own—the periodical trade crises. . . .

Alongside wealth in commodities and slaves, alongside wealth in money, there now appeared wealth in land also. The individuals’ rights of possession in the pieces of land originally allotted to them by gens or tribe had now become so established that the land was their hereditary property. . . . Full, free ownership of the land meant not only power, uncurtailed and unlimited, to possess the land; it meant also the power to alienate it. As long as the land belonged to the gens, no such power could exist. But when the new landed proprietor shook off once and for all the fetters laid upon him by the prior right of gens and tribe, he also cut the ties which had hitherto inseparably attached him to the land. Money, invented at the same time as private property in land, showed him what that meant. Land could now become a commodity; it could be sold and pledged. . . .

Confronted by the new forces in whose growth it had had no share, the gentile constitution was helpless. The necessary condition for its existence was that the members of a gens or at least of a tribe were settled together in the same territory and were its sole inhabitants. . . . Every territory now had a heterogeneous population belonging to the most varied gentes and tribes; everywhere slaves, protected persons and aliens lived side by side with citizens. The settled conditions of life which had only been achieved towards the end of the middle stage of barbarism were broken up by the repeated shifting and changing of residence under the pressure of trade, alteration of occupation and changes in the ownership of the land. The members of the gentile bodies could no longer meet to look after their common concerns. . . . In addition to the needs and interests with which the gentile bodies were intended and fitted to deal, the upheaval in productive relations and the resulting change in the social structure had given rise to new needs and interests, which were not only alien to the old gentile order, but ran directly counter to it at every point. The interests of the groups of handicraftsmen which had arisen with the division of labor, the special needs of the town as opposed to the country, called for new organs. But each of these groups was composed of people of the most diverse gentes, phratries, and tribes, and even included aliens. Such organs had therefore to be formed outside the gentile constitution, alongside of it, and hence in opposition to it. And this conflict of interests was at work within every gentile body, appearing in its most extreme form in the association of rich and poor, usurers and debtors, in the same gens and the same tribe. Further, there was the new mass of population outside the gentile bodies, which, as in Rome, was able to become a power in the land and at the same time was too numerous to be gradually absorbed into the kinship groups and tribes. In relation to this mass, the gentile bodies stood opposed as closed, privileged corporations; the primitive natural democracy had changed into a malign aristocracy. Lastly, the gentile constitution had grown out of a society which knew no internal contradictions, and it was only adapted to such a society. It possessed no means of coercion except public opinion. But here was a society which by all its economic conditions of life had been forced to split itself into freemen and slaves, into the exploiting rich and the exploited poor; a society which not only could never again reconcile these contradictions, but was compelled always to intensify them. Such a society could only exist either in the continuous open fight of these classes against one another, or else under the rule of a third power, which, apparently standing above the warring classes, suppressed their open conflict and allowed the class struggle to be fought out at most in the economic field, in so-called legal form. The gentile constitution was finished. It had been shattered by the division of labor and its result, the cleavage of society into classes. It was replaced by the state. . . .

The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the moral idea,” “the image and the reality of reason,” as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.

In contrast to the old gentile organization, the state is distinguished first by the grouping of its members on a territorial basis. The old gentile bodies, formed and held together by ties of blood, had, as we have seen, become inadequate largely because they presupposed that the gentile members were bound to one particular locality, whereas this had long ago ceased to be the case. The territory was still there, but the people had become mobile. The territorial division was therefore taken as the starting point and the system introduced by which citizens exercised their public rights and duties where they took up residence, without regard to gens or tribe. . . .

The second distinguishing characteristic is the institution of a public force which is no longer immediately identical with the people’s own organization of themselves as an armed power. This special public force is needed because a self-acting armed organization of the people has become impossible since their cleavage into classes. . . . This public force exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds, of which gentile society knew nothing. It may be very insignificant, practically negligible, in societies with still undeveloped class antagonisms and living in remote areas, as at times and in places in the United States of America. But it becomes stronger in proportion as the class antagonisms within the state become sharper and as adjoining states grow larger and more populous. It is enough to look at Europe today, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have brought the public power to a pitch that it threatens to devour the whole of society and even the state itself.

In order to maintain this public power, contributions from the state citizens are necessary—taxes. These were completely unknown to gentile society. We know more than enough about them today. With advancing civilization, even taxes are not sufficient; the state draws drafts on the future, contracts loans, state debts. . . .

In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now present themselves as organs of society standing above society. The free, willing respect accorded to the organs of the gentile constitution is not enough for them, even if they could have it. Representatives of a power which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability. The lowest police officer of the civilized state has more “authority” than all the organs of gentile society put together; but the mightiest prince and the greatest statesman or general of civilization might envy the humblest of the gentile chiefs the unforced and unquestioned respect accorded to him. For the one stands in the midst of society; the other is forced to pose as something outside and above it.

As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage- labor by capital. Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another; and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest achievement in this line, in which ruler and ruled look equally comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian cabbage Junkers.

Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens are graded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that the state is an organization for the protection of the possessing class against the non- possessing class. This is already the case in the Athenian and Roman property classes. Similarly in the medieval feudal state, in which the extent of political power was determined by the extent of landownership. Similarly, also, in the electoral qualifications in modern parliamentary states. This political recognition of property differences is, however, by no means essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage in the development of the state. The highest

form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out—the democratic republic no longer officially recognizes differences of property. Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, and themselves have their own center in the stock exchange. . . . And lastly the possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage. As long as the oppressed class—in our case, therefore, the proletariat—is not yet ripe for its self-liberation, so long will it, in its majority, recognize the existing order of society as the only possible one and remain politically the [tail] of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing. But in the measure in which it matures towards its self-emancipation, in the same measure it constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of the capitalists. Universal suffrage is thus the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the modern state; but that is enough. On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand. . . .

The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.

SOURCE: Marx/Engels Internet Archive.

Discussion Questions 1. According to Marx’s materialist conception of history, what is the

relationship between property or the division of labor and consciousness? How might property relations and ideas prevent or promote social change?

2. Do you think that truly communist societies have existed? Can they exist? What are some of the features that such a society must have in order for it to work?

3. What role does private property play in Marx’s analysis of the inevitable communist revolution? In his emphasis on class, what factors might Marx have overlooked when accounting for revolutionary change or its absence?

4. Has the proletariat, or working class, sunk deeper and deeper with the advance of industry as Marx suggested? Why or why not? How prevalent is alienation in contemporary capitalist societies? Don’t some people like their jobs? If so, have they been “fooled” somehow? Why or why not?

5. Discuss the prevalence of the fetishism of commodities in contemporary capitalist societies. What examples of commodity fetishism do you see in your own life and the lives of your family and friends?

6. To what degree does Engels’s description of marriage and the position of women resonate with today’s society? What has and has not changed? What forces have promoted or prevented change? What are the similarities and differences between the current discussion of and demands for sexual equality and Engels’s analysis?

7. Consider two or three of your favorite products—whether it is your iPhone, your car, or your favorite shoes. Research the working conditions under which this product was made. How much do you know about this product, and who made it? What difference does having this knowledge (or not) have on your relationship to this product? How so?

8. The Global Assembly Line (1986) is a classic film on our global economy and export processing zones. View this film, and discuss the relationship of the film to Marx’s theory, concepts, and ideas (www.globalassemblyline.com/).

1Prussia was a former kingdom in Eastern Europe established in 1701 that included present-day Germany and Poland. It was dissolved following World War II.

2Marx’s mentor and colleague, Bruno Bauer, had promised him a faculty position at the University of

Bonn. But when Bauer was dismissed from the university for advocating leftist, antireligious views, Marx was effectively shut off from pursuing an academic career. 3A number of articles attributed to Marx were actually written by Engels, whose assistance allowed Marx to continue to collect a wage from the newspaper. Engels, whose father owned textile mills in Germany and England (that he would later inherit), also provided Marx with financial support throughout his years in London. The depth of Engels’s devotion even led him to support an out-of- wedlock child fathered by Marx. 4Manchester was also the site of Engels’s urban ethnography, The Condition of the Working Class in England, and the location of one of his family’s textile mills. It was Engels’s work that early on helped to crystallize Marx’s conception of the proletariat as the revolutionary force in modern industrial society.

5Marx was not entirely consistent when discussing the number and types of classes that compose capitalist societies. Most often, however, he described such societies as consisting of two antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. 6By no means have modern communist societies–for instance, the former Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam–resembled the type of free and creative society envisioned by Marx.

1Hegel’s notion of alienation would play a central role in Marx’s work. Marx, however, argued that alienation was not a consequence of distorted consciousness but rather that it resulted from the material conditions of production. Marx takes up this issue in his essay “Alienated Labour,” excerpted below.

1Marx explicitly excluded questions concerning the origins of “wants” as well as how commodities actually satisfied them. Some Marxist-inspired theorists, most notably those associated with the Frankfurt School, would later turn their attention to precisely such questions–that is, how the continued expansion of capitalism requires the production of “false” needs.

2Though Marx contended that the continuing expansion of the industrial reserve army operates as “a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production” (Marx 1867/1978:423), it is clear that rising rates of unemployment are not inevitable, nor are fluctuations in rates of unemployment due entirely to changing levels of production. Instead, unemployment rates are as much a product of government policy as they are of general economic conditions. Nevertheless, a recent (2006) report issued by the International Labour Organization revealed that the number of people unemployed worldwide reached an all-time high of 191.8 million in 2005, an increase of 34.4 million (21 percent) since 1995. Additionally, of the more than 2.8 billion workers in the world, 1.4 billion earned less than $2 per day.

3 ÉMILE DURKHEIM (1858–1917)

© Bettmann/Corbis

Key Concepts Anomie

Social facts

Social solidarity

Mechanical solidarity

Organic solidarity

Collective conscience

Ritual

Symbol

Sacred and profane

Collective representations There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which makes its unity and its

H personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments.

(Durkheim 1912/1995:474–75)

ave you ever been to a professional sports event in a stadium full of fans? Or to a religious service and taken communion, or to a concert and danced in the aisles (or maybe in a mosh pit)? How did these experiences make you feel? What do they have in common?

Is it possible to have this same type of experience if or when you are alone? How so or why not?

These are the sorts of issues that intrigued Émile Durkheim. Above all, he sought to explain what held societies and social groups together—and how. In addressing these twin questions, Durkheim studied a wide variety of phenomena—from suicide and crime, to aboriginal religious totems and symbols. He was especially concerned about how modern, industrial societies can be held together when people don’t even know each other and when their experiences and social positions are so varied. In other words, how can social ties, the very basis for society, be maintained in such an increasingly individualistic world?

Yet Durkheim is an important figure in the history of sociology not only because of his provocative theories about social cohesion, but also because he helped found the discipline of sociology. In contrast to some of the other figures whose works you will read in this book, Durkheim sought to delineate, both theoretically and methodologically, how sociology was different from existing schools of philosophy and history, which also examined social issues. Before we discuss his ideas and work, however, let’s look at his biography because, like Marx, Durkheim’s personal experiences and historical situation deeply influenced his perception and description of the social world.

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Émile Durkheim was born in a small town in northeastern France in 1858. In his youth, he followed family tradition, studying Hebrew and the Talmud in order to become a rabbi. However, in his adolescence, Durkheim apparently rejected Judaism. Though he did not disdain traditional religion, as a child of the Enlightenment (see chapter 1) he came to consider both Christianity and Judaism outmoded in the modern world.

In 1879, Durkheim entered France’s most prestigious college, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, to study philosophy. However, by his third year,

Durkheim had become disenchanted with the high-minded, literary, humanities curriculum at the Normale. He decided to pursue sociology, which he viewed as eminently more scientific, democratic, and practical. Durkheim still maintained his interest in complex philosophical questions, but he wanted to examine them through a “rational,” “scientific” lens. His practical and scientific approach to central social issues would shape his ambition to use sociological methods as a means for reconstituting the moral order of French society, which he saw decaying in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Bellah 1973:xiii–xvi). Durkheim was especially concerned about the abuse of power by political and military leaders, increasing rates of divorce and suicide, and rising anti-Semitism. It seemed to Durkheim that social bonds and a sense of community had broken down and social disorder had come to prevail.1

Upon graduation from the École Normale, Durkheim began teaching in small lycées (secondary schools) near Paris. In 1887, he married Louise Dreyfus, from the Alsace region of France. In the same year, Durkheim began his career as a professor at the University of Bordeaux, where he quickly gained the reputation for being a committed and exciting teacher. Émile and Louise soon had two children, Marie and André.

Durkheim was a serious and productive scholar. His first book, The Division of Labor in Society, which was based on his doctoral dissertation, came out in 1893; his second, The Rules of Sociological Method, appeared just two years later. In 1897, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, perhaps his most well-known work, was published. The next year, Durkheim founded the journal L’Année Sociologique, which was one of the first sociology journals not only in France, but also in the world. L’Année Sociologique was produced annually until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

In 1902, with his reputation as a leading social philosopher and scientist established, Durkheim was offered a position at the prestigious Sorbonne University in Paris. As he had done previously at Bordeaux, Durkheim quickly gained a large following at the Sorbonne. His education courses were compulsory for all students seeking teaching degrees in philosophy, history, literature, and languages. Durkheim also became an important administrator at the Sorbonne, serving on numerous councils and committees (Lukes 1985:372).

Yet not everyone was enamored with either Durkheim’s substantial power or his ideas. Durkheim’s notion that any social “thing”—including religion— could be studied sociologically (i.e., scientifically) was particularly controversial, as was his adamant insistence on providing students a moral but secular education. (These two issues are discussed further later.) As Steven

Lukes (1985:373), noted sociologist and Durkheim scholar, remarked, “To friends he was a prophet and an apostle, but to enemies he was a secular pope.”

Moreover, Durkheim identified with some of the goals of socialism but was unwilling to commit himself politically. He believed that sociologists should be committed to education, not political activism. His passion was for dispassionate, scientific research.

This apparent apoliticism, coupled with his focus on the moral constitution of societies (rather than conflict and revolution), has led some analysts to deem Durkheim politically conservative. However, as the eminent sociologist Robert Bellah (1973: xviii) points out, “to try to force Durkheim into the conservative side of some conservative/liberal dichotomy” is inappropriate. It ignores Durkheim’s “lifelong preoccupation with orderly, continuous social change toward greater social justice” (ibid.:xvii). In addition, to consider Durkheim politically conservative is erroneous in light of how he was evaluated in his day. Durkheim was viewed as a radical modernist and liberal, who, though respectful of religion, was most committed to rationality, science, and humanism. Durkheim infuriated religious conservatives, who desired to replace democracy with a monarchy and to strengthen the military. He also came under fire because he opposed instituting Catholic education as the basic curriculum.

Moreover, to label Durkheim “conservative” ignores his role in the “Dreyfus affair.” Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish army colonel who was charged and convicted on false charges of spying for Germany. The charges against Dreyfus were rooted in anti-Semitism, which was growing in the 1890s, alongside France’s military losses and economic dissatisfaction. Durkheim was very active in the Ligue des droits de l’homme (League of the Rights of Men), which devoted itself to clearing Dreyfus of all charges.

Interestingly, Durkheim’s assessment of the Dreyfus affair reflects his lifelong concern for the moral order of society. He saw the Dreyfus affair as symptomatic of a collective moral sickness rather than merely anti-Semitism at the level of the individual. As Durkheim (1899, as cited by Lukes 1985:345) states, When society undergoes suffering, it feels the need to find someone whom it can hold responsible for its sickness, on whom it can avenge its misfortunes; and those against whom public opinion already discriminates are naturally designated for this role. These are the pariahs who serve as expiatory victims. What confirms me in this interpretation is the way in which the result of Dreyfus’s trial was greeted in 1894. There was a surge of joy in the boulevards. People celebrated as a triumph what should have been a cause of public mourning. At least they knew whom to blame for the economic troubles and moral distress in which they lived. The trouble came from the Jews. The charge had been officially proved. By this very fact alone, things already seemed to be getting better and people felt consoled.

In 1912, Durkheim’s culminating work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, was published. Shortly after that, World War I broke out, and Durkheim’s life was thrown into turmoil. His son André was killed in battle, spiraling Durkheim into a grief from which he never fully recovered. On October 7, 1916, as he was leaving a committee meeting at the Sorbonne, Durkheim suffered a stroke. He spent the next year resting and seemed to have made much progress toward recovering. But on November 15, 1917, while in Fontainebleau where he had gone for peace and fresh air, Durkheim died. He was 59 years old (Lukes 1985:559).

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES AND CORE IDEAS

As indicated previously, Durkheim wrote a number of books and articles on a wide variety of topics. Nevertheless, there are two major themes that transcend all of Durkheim’s work. First, Durkheim sought to articulate the nature of society and, hence, his view of sociology as an academic discipline. Durkheim argued that society was a supraindividual force existing independently of the actors who compose it. The task of sociology, then, is to analyze social facts—conditions and circumstances external to the individual that, nevertheless, determine the individual’s course of action. Durkheim argued that social facts can be ascertained by using collective data, such as suicide and divorce rates. In other words, through systematic collection of data, the patterns behind and within individual behavior can be uncovered. This emphasis on formal methods and objective data is what distinguished sociology from philosophy and put sociology “on the map” as a viable scientific discipline. The significance of Durkheim’s position for the development of sociology as a distinct pursuit of knowledge cannot be overstated. As one of the first academics to hold a position in sociology, Durkheim was on the cutting edge of the birth of the discipline. Nevertheless, his conviction that society is sui generis (an objective reality that is irreducible to the individuals that compose it) and amenable to scientific investigation owes much to the work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Not only had Comte coined the term sociology in 1839, but he also contended that the social world could be studied in as rational and scientific a way as physical scientists (chemists, physicists, biologists, etc.) study their respective domains. Moreover, Durkheim’s comparative and historical methodology was in large measure a continuation of the approach advocated earlier by Comte.

Significant Others

Auguste Comte (1798–1857): The Father of “Social Physics”

Born in southern France during a most turbulent period in French history, Auguste Comte was himself a turbulent figure. Though he excelled as a student, he had little patience for authority. Indeed, his obstinate temperament prevented him from completing his studies at the newly established École Polytechnique, Paris’s elite university. Nevertheless, Comte was able to make a name for himself in the intellectual circles of Paris. In 1817, he began working as a secretary and collaborator to Henri Saint-Simon. Their productive though fractious relationship came to an end seven years later in a dispute over assigning authorship to one of Comte’s essays. Comte next set about developing his system of positivist philosophy while working in minor academic positions for meager wages. Beginning in 1926, Comte offered a series of private lectures in an effort to disseminate his views. Though attended by eminent thinkers, the grandiosity of his theoretical system led some to dismiss his ideas. Nevertheless, Comte continued undeterred: from 1830 to 1842, he worked single-mindedly on his magnum opus, the six-volume The Positive Philosophy (1830–1842/1974). In the series, Comte not only outlines his “Law of Three Stages” (which posits that science develops through three mentally conceived stages: (1) the theological stage, (2) the metaphysical stage, and (3) the positive stage) but also delineates the proper methods for his new science of “social physics” as well as its fundamental task—the study of social statics (order) and dynamics (progress). The work was well received in some scientific quarters, and Comte seemed poised to establish himself as a first-rate scholar. Unfortunately, his temperament again proved to be a hindrance to his success, both personal and professional. His troubled marriage ended soon after Positive Philosophy was completed, and his petulance further alienated him from friends and colleagues while costing him a position at the École Polytechnique. Comte’s life took a turn for the better, however, when in 1844 he met and fell in love with Clotilde de Vaux. Their affair did not last long; Clotilde developed tuberculosis and died within a year of their first meeting. Comte dedicated the rest of his life to “his angel.” In her memory, he founded the Religion of Humanity for which he proclaimed himself the high priest. The new church was founded on the principle of universal love as Comte abandoned his earlier commitment to science and positivism. Until his death in 1857, Comte sought not supporters for his system of science but converts to his Positive Church. SOURCE: This account of Comte’s biography is based largely on Lewis Coser’s (1977) discussion in Masters of Sociological Thought.

A second major theme found in Durkheim’s work is the issue of social solidarity, or the cohesion of social groups. As you will see, all of the

selections in this chapter—from The Division of Labor in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life —explore the nature of the bonds that hold individuals and social groups together. Durkheim was especially concerned about modern societies in which people often don’t know their neighbors (let alone everyone in the larger community) or worship together, and in which people often hold jobs in impersonal companies and organizations. Durkheim wondered how individuals could feel tied to one another in such an increasingly individualistic world. This issue was of utmost importance, for he maintained that, without some semblance of solidarity and moral cohesion, society could not exist. In his emphasis on the nature of solidarity in “traditional” and “modern”

societies, Durkheim again drew on Comte’s work as well as that of the British sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).2 Both Comte and Spencer formulated an organic view of society to explain the developmental paths along which societies allegedly evolve. Such a view depicted society as a system of interrelated parts (religious institutions, the economy, government, the family) that work together to form a unitary, stable whole, analogous to how the parts of the human body (lungs, kidneys, brain) function interdependently to sustain its general well-being. Moreover, as the organism (society and the body) grows in size, it becomes increasingly complex, due to the differentiation of its parts.

Significant Others

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903): Survival of the Fittest Born in the English Midlands, Herbert Spencer’s early years were shaped largely by his father and uncle. It was from these two men that Spencer received his education, an education that centered on math, physics, and chemistry. Moreover, it was from them that Spencer was exposed to the radical religious and social doctrines that would inform his staunch individualism. With little formal instruction in history, literature, and languages, Spencer conceded to the limits of his education, and at the age of 16 declined to attend university, opting instead to pursue a “practical” career as an engineer for the London and Birmingham Railway. Nevertheless, he would prove to be an avid student of and a prolific writer on a range of social and philosophical topics.

With the completion of the railway in 1841, Spencer earned his living by writing essays for a number of radical journals and newspapers. Of particular note is a series of 12 letters he published through a dissenting

newspaper, the Nonconformist. Titled “The Proper Sphere of Government,” the letters are an early expression of Spencer’s decidedly laissez-faire perspective. In them, Spencer argued that the role of government should be restricted solely to policing, while all other matters, including education, social welfare, and economic activities, should be left to the private sector. According to Spencer, government regulations interfere with the laws of human evolution that, if left unhampered, ensure the “survival of the fittest.” It is not hard to see that Spencer’s view of government still resonates with many American politicians and voters. Less sanguine, however, is the racism and sexism that was interjected into Spencer’s argument. Following the logic of his view, those who don’t survive—that is, succeed—are merely fulfilling their evolutionary destiny. To the extent that women and people of color are less “successful” than white males, their “success” and “failure” hinge not only on individual aptitude and effort, but also on institutional and cultural dynamics that sustain a less-than-level playing field.

However, Durkheim was only partially sympathetic to the organic, evolutionary models developed by Comte and Spencer. On the one hand, Durkheim’s insistence that social solidarity is rooted in shared moral sentiments, and the sense of obligation they evoke, stems from Comte (as well as from Jean-Jacques Rousseau; see chapter 1). Likewise, his notion that the specialized division of labor characteristic of modern societies leads to greater interdependency and integration owes much to Comte (as well as to Saint-Simon; see chapter 2). Nevertheless, Durkheim did not embrace Comte’s assertion that all societies progress through a series of identifiable evolutionary stages. In particular, he dismissed Comte’s “Law of Three Stages,” wherein all societies—as well as individual intellectual development —are said to pass from a theological stage characterized by “militaristic” communities led by priests, to a metaphysical stage organized according to “legalistic” principles and controlled by lawyers and clergy, and finally to a positivist or scientific stage in which “industrial” societies are governed by technocrats and, of course, sociologists.

Durkheim was most influenced by Spencer’s theory on the evolution of societies. According to Spencer, just as biological organisms become more differentiated as they grow and mature, so do small-scale, homogeneous communities become increasingly complex and diverse as a result of population growth. The individuals living in simple societies are minimally dependent on one another for meeting their survival and that of the community as they each carry out similar tasks. As the size of the population increases, however, similarity or likeness is replaced by heterogeneity and a

specialized division of labor. Individuals become interdependent on one another as essential tasks are divided among the society’s inhabitants. As a result, an individual’s well-being becomes tied more and more to the general welfare of the larger society. Ensuring the functional integration of individuals now becomes the central issue for the survival of the society.

In this regard, Durkheim’s perspective is compatible with that of Spencer. As discussed later, Durkheim hypothesized that a different kind of solidarity was prevalent in modern—as opposed to smaller, more traditional—societies. Durkheim’s equation of traditional societies with “mechanical” solidarity and modern societies with “organic” solidarity (discussed on pp. 110–112) shares an affinity with Spencer’s classification of societies as either “simple” or “compound.”

However, the two theorists diverge on the crucial point of integration. Spencer saw society as composed of atomistic individuals, each pursuing lines of self-interested conduct. In a classic expression of utilitarian philosophy, Spencer maintained that a stable, well-functioning social whole is the outgrowth of individuals freely seeking to maximize their advantages.

By contrast, Durkheim (and Comte) took a far less utilitarian approach than Spencer. Durkheim emphasized that society is not a result or aftereffect of individual conduct; rather, it exists prior to, and thus shapes, individual action. In other words, individual lines of conduct are the outgrowth of social arrangements, particularly those connected to the developmental stage of the division of labor. Social integration, then, cannot be an unintended consequence of an aggregate of individuals pursuing their self-interest. Instead, it is rooted in a shared moral code, for only it can sustain a harmonious social order. And it is this moral code, along with the feelings of solidarity it generates, that forms the basis of all societies. Without the restraints imposed by a sense of moral obligation to others, the selfish pursuit of interests would destroy the social fabric.

DURKHEIM’s THEORETICAL ORIENTATION

As discussed previously, Durkheim was most concerned with analyzing “social facts”: he sought to uncover the preexisting social conditions that shape the parameters for individual behavior. Consequently, Durkheim can be said to take a predominantly collectivist approach to order (see Figure 3.1).

This approach is most readily apparent in Suicide. In this study, Durkheim begins with one of the most seemingly individualistic, psychologically motivated acts there is—suicide—in order to illuminate the social and moral

parameters behind and within this undisputedly individual behavior. So too, Durkheim’s emphasis on collective conscience and collective representations indicates an interest in the collective level of society (see Figure 3.2). By collective conscience, Durkheim means the “totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society” that “forms a determinate system which has it own life” (Durkheim 1893/1984:38–39). In later work, Durkheim used the term collective representations to refer to much the same thing. In any case, the point is that Durkheim’s main concern is not with the conscious or psychological state of specific individuals, but rather with the collective beliefs and sentiments that exist “independent of the particular conditions in which individuals are placed; they pass on and it remains” (ibid.:80). Figure 3.1 Durkheim’s Basic Theoretical Orientation

This leads us to one of the most common criticisms of Durkheim. Because of his preoccupation with social facts and the collective conscience, it is often claimed that he overlooks the role of the individual in producing and reproducing the social order. Durkheim’s emphasis on the power of the group makes it seem like we’re just vessels for society’s will. Yet this criticism ignores two essential points: First, Durkheim not only acknowledged individual autonomy but also took it for granted as an inevitable condition of modern societies. Durkheim sought to show how, in modern societies, increasing individuation could produce detrimental effects because individuals are often torn between competing normative prescriptions and rules. For instance, in Suicide, Durkheim maintains that, rather than rest comfortably on all-pervasive norms and values, “a thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once

known . . . [but that] all these new sensations in their infinite quantity cannot form a solid foundation for happiness to support one in days of trial” (Durkheim 1897/1951:256). To be sure, the criticism could still be made that Durkheim ignores individual agency in “traditional” societies based on mechanical solidarity. In these societies, Durkheim did in fact posit a lack of individual autonomy, perhaps reflecting the Enlightenment-driven, Eurocentric thinking of his day. (We discuss this issue more fully later.)

Figure 3.2 Durkheim’s Core Concepts

Relatedly, to assert that his orientation was singularly collectivist overlooks Durkheim’s assumption that collective life emerges in social interaction. For instance, a major part of his analysis of the elementary forms of religious life involved showing how mundane objects, such as lizards and plants, take on the sacredness of the totem (the symbol of the tribe) by virtue of individuals coming together to participate in ritual practices. Similarly, in his study of suicide, Durkheim examined marriage and divorce rates not simply because he was fascinated by abstract, collective dimensions of social life, but also because he wanted to uncover objective factors that measure the extent to which individuals are bound together in an increasingly individualistic world.

This leads us to the issue of action. In our view, Durkheim is primarily nonrationalist in his orientation (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2). He focused on how collective representations and moral sentiments are a motivating force, much more so than “rational” or strategic interests connected to economic or political institutions. Yet it is important to point out that in emphasizing the

external nature of social facts Durkheim also recognized that such facts are not confined to the realm of ideas or feelings, but often possess a concrete reality as well. For instance, educational institutions and penal systems are also decisive for shaping the social order and individuals’ actions within it. Thus, social facts are capable of exerting both a moral and an institutional force. In the end, however, Durkheim stressed the nonrational aspect of social facts as suggested in his supposition that the penal system (courts, legal codes and their enforcement, etc.) ultimately rests on collective notions of morality, a complex symbolic system as to what is “right” and what is “wrong.” This issue will be discussed further in the next section in relationship to the specific selections you will read.

Readings In this section, you will read selections from the four major books that Durkheim published during his lifetime: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). We begin with The Division of Labor in Society, in which Durkheim set out the key concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity, and collective conscience. We then shift to excerpts from The Rules of Sociological Method. It is here, as you will see, that Durkheim first laid out his basic conceptualization of sociology as a discipline and delineated his concept of social facts. This is followed by excerpts from Suicide: A Study in Sociology, which is notable, first, in that it exemplifies Durkheim’s distinctive approach to the study of the social world, and second, because it further delineates Durkheim’s core concept of anomie. We conclude this chapter with excerpts from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which many theorists consider Durkheim’s most theoretically significant work. In it, Durkheim takes an explicitly cultural turn, emphasizing the concepts of ritual and symbol, and the sacred and profane, and collective representations.

Introduction to The Division of Labor in Society In his first major work, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), which was

based on his doctoral dissertation, Durkheim explains how the division of labor (or economic specialization) characteristic of modern societies affects individuals as well as society as a whole. As you may recall, this issue had been of utmost concern to Marx as well. Marx contended that modern, competitive capitalism, and the specialized division of labor that sustained it, resulted in alienation. In contrast, Durkheim argued that economic

specialization was not necessarily “bad” for either the individual or the society as a whole. Instead, he argued that an extensive division of labor could exist without necessarily jeopardizing the moral cohesion of a society or the opportunity for individuals to realize their interests.

How is this possible? Durkheim argued that there were two basic types of solidarity: mechanical and organic.1 Mechanical solidarity is typified by feelings of likeness. Mechanical solidarity is rooted in everyone literally doing or feeling similar things. Durkheim maintained that this type of solidarity is characteristic of small, traditional societies. In these “simple” societies, circumstances compel individuals to be generalists. Neither the actual processes involved in the production and distribution of goods and services, nor the knowledge behind such production and distribution, is relegated to particular sectors of society. Specialization in one task to the exclusion of others is not possible because each individual is needed for a wide variety of tasks. For instance, despite their varying individual levels of competence and ability, men, women, and children alike are all needed to pick crops at harvest time; and at the end of the harvest, all partake in the harvest time celebrations as well. So too, governmental decisions, personal conflicts, holidays, and so on are all shared by everyone in the community (even if some individuals have more power than others or are more directly involved).

© Graham Kirk Food and Drink Photos/Newscom

Photo 3.1a Mechanical Solidarity: Women Work Harvest Durkheim maintained that different types of society exhibit different types of solidarity. Mechanical solidarity, based on likeness, is characteristic of small, traditional societies. In this type of society, participating in the same exact tasks accords individuals a feeling of oneness based on similarity, and shared systems of meaning, or collective consciousness.

© kupicoo/istockphoto

Photo 3.1b Organic Solidarity: Doctors Perform Surgery Organic solidarity, based on specialization, is characteristic of large, modern industrial societies. In these types of societies, individuals garner a feeling of oneness not from participating in the same exact tasks, but rather from interdependence based on specialization. Here plastic, orthopedic, and hand surgeons, rehabilitation specialists, and nurses work together to perform a successful double-arm transplant.

Durkheim argued that a significant social consequence of the shared work experience characteristic of traditional societies is a shared collective conscience. Social cohesion and solidarity—and social order—in such societies rests on everyone feeling “one and the same.”

Yet, Durkheim saw that in large, complex societies, mechanical solidarity, based on likeness, was waning. In large, modern societies, labor is specialized; people do not necessarily all engage in the same work or share the same ideas and beliefs. For Durkheim, organic solidarity refers to a type of solidarity in which each person is interdependent with others, forming a complex web of cooperative associations. In such situations, solidarity (or a feeling of “oneness”) comes not from each person believing or doing the same things, but from each person cultivating individual differences and knowing that each is doing her part for the good of the whole. Thus, Durkheim argued that the increasing specialization and individuation so readily apparent in modern industrial societies does not necessarily result in a decline in social stability or cohesion. Rather, the growth in a society’s density (the number of people living in a community) and consequent increasingly specialized division of labor can result in simply a different type of social cohesion, which he calls organic solidarity.

Consider, for instance, your relationship with your mechanic or your

computer technician. You may not know your mechanic or tech consultant personally, but you know that they know how to fix cars or computers. You feel dependent on them because they know things that you do not, just as they feel dependent on you for your business. For Durkheim, the cohesion of modern society depends, then, not on feelings of “oneness” based on similarity or likeness, but rather on feelings of interdependence based on specialization. So too, in your workplace, you may not personally know the other people in your same company who work in other departments. But you trust that they will do their jobs so that you can do yours. In this case, what holds you together is interdependence based on specialization, or organic solidarity.

Significantly, however, Durkheim maintained that organic solidarity does not automatically emerge in modern societies. Rather, it arises only when the division of labor is “spontaneous” or voluntary. States Durkheim, “For the division of labor to produce solidarity, it is not sufficient, then, that each have his task; it is still necessary that this task be fitting to him” (Durkheim 1893/1984:375). Moreover, a “normal” division of labor exists only when the specialization of tasks is not exaggerated. If the division of labor is pushed too far, there is a danger for the individual to become “isolated in his special activity.” In such cases, the division of labor becomes “a source of disintegration” for both the individual and society (ibid.). The individual “no longer feels the idea of common work being done by those who work side by side with him” (ibid.). Meanwhile, a rigid division of labor can lead to “the institution of classes and castes . . . [which] is often a source of dissension” (ibid.:374). Durkheim used the term anomie to refer to the pathological lack of moral regulation in modern societies. In The Division of Labor, Durkheim emphasized that overspecialization thwarts organic solidarity (or the “feeling of oneness” based on interdependence) because instead of instigating interdependence it instigates isolation. As we will see, Durkheim expanded on the concept of anomie in later works. Thus this is a pivotal concept to which we shortly return.

Most interesting, then, the important point is not that Durkheim ignored the potentially harmful aspects of the division of labor in modern societies; on the contrary, Durkheim acknowledged that the division of labor is problematic when it is “forced” or pushed to an extreme. This position offers an important similarity as well as difference to that offered by Marx. As we noted previously, Marx saw both alienation and class conflict as inevitable (or “normal”) in capitalist societies. By contrast, rather than seeing social conflict as a “normal” condition of capitalism, Durkheim maintained that anomie results only in “abnormal” conditions of overspecialization, when the rules of capitalism become too rigid and individuals are “forced” into a particular

position in the division of labor.

From The Division of Labor in Society (1893) Émile Durkheim

INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM The division of labor is not of recent origin, but it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that social cognizance was taken of the principle, though, until then, unwitting submission had been rendered to it. To be sure, several thinkers from earliest times saw its importance;i but Adam Smith was the first to attempt a theory of it. Moreover, he adopted this phrase that social science later lent to biology.

Nowadays, the phenomenon has developed so generally it is obvious to all. We need have no further illusions about the tendencies of modern industry; it advances steadily towards powerful machines, towards great concentrations of forces and capital, and consequently to the extreme division of labor. Occupations are infinitely separated and specialized, not only inside the factories, but each product is itself a specialty dependent upon others. Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill still hoped that agriculture, at least, would be an exception to the rule, and they saw it as the last resort of small-scale industry. Although one must be careful not to generalize unduly in such matters, nevertheless it is hard to deny today that the principal branches of the agricultural industry are steadily being drawn into the general movement. Finally, business itself is ingeniously following and reflecting in all its shadings the infinite diversity of industrial enterprises; and, while this evolution is realizing itself with unpremeditated spontaneity, the economists, examining its causes and appreciating its results, far from condemning or opposing it, uphold it as necessary. They see in it the supreme law of human societies and the condition of their progress. But the division of labor is not peculiar to the economic world; we can observe its growing influence in the most varied fields of society. The political, administrative, and judicial functions are growing more and more specialized. It is the same with the aesthetic and scientific functions. It is long since philosophy reigned as the science unique; it has been broken into a multitude of special disciplines each of which has its object, method, and though. “Men working in the sciences have become increasingly more specialized.”ii

MECHANICAL SOLIDARITY We are now in a position to come to a conclusion.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the collective or common conscience. No doubt, it has not a specific organ as a substratum; it is, by definition, diffuse in every reach of society. Nevertheless, it has specific characteristics which make it a distinct reality. It is, in effect, independent of the particular conditions in which individuals are placed; they pass on and it remains. It is the same in the North and in the South, in great cities and in small, in different professions. Moreover, it does not change with each generation, but, on the contrary, it connects successive generations with one another. It is, thus, an entirely different thing from particular consciences, although it can be realized only through them. It is the psychical type of society, a type which has its properties, its conditions of existence, its mode of development, just as individual types, although in a different way. Thus understood, it has the right to be denoted by a special word. The one which we have just employed is not, it is true, without ambiguity. As the terms, collective and social, are often considered synonymous, one is inclined to believe that the collective conscience is the total social conscience, that is, extend it to include more than the psychic life of society, although, particularly in advanced societies, it is only a very restricted part. Judicial, governmental, scientific, industrial, in short, all special functions are of a psychic nature, since they consist in systems of representations and actions. They, however, are surely outside the common conscience. To avoid the confusioniii into which some have fallen, the best way would be to create a technical expression especially to designate the totality of social similitudes. However, since the use of a new word, when not absolutely necessary, is not without inconvenience, we shall employ the well- worn expression, collective or common conscience, but we shall always mean the strict sense in which we have taken it.

We can, then, to resume the preceding analysis, say that an act is criminal when it offends strong and defined states of the collective conscience.iv

The statement of this proposition is not generally called into question, but it is ordinarily given a sense very different from that which it ought to convey. We take it as if it expressed, not the essential property of crime, but one of its repercussions. We well know that crime violates very pervasive and intense sentiments, but we believe that this pervasiveness and this intensity derive from the criminal character of the act, which consequently remains to be defined. We do not deny that every delict is universally reproved, but we take as agreed that the reprobation to which it is subjected results from its delictness. But we are hard put to say what this delictness consists of. In immorality which is particularly serious? I wish such were the case, but that is to reply to the question by putting one word in place of another, for it is

precisely the problem to understand what this immorality is, and especially this particular immorality which society reproves by means of organized punishment and which constitutes criminality. It can evidently come only from one or several characteristics common to all criminological types. The only one which would satisfy this condition is that opposition between a crime, whatever it is, and certain collective sentiments. It is, accordingly, this opposition which makes crime rather than being a derivative of crime. In other words, we must not say that an action shocks the common conscience because it is criminal, but rather that it is criminal because it shocks the common conscience. We do not reprove it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we reprove it. As for the intrinsic nature of these sentiments, it is impossible to specify them. They have the most diverse objects and cannot be encompassed in a single formula. We can say that they relate neither to vital interests of society nor to a minimum of justice. All these definitions are inadequate. By this alone can we recognize it: a sentiment, whatever its origin and end, is found in all consciences with a certain degree of force and precision, and every action which violates it is a crime. Contemporary psychology is more and more reverting to the idea of Spinoza, according to which things are good because we like them, as against our liking them because they are good. What is primary is the tendency, the inclination; the pleasure and pain are only derivative facts. It is just so in social life. An act is socially bad because society disproves of it. But, it will be asked, are there not some collective sentiments which result from pleasure and pain which society feels from contact with their ends? No doubt, but they do not all have this origin. A great many, if not the larger part, come from other causes. Everything that leads activity to assume a definite form can give rise to habits, whence result tendencies which must be satisfied. Moreover, it is these latter tendencies which alone are truly fundamental. The others are only special forms and more determinate. Thus, to find charm in such and such an object, collective sensibility must already be constituted so as to be able to enjoy it. If the corresponding sentiments are abolished, the most harmful act to society will not only be tolerated, but even honored and proposed as an example. Pleasure is incapable of creating an impulse out of whole cloth; it can only link those sentiments which exist to such and such a particular end, provided that the end be in accord with their original nature. . . .

ORGANIC SOLIDARITY

Since negative solidarity does not produce any integration by itself, and since, moreover, there is nothing specific about it, we shall recognize only two kinds of positive solidarity which are distinguishable by the following qualities:

1. The first binds the individual directly to society without any

intermediary. In the second, he depends upon society, because he depends upon the parts of which it is composed. 2. Society is not seen in the same aspect in the two cases. In the first, what

we call society is a more or less organized totality of beliefs and sentiments common to all the members of the group: this is the collective type. On the other hand, the society in which we are solitary in the second instance is a system of different, special functions which definite relations unite. These two societies really make up only one. They are two aspects of one and the same reality, but none the less they must be distinguished.

3. From this second difference there arises another which helps us to characterize and name the two kinds of solidarity.

The first can be strong only if the ideas and tendencies common to all the members of the society are greater in number and intensity than those which pertain personally to each member. It is as much stronger as the excess is more considerable. But what makes our personality is how much of our own individual qualities we have, what distinguishes us from others. This solidarity can grow only in inverse ratio to personality. There are in each of us, as we have said, two consciences: one which is common to our group in its entirety, which, consequently, is not ourself, but society living and acting within us; the other, on the contrary, represents that in us which is personal and distinct, that which makes us an individual.v Solidarity which comes from likenesses is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it. But, at that moment, our individuality is nil. It can be born only if the community takes smaller toll of us. There are, here, two contrary forces, one centripetal, the other centrifugal, which cannot flourish at the same time. We cannot, at one and the same time, develop ourselves in two opposite senses. If we have a lively desire to think and act for ourselves, we cannot be strongly inclined to think and act as others do. If our ideal is to present a singular and personal appearance, we do not want to resemble everybody else. Moreover, at the moment when this solidarity exercises its force, our personality vanishes, as our definition permits us to say, for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective life.

The social molecules which can be coherent in this way can act together only in the measure that they have no actions of their own, as the molecules of inorganic bodies. That is why we propose to call this type of solidarity mechanical. The term does not signify that it is produced by mechanical and artificial means. We call it that only by analogy to the cohesion which unites the elements of an inanimate body, as opposed to that which makes a unity out of the elements of a living body. What justifies this term is that the link

which thus unites the individual to society is wholly analogous to that which attaches a thing to a person. The individual conscience, considered in this light, is a simple dependent upon the collective type and follows all of its movements, as the possessed object follows those of its owner. In societies where this type of solidarity is highly developed, the individual does not appear, as we shall see later. Individuality is something which the society possesses. Thus, in these social types, personal rights are not yet distinguished from real rights.

It is quite otherwise with the solidarity which the division of labor produces. Whereas the previous type implies that individuals resemble each other, this type presumes their difference. The first is possible only in so far as the individual personality is absorbed into the collective personality; the second is possible only if each one has a sphere of action which is peculiar to him; that is, a personality. It is necessary, then, that the collective conscience leave open a part of the individual conscience in order that special functions may be established there, functions which it cannot regulate. The more this region is extended, the stronger is the cohesion which results from this solidarity. In effect, on the one hand, each one depends as much more strictly on society as labor is more divided; and, on the other, the activity of each is as much more personal as it is more specialized. Doubtless, as circumscribed as it is, it is never completely original. Even in the exercise of our occupation, we conform to usages, to practices which are common to our whole professional brotherhood. But, even in this instance, the yoke that we submit to is much less heavy than when society completely controls us, and it leaves much more place open for the free play of our initiative. Here, then, the individuality of all grows at the same time as that of its parts. Society becomes more capable of collective movement, at the same time that each of its elements has more freedom of movement. This solidarity resembles that which we observe among the higher animals. Each organ, in effect, has its special physiognomy, its autonomy. And, moreover, the unity of the organism is as great as the individuation of the parts is more marked. Because of this analogy, we propose to call the solidarity which is due to the division of labor, organic. . . .

THE CAUSES

We can then formulate the following proposition: The division of labor varies in direct ratio with the volume and density of societies, and, if it progresses in a continuous manner in the course of social development, it is because societies become regularly denser and generally more voluminous.

At all times, it is true, it has been well understood that there was a relation between these two orders of fact, for, in order that functions be more

specialized, there must be more co-operators, and they must be related to co- operate. But, ordinarily, this state of societies is seen only as the means by which the division of labor develops, and not as the cause of its development. The latter is made to depend upon individual aspirations toward well-being and happiness, which can be satisfied so much better as societies are more extensive and more condensed. The law we have just established is quite otherwise. We say, not that the growth and condensation of societies permit, but that they necessitate a greater division of labor. It is not an instrument by which the latter is realized; it is its determining cause.vi

THE FORCED DIVISION OF LABOR

It is not sufficient that there be rules, however, for sometimes the rules themselves are the cause of evil. This is what occurs in class-wars. The institution of classes and of castes constitutes an organization of the division of labor, and it is a strictly regulated organization, although it often is a source of dissension. The lower classes not being, or no longer being, satisfied with the role which has devolved upon them from custom or by law aspire to functions which are closed to them and seek to dispossess those who are exercising these functions. Thus civil wars arise which are due to the manner in which labor is distributed.

There is nothing similar to this in the organism. No doubt, during periods of crises, the different tissues war against one another and nourish themselves at the expense of others. But never does one cell or organ seek to usurp a role different from the one which it is filling. The reason for this is that each anatomic element automatically executes its purpose. Its constitution, its place in the organism, determines its vocation; its task is a consequence of its nature. It can badly acquit itself, but it cannot assume another’s task unless the latter abandons it, as happens in the rare cases of substitution that we have spoken of. It is not so in societies. Here the possibility is greater. There is a greater distance between the hereditary dispositions of the individual and the social function he will fill. The first do not imply the second with such immediate necessity. This space, open to striving and deliberation, is also at the mercy of a multitude of causes which can make individual nature deviate from its normal direction and create a pathological state. Because this organization is more supple, it is also more delicate and more accessible to change. Doubtless, we are not, from birth, predestined to some special position; but we do have tastes and aptitudes which limit our choice. If no care is taken of them, if they are ceaselessly disturbed by our daily occupations, we shall suffer and seek a way of putting an end to our suffering. But there is no other way out than to change the established order and to set up a new one. For the division of labor to produce solidarity, it is not

sufficient, then, that each have his task; it is still necessary that this task be fitting to him. Now, it is this condition which is not realized in the case we are examining. In effect, if the institution of classes or castes sometimes gives rise to anxiety and pain instead of producing solidarity, this is because the distribution of social functions on which it rests does not respond, or rather no longer responds, to the distribution of natural talents. . . .

CONCLUSION

But not only does the division of labor present the character by which we have defined morality; it more and more tends to become the essential condition of social solidarity. As we advance in the evolutionary scale, the ties which bind the individual to his family, to his native soil, to traditions which the past has given to him, to collective group usages, become loose. More mobile, he changes his environment more easily, leaves his people to go elsewhere to live a more autonomous existence, to a greater extent forms his own ideas and sentiments. Of course, the whole common conscience does not, on this account, pass out of existence. At least there will always remain this cult of personality, of individual dignity of which we have just been speaking, and which, today, is the rallying-point of so many people. But how little a thing it is when one contemplates the ever increasing extent of social life, and, consequently, of individual consciences! For, as they become more voluminous, as intelligence becomes richer, activity more varied, in order for morality to remain constant, that is to say, in order for the individual to remain attached to the group with a force equal to that of yesterday, the ties which bind him to it must become stronger and more numerous. If, then, he formed no others than those which come from resemblances, the effacement of the segmental type would be accompanied by a systematic debasement of morality. Man would no longer be sufficiently obligated; he would no longer feel about and above him this salutary pressure of society which moderates his egoism and makes him a moral being. This is what gives moral value to the division of labor. Through it, the individual becomes cognizant of his dependence upon society; from it come the forces which keep him in check and restrain him. In short, since the division of labor becomes the chief source of social solidarity, it becomes, at the same time, the foundation of the moral order.

We can then say that, in higher societies, our duty is not to spread our activity over a large surface, but to concentrate and specialize it. We must contract our horizon, choose a definite task and immerse ourselves in it completely, instead of trying to make ourselves a sort of creative masterpiece, quite complete, which contains its worth in itself and not in the services that it renders. Finally, this specialization ought to be pushed as far as the elevation

of the social type, without assigning any other limit to it.vii No doubt, we ought so to work as to realize in ourselves the collective type as it exists. There are common sentiments, common ideas, without which, as has been said, one is not a man. The rule which orders us to specialize remains limited by the contrary rule. Our conclusion is not that it is good to press specialization as far as possible, but as far as necessary. As for the part that is to be played by these two opposing necessities, that is determined by experience and cannot be calculated a priori. It is enough for us to have shown that the second is not of a different nature from the first, but that it also is moral, and that, moreover, this duty becomes ever more important and pressing, because the general qualities which are in question suffice less and less to socialize the individual. . . . Let us first of all remark that it is difficult to see why it would be more in

keeping with the logic of human nature to develop superficially rather than profoundly. Why would a more extensive activity, but more dispersed, be superior to a more concentrated, but circumscribed, activity? Why would there be more dignity in being complete and mediocre, rather than in living a more specialized, but more intense life, particularly if it is thus possible for us to find what we have lost in this specialization, through our association with other beings who have what we lack and who complete us? We take off from the principle that man ought to realize his nature as man, to accomplish his ,OLKEĹOV ẺPYOV, as Aristotle said. But this nature does not remain constant throughout history; it is modified with societies. Among lower peoples, the proper duty of man is to resemble his companions, to realize in himself all the traits of the collective type which are then confounded, much more than today, with the human type. But, in more advanced societies, his nature is, in large part, to be an organ of society, and his proper duty, consequently, is to play his role as an organ.

Moreover, far from being trammelled by the progress of specialization, individual personality develops with the division of labor.

To be a person is to be an autonomous source of action. Man acquires this quality only in so far as there is something in him which is his alone and which individualizes him, as he is something more than a simple incarnation of the generic type of his race and his group. It will be said that he is endowed with free will and that is enough to establish his personality. But although there may be some of this liberty in him, an object of so many discussions, it is not this metaphysical, impersonal, invariable attribute which can serve as the unique basis for concrete personality, which is empirical and variable with individuals. That could not be constituted by the wholly abstract power of choice between two opposites, but it is still necessary for this faculty to be

exercised towards ends and aims which are proper to the agent. In other words, the very materials of conscience must have a personal character. But we have seen in the second book of this work that this result is progressively produced as the division of labor progresses. The effacement of the segmental type, at the same time that it necessitates a very great specialization, partially lifts the individual conscience from the organic environment which supports it, as from the social environment which envelops it, and, accordingly, because of this double emancipation, the individual becomes more of an independent factor in his own conduct. The division of labor itself contributes to this enfranchisement, for individual natures, while specializing, become more complex, and by that are in part freed from collective action and hereditary influences which can only enforce themselves upon simple, general things. . . .

SOURCE: Reprinted and edited with the permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc., from The Division of Labor in Society by Émile Durkheim, translated by George Simpson. Copyright © 1947, 1964 by The Free Press. All rights reserved.

iAristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, E, 1133a, 16. iiDe Candolle, Histoire des Sciences et des Savants, 2nd ed., p. 263.

iiiThe confusion is not without its dangers. Thus, we sometimes ask if the individual conscience varies as the collective conscience. It all depends upon the sense in which the word is taken. If it represents social likenesses, the variation is inverse, as we shall see. If it signifies the total psychic life of society, the relation is direct. It is thus necessary to distinguish them. ivWe shall not consider the question whether the collective conscience is a conscience as is that of the individual. By this term, we simply signify the totality of social likenesses, without prejudging the category by which this system of phenomena ought to be defined.

vHowever, these two consciences are not in regions geographically distinct from us, but penetrate from all sides. viOn this point, we can still rely on Comte as authority. “I must,” he said “now indicate the progressive condensation of our species as a last general concurrent element in regulating the effective speed of the social movement. We can first easily recognize that this influence contributes a great deal, especially in origin, in determining a more special division of human labor, necessarily incompatible with a small number of co-operators. Besides, by a most intimate and little known property, although still most important, such a condensation stimulates directly, in a very powerful manner, the most rapid development of social evolution, either in driving individuals to new efforts to assure themselves by more refined means of an existence which otherwise would become more difficult, or by obliging society with more stubborn and better concentrated energy to fight more stiffly against the more powerful effort of particular divergences. With one and the other, we see that it is not a question here of the absolute increase of the number of individuals, but especially of their more intense concourse in a given space.” Cours, IV, p. 455.

viiThere is, however, probably another limit which we do not have to speak of since it concerns individual hygiene. It may be held that, in the light of our organico-psychic constitution, the division of labor cannot go beyond a certain limit without disorders resulting. Without entering upon the question, let us straightaway say that the extreme specialization at which biological functions have arrived does not seem favorable to this hypothesis. Moreover, in the very order of psychic and social functions, has

not the division of labor, in its historical development, been carried to the last stage in the relations of men and women? Have not there been faculties completely lost by both? Why cannot the same phenomenon occur between individuals of the same sex? Of course, it takes time for the organism to adapt itself to these changes, but we do not see why a day should come when this adaptation would become impossible.

Introduction to The Rules of Sociological Method

In The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim 1895/1966:xiii), Durkheim makes at least three essential points. Durkheim insists (1) sociology is a distinct field of study, and (2) although the social sciences are distinct from the natural sciences, the methods of the latter can be applied to the former. In addition, Durkheim maintains (3) the social field is also distinct from the psychological realm. Thus, sociology is the study of social phenomena or “social facts,” a very different enterprise from the study of an individual’s own ideas or will.

Specifically, Durkheim maintains there are two different ways that social facts can be identified. First, social facts are “general throughout the extent of a given society” at a given stage in the evolution of that society (Durkheim 1895/1966:xv,13). Second, albeit related, a social fact is marked by “any manner of action . . . capable of exercising over the individual exterior constraint” (ibid.). In other words, a “social fact” is recognized by the “coercive power which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals” (ibid.:10). This does not mean that there are no “exceptions” to a social fact, but that it is potentially universal in the sense that, given specific conditions, it will be likely to emerge (ibid.:xv).

The “coercive power” of social facts brings us to a critical issue raised in The Rules of Sociological Method: crime. Durkheim argues that crime is inevitable or “normal” in all societies for two reasons. First, crime is inevitable and normal because crime defines the moral boundaries of a society and, in doing so, communicates to its inhabitants the range of acceptable behaviors. As Durkheim maintains, “A society exempt from [crime] is utterly impossible” because crime affirms and reaffirms the collective sentiments on which it is founded and which are necessary for its existence (ibid.:67). The formation and reformation of the collective conscience is never complete. Indeed, Durkheim maintains that even in a hypothetical “society of saints,” a “perfect cloister of exemplary individuals,” “faults” will appear, which will cause the same “scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary consciousnesses” (ibid.:68,69). It is impossible for all to be alike. . . . There cannot be a society in which the individuals do not differ more or less from

the collective type” (ibid.:69,70). Simply put, you cannot have a society without “crime” for the same reason that you cannot have a game without rules (i.e., you can do A, but not B) and consequences to rule violations (if you do B, this will happen). Thus, when children make up a new game, they make up not only rules, but also consequences for rule infractions (e.g., you have to kick the ball between the tree and the mailbox; if the ball touches your hands, you’re out). So too, one could argue, society is like a game. There are rules (norms and laws), and there are consequences or punishments if you break those norms/rules/laws (whether social ostracism or jail). Most important, it is the consequences of the action (crime and punishment) themselves that help clarify and reaffirm what the rules of the game are and thus the basis of society itself.

Reuters/Mario Anzuoni

Photo 3.2 Opponents of California’s Proposition 8, Which Banned Same-Sex Marriage, Rally outside San Francisco’s City Hall

In addition, Durkheim maintains that crime is indispensable because it enables social change. Crimes or violations of the collective conscience provide options for “progress,” or “the normal evolution of morality and law” (1895/1966:69). As Durkheim states, “To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself. In order that the originality of the idealist whose dreams transcend his century may find expression, it is necessary that the originality of the criminal, is below the level of his time, shall be possible” (ibid). Such is the case with civil rights laws and movements. What was once legal and normative, such as Jim Crow laws, are

now illegal. So too, as shown in Table 3.1, public attitudes about homosexuality have shifted significantly in the past ten years. Whether crime is ultimately a positive development, as, for instance, when individuals “ahead of their time” think outside the box, or a negative development, as, for instance, individuals make “bad” choices for idiosyncratic, psychological reasons (e.g., the Boston Marathon bomber), crime reaffirms the collective consciousness, clarifying and affirming underlying collective sentiments and values. Moreover, crime helps bring the law into alignment with these collective sentiments. After a tragedy, people cry out for new laws (or the enforcement or abolishment of existing ones) in the hope of preventing a similar tragedy from occurring again. Of course, this crying out for new laws (or enforcement or abolishment of existing ones) is what civil rights movements are all about as well. Table 3.1 Shifts in Public Attitudes on Homosexuality

PEW RESEARCH CENTER May 1–5, 2013. Q17b, Q56, Q63, Q72, Q59/Q61.

*Trend from March 2004 survey by Los Angeles Times. **From March 2013 Pew Research Center survey.

SOURCE: http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/06/in-gay-marriage-debate-both-supporters-and- opponents-see-legal-recognition-as-inevitable/

From The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) Émile Durkheim

WHAT IS A SOCIAL FACT?

Before inquiring into the method suited to the study of social facts, it is important to know which facts are commonly called “social.” This information is all the more necessary since the designation “social” is used with little precision. It is currently employed for practically all phenomena generally diffused within society, however small their social interest. But on that basis, there are, as it were, no human events that may not be called social. Each individual drinks, sleeps, eats, reasons; and it is to society’s interest that these functions be exercised in an orderly manner. If, then, all these facts are counted as “social” facts, sociology would have no subject matter exclusively its own, and its domain would be confused with that of biology and psychology.

But in reality there is in every society a certain group of phenomena which may be differentiated from those studied by the other natural sciences. When I fulfill my obligations as brother, husband, or citizen, when I execute my contracts, I perform duties which are defined, externally to myself and my acts, in law and in custom. Even if they conform to my own sentiments and I feel their reality subjectively, such reality is still objective, for I did not create them; I merely inherited them through my education. How many times it happens, moreover, that we are ignorant of the details of the obligations incumbent upon us, and that in order to acquaint ourselves with them we must consult the law and its authorized interpreters! Similarly, the church-member finds the beliefs and practices of his religious life ready-made at birth; their existence prior to his own implies their existence outside of himself. The system of signs I use to express my thought, the system of currency I employ to pay my debts, the instruments of credit I utilize in my commercial relations, the practices followed in my profession, etc., function independently of my own use of them. And these statements can be repeated for each member of society. Here, then, are ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that present the noteworthy property of existing outside the individual consciousness.

These types of conduct or thought are not only external to the individual but are, moreover, endowed with coercive power, by virtue of which they impose themselves upon him, independent of his individual will. Of course, when I fully consent and conform to them, this constraint is felt only slightly, if at all, and is therefore unnecessary. But it is, nonetheless, an intrinsic

characteristic of these facts, the proof thereof being that it asserts itself as soon as I attempt to resist it. If I attempt to violate the law, it reacts against me so as to prevent my act before its accomplishment, or to nullify my violation by restoring the damage, if it is accomplished and reparable, or to make me expiate it if it cannot be compensated for otherwise.

In the case of purely moral maxims; the public conscience exercises a check on every act which offends it by means of the surveillance it exercises over the conduct of citizens, and the appropriate penalties at its disposal. In many cases the constraint is less violent, but nevertheless it always exists. If I do not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress I do not conform to the customs observed in my country and in my class, the ridicule I provoke, the social isolation in which I am kept, produce, although in an attenuated form, the same effects as a punishment in the strict sense of the word. The constraint is nonetheless efficacious for being indirect. I am not obliged to speak French with my fellow-countrymen nor to use the legal currency, but I cannot possibly do otherwise. If I tried to escape this necessity, my attempt would fail miserably. As an industrialist, I am free to apply the technical methods of former centuries; but by doing so, I should invite certain ruin. Even when I free myself from these rules and violate them successfully, I am always compelled to struggle with them. When finally overcome, they make their constraining power sufficiently felt by the resistance they offer. The enterprises of all innovators, including successful ones, come up against resistance of this kind.

Here, then, is a category of facts with very distinctive characteristics: it consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him. These ways of thinking could not be confused with biological phenomena, since they consist of representations and of actions; nor with psychological phenomena, which exist only in the individual consciousness and through it. They constitute, thus, a new variety of phenomena; and it is to them exclusively that the term “social” ought to be applied. And this term fits them quite well, for it is clear that, since their source is not in the individual, their substratum can be no other than society, either the political society as a whole or some one of the partial groups it includes, such as religious denominations, political, literary, and occupational associations, etc. On the other hand, this term “social” applies to them exclusively, for it has a distinct meaning only if it designates exclusively the phenomena which are not included in any of the categories of facts that have already been established and classified. These ways of thinking and acting therefore constitute the proper domain of sociology. It is true that, when we define them with this word “constraint,” we risk shocking the zealous partisans of absolute individualism. For those who

profess the complete autonomy of the individual, man’s dignity is diminished whenever he is made to feel that he is not completely self-determinant. It is generally accepted today, however, that most of our ideas and our tendencies are not developed by ourselves but come to us from without. How can they become a part of us except by imposing themselves upon us? This is the whole meaning of our definition. And it is generally accepted, moreover, that social constraint is not necessarily incompatible with the individual personality.i

Since the examples that we have just cited (legal and moral regulations, religious faiths, financial systems, etc.) all consist of established beliefs and practices, one might be led to believe that social facts exist only where there is some social organization. But there are other facts without such crystallized form which have the same objectivity and the same ascendancy over the individual. These are called “social currents.” Thus the great movements of enthusiasm, indignation, and pity in a crowd do not originate in any one of the particular individual consciousnesses. They come to each one of us from without and can carry us away in spite of ourselves. Of course, it may happen that, in abandoning myself to them unreservedly, I do not feel the pressure they exert upon me. But it is revealed as soon as I try to resist them. Let an individual attempt to oppose one of these collective manifestations, and the emotions that he denies will turn against him. Now, if this power of external coercion asserts itself so clearly in cases of resistance, it must exist also in the first-mentioned cases, although we are unconscious of it. We are then victims of the illusion of having ourselves created that which actually forced itself from without. If the complacency with which we permit ourselves to be carried along conceals the pressure undergone, nevertheless it does not abolish it. Thus, air is no less heavy because we do not detect its weight. So, even if we ourselves have spontaneously contributed to the production of the common emotion, the impression we have received differs markedly from that which we would have experienced if we had been alone. Also, once the crowd has dispersed, that is, once these social influences have ceased to act upon us and we are alone again, the emotions which have passed through the mind appear strange to us, and we no longer recognize them as ours. We realize that these feelings have been impressed upon us to a much greater extent than they were created by us. It may even happen that they horrify us, so much were they contrary to our nature. Thus, a group of individuals, most of whom are perfectly inoffensive, may, when gathered in a crowd, be drawn into acts of atrocity. And what we say of these transitory outbursts applies similarly to those more permanent currents of opinion on religious, political, literary, or artistic matters which are constantly being formed around us, whether in society as a whole or in more limited circles.

To confirm this definition of the social fact by a characteristic illustration from common experience, one need only observe the manner in which children are brought up. Considering the facts as they are and as they have always been, it becomes immediately evident that all education is a continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing, feeling, and acting which he could not have arrived at spontaneously. From the very first hours of his life, we compel him to eat, drink, and sleep at regular hours; we constrain him to cleanliness, calmness, and obedience; later we exert pressure upon him in order that he may learn proper consideration for others, respect for customs and conventions, the need for work, etc. If, in time, this constraint ceases to be felt, it is because it gradually gives rise to habits and to internal tendencies that render constraint unnecessary; but nevertheless it is not abolished, for it is still the source from which these habits were derived. It is true that, according to Spencer, a rational education ought to reject such methods, allowing the child to act in complete liberty; but as this pedagogic theory has never been applied by any known people, it must be accepted only as an expression of personal opinion, not as a fact which can contradict the aforementioned observations. What makes these facts particularly instructive is that the aim of education is, precisely, the socialization of the human being; the process of education, therefore, gives us in a nutshell the historical fashion in which the social being is constituted. This unremitting pressure to which the child is subjected is the very pressure of the social milieu which tends to fashion him in its own image, and of which parents and teachers are merely the representatives and intermediaries.

It follows that sociological phenomena cannot be defined by their universality. A thought which we find in every individual consciousness, a movement repeated by all individuals, is not thereby a social fact. If sociologists have been satisfied with defining them by this characteristic, it is because they confused them with what one might call their reincarnation in the individual. It is, however, the collective aspects of the beliefs, tendencies, and practices of a group that characterize truly social phenomena. As for the forms that the collective states assume when refracted in the individual, these are things of another sort. This duality is clearly demonstrated by the fact that these two orders of phenomena are frequently found dissociated from one another. Indeed, certain of these social manners of acting and thinking acquire, by reason of their repetition, a certain rigidity which on its own account crystallizes them, so to speak, and isolates them from the particular events which reflect them. They thus acquire a body, a tangible form, and constitute a reality in their own right, quite distinct from the individual facts which produce it. Collective habits are inherent not only in the successive acts which they determine but, by a privilege of which we find no example in the

biological realm, they are given permanent expression in a formula which is repeated from mouth to mouth, transmitted by education, and fixed even in writing. Such is the origin and nature of legal and moral rules, popular aphorisms and proverbs, articles of faith wherein religious or political groups condense their beliefs, standards of taste established by literary schools, etc. None of these can be found entirely reproduced in the applications made of them by individuals, since they can exist even without being actually applied.

No doubt, this dissociation does not always manifest itself with equal distinctness, but its obvious existence in the important and numerous cases just cited is sufficient to prove that the social fact is a thing distinct from its individual manifestations. Moreover, even when this dissociation is not immediately apparent, it may often be disclosed by certain devices of method. Such dissociation is indispensable if one wishes to separate social facts from their alloys in order to observe them in a state of purity. Currents of opinion, with an intensity varying according to the time and place, impel certain groups either to more marriages, for example, or to more suicides, or to a higher or lower birthrate, etc. These currents are plainly social facts. At first sight they seem inseparable from the forms they take in individual cases. But statistics furnish us with the means of isolating them. They are, in fact, represented with considerable exactness by the rates of births, marriages, and suicides, that is, by the number obtained by dividing the average annual total of marriages, births, suicides, by the number of persons whose ages lie within the range in which marriages, births, and suicides occur.ii Since each of these figures contains all the individual cases indiscriminately, the individual circumstances which may have had a share in the production of the phenomenon are neutralized and, consequently, do not contribute to its determination. The average, then, expresses a certain state of the group mind (l’āme collective).

Such are social phenomena, when disentangled from all foreign matter. As for their individual manifestations, these are indeed, to a certain extent, social, since they partly reproduce a social model. Each of them also depends, and to a large extent, on the organopsychological constitution of the individual and on the particular circumstances in which he is placed. Thus they are not sociological phenomena in the strict sense of the word. They belong to two realms at once; one could call them sociopsychological. They interest the sociologist without constituting the immediate subject matter of sociology. There exist in the interior of organisms similar phenomena, compound in their nature, which form in their turn the subject matter of the “hybrid sciences,” such as physiological chemistry, for example.

The objection may be raised that a phenomenon is collective only if it is

common to all members of society, or at least to most of them—in other words, if it is truly general. This may be true; but it is general because it is collective (that is, more or less obligatory), and certainly not collective because general. It is a group condition repeated in the individual because imposed on him. It is to be found in each part because it exists in the whole, rather than in the whole because it exists in the parts. This becomes conspicuously evident in those beliefs and practices which are transmitted to us ready-made by previous generations; we receive and adopt them because, being both collective and ancient, they are invested with a particular authority that education has taught us to recognize and respect. It is, of course, true that a vast portion of our social culture is transmitted to us in this way; but even when the social fact is due in part to our direct collaboration, its nature is not different. A collective emotion which bursts forth suddenly and violently in a crowd does not express merely what all the individual sentiments had in common; it is something entirely different, as we have shown. It results from their being together, a product of the actions and reactions which take place between individual consciousnesses; and if each individual consciousness echoes the collective sentiment, it is by virtue of the special energy resident in its collective origin. If all hearts beat in unison, this is not the result of a spontaneous and pre-established harmony but rather because an identical force propels them in the same direction. Each is carried along by all.

We thus arrive at the point where we can formulate and delimit in a precise way the domain of sociology. It comprises only a limited group of phenomena. A social fact is to be recognized by the power of external coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals, and the presence of this power may be recognized in its turn either by the existence of some specific sanction or by the resistance offered against every individual effort that tends to violate it. One can, however, define it also by its diffusion within the group, provided that, in conformity with our previous remarks, one takes care to add as a second and essential characteristic that its own existence is independent of the individual forms it assumes in its diffusion. This last criterion is perhaps, in certain cases, easier to apply than the preceding one. In fact, the constraint is easy to ascertain when it expresses itself externally by some direct reaction of society, as is the case in law, morals, beliefs, customs, and even fashions. But when it is only indirect, like the constraint which an economic organization exercises, it cannot always be so easily detected. Generality combined with externality may, then, be easier to establish. Moreover, this second definition is but another form of the first; for if a mode of behavior whose existence is external to individual consciousnesses becomes general, this can only be brought about by its being imposed upon them.

But these several phenomena present the same characteristic by which we defined the others. These “ways of existing” are imposed on the individual precisely in the same fashion as the “ways of acting” of which we have spoken. Indeed, when we wish to know how a society is divided politically, of what these divisions themselves are composed, and how complete is the fusion existing between them, we shall not achieve our purpose by physical inspection and by geographical observations; for these phenomena are social, even when they have some basis in physical nature. It is only by a study of public law that a comprehension of this organization is possible, for it is this law that determines the organization, as it equally determines our domestic and civil relations. This political organization is, then, no less obligatory than the social facts mentioned above. If the population crowds into our cities instead of scattering into the country, this is due to a trend of public opinion, a collective drive that imposes this concentration upon the individuals. We can no more choose the style of our houses than of our clothing—at least, both are equally obligatory. The channels of communication prescribe the direction of internal migrations and commerce, etc., and even their extent. Consequently, at the very most, it should be necessary to add to the list of phenomena which we have enumerated as presenting the distinctive criterion of a social fact only one additional category, “ways of existing”; and, as this enumeration was not meant to be rigorously exhaustive, the addition would not be absolutely necessary.

Such an addition is perhaps not necessary, for these “ways of existing” are only crystallized “ways of acting.” The political structure of a society is merely the way in which its component segments have become accustomed to live with one another. If their relations are traditionally intimate, the segments tend to fuse with one another, or, in the contrary case, to retain their identity. The type of habitation imposed upon us is merely the way in which our contemporaries and our ancestors have been accustomed to construct their houses. The methods of communication are merely the channels which the regular currents of commerce and migrations have dug, by flowing in the same direction. To be sure, if the phenomena of a structural character alone presented this performance, one might believe that they constituted a distinct species. A legal regulation is an arrangement no less permanent than a type of architecture, and yet the regulation is a “physiological” fact. A simple moral maxim is assuredly somewhat more malleable, but it is much more rigid than a simple professional custom or a fashion. There is thus a whole series of degrees without a break in continuity between the facts of the most articulated structure and those free currents of social life which are not yet definitely molded. The differences between them are, therefore, only differences in the degree of consolidation they present. Both are simply life, more or less

crystallized. No doubt, it may be of some advantage to reserve the term “morphological” for those social facts which concern the social substratum, but only on condition of not overlooking the fact that they are of the same nature as the others. Our definition will then include the whole relevant range of facts if we say: A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations. . . .iii

THE NORMAL AND THE PATHOLOGICAL

If there is any fact whose pathological character appears incontestable, that fact is crime. All criminologists are agreed on this point. Although they explain this pathology differently, they are unanimous in recognizing it. But let us see if this problem does not demand a more extended consideration. . . .

Crime is present not only in the majority of societies of one particular species but in all societies of all types. There is no society that is not confronted with the problem of criminality. Its form changes; the acts thus characterized are not the same everywhere; but, everywhere and always, there have been men who have behaved in such a way as to draw upon themselves penal repression. If, in proportion as societies pass from the lower to the higher types, the rate of criminality, i.e., the relation between the yearly number of crimes and the population, tended to decline, it might be believed that crime, while still normal, is tending to lose this character of normality. But we have no reason to believe that such a regression is substantiated. Many facts would seem rather to indicate a movement in the opposite direction. From the beginning of the [nineteenth] century, statistics enable us to follow the course of criminality. It has everywhere increased. In France the increase is nearly 300 per cent. There is, then, no phenomenon that presents more indisputably all the symptoms of normality, since it appears closely connected with the conditions of all collective life. To make of crime a form of social morbidity would be to admit that morbidity is not something accidental, but, on the contrary, that in certain cases it grows out of the fundamental constitution of the living organism; it would result in wiping out all distinction between the physiological and the pathological. No doubt it is possible that crime itself will have abnormal forms, as, for example, when its rate is unusually high. This excess is, indeed, undoubtedly morbid in nature. What is normal, simply, is the existence of criminality, provided that it attains and does not exceed, for each social type, a certain level, which it is perhaps not impossible to fix in conformity with the preceding rules.iv

Here we are, then, in the presence of a conclusion in appearance quite

paradoxical. Let us make no mistake. To classify crime among the phenomena of normal sociology is not to say merely that it is an inevitable, although regrettable phenomenon, due to the incorrigible wickedness of men; it is to affirm that it is a factor in public health, an integral part of all healthy societies. This result is, at first glance, surprising enough to have puzzled even ourselves for a long time. Once this first surprise has been overcome, however, it is not difficult to find reasons explaining this normality and at the same time confirming it. In the first place crime is normal because a society exempt from it is utterly

impossible. Crime, we have shown elsewhere, consists of an act that offends certain very strong collective sentiments. In a society in which criminal acts are no longer committed, the sentiments they offend would have to be found without exception in all individual consciousnesses, and they must be found to exist with the same degree as sentiments contrary to them. Assuming that this condition could actually be realized, crime would not thereby disappear; it would only change its form, for the very cause which would thus dry up the sources of criminality would immediately open up new ones.

Indeed, for the collective sentiments which are protected by the penal law of a people at a specified moment of its history to take possession of the public conscience or for them to acquire a stronger hold where they have an insufficient grip, they must acquire an intensity greater than that which they had hitherto had. The community as a whole must experience them more vividly, for it can acquire from no other source the greater force necessary to control these individuals who formerly were the most refractory. . . .

Imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals. Crimes, properly so called, will there be unknown; but faults which appear venial to the layman will create there the same scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary consciousnesses. If, then, this society has the power to judge and punish, it will define these acts as criminal and will treat them as such. For the same reason, the perfect and upright man judges his smallest failings with a severity that the majority reserve for acts more truly in the nature of an offense. Formerly, acts of violence against persons were more frequent than they are today, because respect for individual dignity was less strong. As this has increased, these crimes have become more rare; and also, many acts violating this sentiment have been introduced into the penal law which were not included there in primitive times.v

In order to exhaust all the hypotheses logically possible, it will perhaps be asked why this unanimity does not extend to all collective sentiments without exception. Why should not even the most feeble sentiment gather enough energy to prevent all dissent? The moral consciousness of the society would

be present in its entirety in all the individuals, which a vitality sufficient to prevent all acts offending it—the purely conventional faults as well as the crimes. But a uniformity so universal and absolute is utterly impossible; for the immediate physical milieu in which each one of us is placed, the hereditary antecedents, and the social influences vary from one individual to the next, and consequently diversify consciousnesses. It is impossible for all to be alike, if only because each one has his own organism and that these organisms occupy different areas in space. That is why, even among the lower peoples, where individual originality is very little developed, it nevertheless does exist.

Thus, since there cannot be a society in which the individuals do not differ more or less from the collective type, it is also inevitable that, among these divergences, there are some with a criminal character. What confers this character upon them is not the intrinsic quality of a given act but that definition which the collective conscience lends them. If the collective conscience is stronger, if it has enough authority practically to suppress these divergences, it will also be more sensitive, more exacting; and, reacting against the slightest deviations with the energy it otherwise displays only against more considerable infractions, it will attribute to them the same gravity as formerly to crimes. In other words, it will designate them as criminal.

Crime is, then, necessary; it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life, and by that very fact it is useful, because these conditions of which it is a part are themselves indispensable to the normal evolution of morality and law.

Indeed, it is no longer possible today to dispute the fact that law and morality vary from one social type to the next, nor that they change within the same type if the conditions of life are modified. But, in order that these transformations may be possible, the collective sentiments at the basis of morality must not be hostile to change, and consequently must have but moderate energy. If they were too strong, they would no longer be plastic. Every pattern is an obstacle to new patterns, to the extent that the first pattern is inflexible. The better a structure is articulated, the more it offers a healthy resistance to all modification; and this is equally true of functional, as of anatomical, organization. If there were no crimes, this condition could not have been fulfilled; for such a hypothesis presupposes that collective sentiments have arrived at a degree of intensity unexampled in history. Nothing is good indefinitely and to an unlimited extent. The authority which the moral conscience enjoys must not be excessive; otherwise no one would dare criticize it, and it would too easily congeal into an immutable form. To

make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself. In order that the originality of the idealist whose dreams transcend his century may find expression, it is necessary that the originality of the criminal, who is below the level of his time, shall also be possible. One does not occur without the other.

Nor is this all. Aside from this indirect utility, it happens that crime itself plays a useful role in this evolution. Crime implies not only that the way remains open to necessary changes but that in certain cases it directly prepares these changes. Where crime exists, collective sentiments are sufficiently flexible to take on a new form, and crime sometimes helps to determine the form they will take. How many times, indeed, it is only an anticipation of future morality—a step toward what will be! According to Athenian law, Socrates was a criminal, and his condemnation was no more than just. However, his crime, namely, the independence of his thought, rendered a service not only to humanity but to his country. It served to prepare a new morality and faith which the Athenians needed, since the traditions by which they had lived until then were no longer in harmony with the current conditions of life. Nor is the case of Socrates unique; it is reproduced periodically in history. It would never have been possible to establish the freedom of thought we now enjoy if the regulations prohibiting it had not been violated before being solemnly abrogated. At that time, however, the violation was a crime, since it was an offense against sentiments still very keen in the average conscience. And yet this crime was useful as a prelude to reforms which daily became more necessary. Liberal philosophy had as its precursors the heretics of all kinds who were justly punished by secular authorities during the entire course of the Middle Ages and until the eve of modern times.

From this point of view the fundamental facts of criminality present themselves to us in an entirely new light. Contrary to current ideas, the criminal no longer seems a totally unsociable being, a sort of parasitic element, a strange and inassimilable body, introduced into the midst of society.vi On the contrary, he plays a definite role in social life. . . .

SOURCE: Reprinted with permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Rules of Sociological Method by Émile Durkheim, translated by Sarah A. Soloway and John H. Mueller, edited by George E. G. Catlin. Copyright © 1938 by George E. G. Catlin. Copyright renewed © 1966 by Sarah A. Soloway, John H. Mueller, George E. G. Catlin. All rights reserved.

iWe do not intend to imply, however, that all constraints are normal. We shall return to this point later. iiSuicides do not occur at every age, and they take place with varying intensity at the different ages in which they occur.

iiiThis close connection between life and structure, organ and function, may be easily proved in sociology because between these two extreme terms there exists a whole series of immediately observable intermediate stages which show the bond between them. Biology is not in the same favorable position. But we may well believe that the inductions on this subject made by sociology are applicable to biology and that, in organisms as well as in societies, only differences in degree exist between these two orders of facts.

ivFrom the fact that crime is a phenomenon of normal sociology, it does not follow that the criminal is an individual normally constituted from the biological and psychological points of view. The two questions are independent of each other. This independence will be better understood when we have shown, later on, the difference between psychological and sociological facts. vCalumny, insults, slander, fraud, etc.

viWe have ourselves committed the error of speaking thus of the criminal, because of a failure to apply our rule (Division du travail social, pp. 395–96).

Introduction to Suicide: A Study in Sociology Suicide (1897) is both a theoretical and methodological exemplar. In this

famous study, Durkheim examines a phenomenon that most people think of as an intensely individual act—suicide—and demonstrates its social (rather than psychological) roots. His method for doing this is to analyze rates of suicide between societies and historical periods and between different social groups within the same society. By linking the different suicide rates of particular societies and social groups to the specific characteristics of that society or social group, Durkheim not only demonstrates that individual pathologies are rooted in social conditions, but, in addition, shows how sociologists can scientifically study social behavior. His innovative examination of suicide rates lent credibility to his conviction that sociology should be considered a viable scientific discipline.

Most important, Durkheim argues that the places with the highest rates of alcoholism and mental illness are not the areas with the highest suicide rates (thereby undermining the notion that it is pathological psychological states that are solely determinative of the individual act of suicide). Rather, Durkheim maintains that suicide rates are highest in moments when and in places where individuals lack social and moral regulation or integration. In addition, as in his first book, The Division of Labor in Society, in Suicide Durkheim was particularly interested in delineating the fundamental differences between traditional and modern societies. Durkheim sought to explain why suicide is rare in small, simple societies while much more frequent in modern, industrial ones. Parallel to his argument in The Division of Labor (in which Durkheim argued that traditional societies are characterized by mechanical solidarity while modern societies are characterized by organic solidarity), Durkheim argues that traditional and

modern societies differ not only in their rates of suicide but in the types of suicide that are prevalent as well.

Specifically, Durkheim saw two main characteristics of modern, industrial society: (1) a lack of integration of the individual in the social group and (2) a lack of moral regulation. Durkheim used the term egoism to refer to the lack of integration of the individual in the social group. He used the term anomie to refer to a lack of moral regulation. Durkheim argued that both of these conditions—egoism and anomie—are “chronic” in modern, industrial society; and that in extreme, pathological form, both egoism and anomie can result in suicide. Let’s look at these two different, albeit intimately interrelated, conditions in turn.

For Durkheim, egoistic suicide results from a pathological weakening of the bonds between the individual and the social group. This lack of integration is evident statistically, in that there are higher rates of suicide among single, divorced, and widowed persons than among married persons, and that there are higher rates of suicide among married persons without children than there are among married persons with children. Additionally, Durkheim argued that egoism helps explain why suicide rates are higher among Protestants than among Catholics or Jews: Protestantism emphasizes an individual relationship with God, which means that the individual is less bound to the religious clergy and members of the congregation. Interesting, then, Durkheim maintains that it is not Catholic doctrine that inhibits the act of suicide; rather, it is Catholics’ social bonds, their association with the priests, nuns, and other lay members of the congregation, that deter them from this act. Protestant rates of suicide are higher because Protestants are more socially and spiritually isolated than the more communally oriented Jews and Catholics.

Durkheim saw an increase in egoistic suicide as a “natural” outgrowth of the individuation of modern, industrial societies. For instance, today it is quite common—especially in big cities—for people to live alone. By contrast, in many traditional societies it is virtually unheard of for anyone to live alone. Children live with parents until they get married; parents move in with children (or vice versa) if a spouse dies; unmarried siblings live with either parents or other siblings. As we noted previously, Durkheim argued that in its extreme form the type of social isolation found in modern societies can be— literally—fatal.

Intertwined with an increasing lack of social integration in modern industrial societies is a lack of moral integration. Recall that in The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim used the term anomie to refer to the isolation caused by overspecialization, that results in the loosening of social ties.

Similarly, in Suicide Durkheim maintains that modern societies are “chronically” anomic, or characterized by a lack of regulation of the individual by the collective. Anomic suicide is the pathological consequence of this normal, chronic state of anomie. This type of suicide is characterized by an extraordinary lack of moral direction. The individual commits suicide because she feels isolated and morally adrift.

Thus, for instance, modern industrial societies are religiously pluralistic, whereby people are more able to freely choose among a variety of religious faiths—or to choose not to “believe” at all. Similarly, today many people choose to “identify”—or not—with a specific part of their ethnic heritage. That we spend much time and energy searching for “identity”—“I’m a punk!” “I’m Irish!”—reflects a chronic lack of moral regulation. To be sure, there are many wonderful benefits from this increasing individuation, which contrasts significantly from small, traditional, homogeneous societies in which “who” you are is taken for granted. In small, closed, indigenous societies without so many (or any) options, where there is one religion and one ethnic group, your place in that society is a cultural given—a “place” that may be quite oppressive. Not surprisingly, then, Durkheim asserts that suppressing individuation also can produce pathological consequences. (This point is discussed further later.)

The lack of moral regulation in modern societies is especially prevalent in times of intense social and personal change. During such periods, the authority of the family, the church, and the community may be challenged or questioned; without moral guidance and authority, individuals may feel like they have no moral anchor. The pursuit of individual desires and goals can overtake moral concerns. Thus for instance, researchers recently compared unemployment rates and suicide data in 54 countries in the world and found that the 2008 global recession contributed to an uptick in the suicide rate for men (but not for women). According to the survey, in 2009, the year after the Great Recession hit, a 37 percent higher unemployment rate was linked to a 3.3 percent increase in men’s global suicide rate (http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/20/2656051/great-recession-suicide- world/; www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5239). These findings accord with other research. For instance, another study found that the suicide rate in the United States increased four times faster between 2008 and 2010, right after the housing bubble burst, than it did in the eight years before the recession (www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/health/us-suicide-rate-rose-during-recession- study-finds.html?hp&_r=1&).

However, Durkheim maintains that anomie can result not only from “bad” social change, such as losing one’s job or a political crisis, but from “positive”

social change as well. Consider, for instance, what happens when someone wins the lottery. Most people think that if they were to win the lottery, they would experience only happiness. Indeed, some people buy lottery tickets thinking, “If I win the ‘big one,’ all my problems will be solved!” However, Durkheim contends that sudden life-changing events can bring on a battery of social and personal issues that one might not expect.

First, after winning the lottery, you might suddenly find yourself confronted with weighty existential issues. Before the lottery, you may have simply worked—and worked hard—because you needed to earn a living. But now that you’ve won the lottery, you don’t know what to do. By not having to work, you might start thinking about things, such as the meaning of life, that you had never thought about before. This feeling that you don’t know “what to do” and “how to act” is a state of anomie.

In addition, you might start to wonder how much friends and family should get from your winnings. You might begin to feel like everyone just wants your money and that it is hard to tell who likes you and who just likes your newfound fame and fortune. You might feel like you can’t talk to your friends about your dilemma, that no one in your previous social circle really “understands” you anymore. You may begin to find that you can’t relate to the people from your old socioeconomic class, but that you can’t relate to anyone in your new class either. Thus, the sudden change brought about by winning the lottery can lead not only to feeling morally “anchorless” (anomie) but also to feeling socially alone (egoism). A most extreme outcome of feeling this moral and social isolation would be suicide.

As we noted previously, Durkheim argued that traditional and modern societies are rooted in different social conditions. Compared to modern societies, social regulation is intensive in traditional societies, thus limiting the development of individuality. In extreme form, such restrictions can lead to altruistic suicide, where an individual gives his life for the social group. According to Durkheim, this is the primary type of suicide that occurs in small, traditional societies where individuation is minimal. The classic type of altruistic suicide was the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice, in which a person was sacrificed for the moral or spiritual benefit of the group.1

Today many sociologists find fault with Durkheim’s distinction between “modern” and “traditional” societies. This binary opposition seems to be a function of the Eurocentrism of his day: social scientists tended to imagine that their societies were extremely “complex,” while “traditional” societies were just “simple.” Indeed, traditional and modern societies may have more in common than Durkheim let on. The degree of integration of the individual into the collective social group is a complex process rather than a permanent

state. For instance, even though Durkheim saw altruistic suicide as more prevalent in “primitive” societies, sadly, it is far from absent in modern societies as well. Not unlike the altruistic suicides in primitive societies, modern-day wars and suicide bombings are carried out on the premise that sacrificing one’s life is necessary for the fight to preserve or attain a sacred way of life for the group as a whole. Nowhere are the similarities between these expressions of altruistic suicide (soldiers, suicide bombers, and “primitive” human sacrifice) more readily apparent than in the tragic case of the Japanese kamikaze (suicide) pilots of World War II. Shockingly, kamikaze flights were a principal tactic of Japan in the last year of the war.2

AP Photo/Malcolm Browne; used by permission

Photo 3.3 In a modern-day incident of altruistic suicide, a number of South Vietnamese Buddhist monks used self-immolation to protest the persecution of the country’s majority Buddhist population at the hands of the Catholic president, Ngô Ðình Here, Thích burns himself to death on a Saigon street, June 11, 1963.

From Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897) Émile Durkheim

ANOMIC SUICIDE But society is not only something attracting the sentiments and activities of individuals with unequal force. It is also a power controlling them. There is a relation between the way this regulative action is performed and the social suicide-rate.

I It is a well-known fact that economic crises have an aggravating effect on the

suicidal tendency.

In Vienna, in 1873 a financial crisis occurred which reached its height in 1874; the number of suicides immediately rose. From 141 in 1872, they rose to 153 in 1873 and 216 in 1874. The increase in 1874 is 53 per centi above 1872 and 41 per cent above 1873. What proves this catastrophe to have been the sole cause of the increase is the special prominence of the increase when the crisis was acute, or during the first four months of 1874. From January 1 to April 30 there had been 48 suicides in 1871, 44 in 1872, 43 in 1873; there were 73 in 1874. The increase is 70 per cent.ii The same crisis occurring at the same time in Frankfurt-on-Main produced the same effects there. In the years before 1874, 22 suicides were committed annually on the average; in 1874 there were 32, or 45 per cent more.

The famous crash is unforgotten which took place on the Paris Bourse during the winter of 1882. Its consequences were felt not only in Paris but throughout France. From 1874 to 1886 the average annual increase was only 2 per cent; in 1882 it was 7 per cent. Moreover, it was unequally distributed among the different times of year, occurring principally during the first three months or at the very time of the crash. Within these three months alone 59 per cent of the total rise occurred. So distinctly is the rise the result of unusual circumstances that it not only is not encountered in 1881 but has disappeared in 1883, although on the whole the latter year had a few more suicides than the preceding one:

This relation is found not only in some exceptional cases, but is the rule. The number of bankruptcies is a barometer of adequate sensitivity, reflecting the variations of economic life. When they increase abruptly from year to year, some serious disturbance has certainly occurred. From 1845 to 1869 there were sudden rises, symptomatic of crises, on three occasions. While the annual increase in the number of bankruptcies during this period is 3.2 per cent, it is 26 per cent in 1847, 37 per cent in 1854 and 20 per cent in 1861. At these three moments, there is also to be observed an unusually rapid rise in the number of suicides. While the average annual increase during these 24 years was only 2 per cent, it was 17 per cent in 1847, 8 per cent in 1854 and 9 per cent in 1861.

But to what do these crises owe their influence? Is it because they increase poverty by causing public wealth to fluctuate? Is life more readily renounced

as it becomes more difficult? The explanation is seductively simple; and it agrees with the popular idea of suicide. But it is contradicted by facts.

Actually, if voluntary deaths increased because life was becoming more difficult, they should diminish perceptibly as comfort increases. Now, although when the price of the most necessary foods rises excessively, suicides generally do the same, they are not found to fall below the average in the opposite case. In Prussia, in 1850 wheat was quoted at the lowest point it reached during the entire period of 1848–81; it was at 6.91 marks per 50 kilograms; yet at this very time suicides rose from 1,527 where they were in 1849 to 1,736, or an increase of 13 per cent, and continued to increase during the years 1851, 1852 and 1853 although the cheap market held. In 1858–59 a new fall took place; yet suicides rose from 2,038 in 1857 to 2,126 in 1858, and to 2,146 in 1859. From 1863 to 1866 prices which had reached 11.04 marks in 1861 fell progressively to 7.95 marks in 1864 and remained very reasonable for the whole period; suicides during the same time increased 17 per cent (2,112 in 1862, 2,485 in 1866).iii Similar facts are observed in Bavaria. According to a curve constructed by Mayriv for the period 1835–61, the price of rye was lowest during the years 1857–58 and 1858–59; now suicides, which in 1857 numbered only 286, rose to 329 in 1858, to 387 in 1859. The same phenomenon had already occurred during the years 1848–50; at that time wheat had been very cheap in Bavaria as well as throughout Europe. Yet, in spite of a slight temporary drop due to political events, which we have mentioned, suicides remained at the same level. There were 217 in 1847, there were still 215 in 1848, and if they dropped for a moment to 189 in 1849, they rose again in 1850 and reached 250.

So far is the increase in poverty from causing the increase in suicide that even fortunate crises, the effect of which is abruptly to enhance a country’s prosperity, affect suicide like economic disasters.

The conquest of Rome by Victor-Emmanuel in 1870, by definitely forming the basis of Italian unity, was the starting point for the country of a process of growth which is making it one of the great powers of Europe. Trade and industry received a sharp stimulus from it and surprisingly rapid changes took place. Whereas in 1876, 4,459 steam boilers with a total of 54,000 horse- power were enough for industrial needs, the number of machines in 1887 was 9,983 and their horse-power of 167,000 was threefold more. Of course the amount of production rose proportionately during the same time.v Trade followed the same rising course; not only did the merchant marine, communications and transportation develop, but the number of persons and things transported doubled.vi As this generally heightened activity caused an increase in salaries (an increase of 35 per cent is estimated to have taken place

from 1873 to 1889), the material comfort of workers rose, especially since the price of bread was falling at the same time.vii Finally, according to calculations by Bodio, private wealth rose from 45 and a half billions on the average during the period 1875–80 to 51 billions during the years 1880–85 and 54 billions and a half in 1885–90.viii

Now, an unusual increase in the number of suicides is observed parallel with this collective renaissance. From 1866 to 1870 they were roughly stable; from 1871 to 1877 they increased 36 per cent. There were in

And since then the movement has continued. The total figure, 1,139 in 1877, was 1,463 in 1889, a new increase of 28 per cent.

In Prussia the same phenomenon occurred on two occasions. In 1866 the kingdom received a first enlargement. It annexed several important provinces, while becoming the head of the Confederation of the North. Immediately this growth in glory and power was accompanied by a sudden rise in the number of suicides. There had been 123 suicides per million during the period 1856– 60 per average year and only 122 during the years 1861–65. In the five years, 1866–70, in spite of the drop in 1870, the average rose to 133. The year 1867, which immediately followed victory, was that in which suicide achieved the highest point it had reached since 1816 (1 suicide per 5,432 inhabitants, while in 1864 there was only one case per 8,739).

On the morrow of the war of 1870 a new accession of good fortune took place. Germany was unified and placed entirely under Prussian hegemony. An enormous war indemnity addedto the public wealth; commerce and industry made great strides. The development of suicide was never so rapid. From 1875 to 1886 it increased 90 per cent, from 3,278 cases to 6,212.

World expositions, when successful, are considered favorable events in the existence of a society. They stimulate business, bring more money into the country and are thought to increase public prosperity, especially in the city where they take place. Yet, quite possibly, they ultimately take their toll in a considerably higher number of suicides. Especially does this seem to have

been true of the Exposition of 1878. The rise that year was the highest occurring between 1874 and 1886. It was 8 per cent, that is, higher than the one caused by the crash of 1882. And what almost proves the Exposition to have been the cause of this increase is that 86 per cent of it took place precisely during the six months of the Exposition.

In 1889 things were not identical all over France. But quite possibly the Boulanger crisis neutralized the contrary effects of the Exposition by its depressive influence on the growth of suicides. Certainly at Paris, although the political feeling aroused must have had the same effect as in the rest of the country, things happened as in 1878. For the 7 months of the Exposition, suicides increased almost 10 per cent, 9.66 to be exact, while through the remainder of the year they were below what they had been in 1888 and what they afterwards were in 1890.

It may well be that but for the Boulanger influence the rise would have been greater.

What proves still more conclusively that economic distress does not have the aggravating influence often attributed to it, is that it tends rather to produce the opposite effect. There is very little suicide in Ireland, where the peasantry leads so wretched a life. Poverty-stricken Calabria has almost no suicides; Spain has a tenth as many as France. Poverty may even be considered a protection. In the various French departments the more people there are who have independent means, the more numerous are suicides. . . .

If therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is not because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is, disturbances of the collective order.ix Every disturbance of equilibrium, even though it achieves greater comfort and a heightening of general vitality, is an impulse to voluntary death. Whenever serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men are more inclined to self- destruction. How is this possible? How can something considered generally to improve existence serve to detach men from it?

For the answer, some preliminary considerations are required.

II

No living being can be happy or even exist unless his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his means. In other words, if his needs require more than can be granted, or even merely something of a different sort, they will be under continual friction and can only function painfully. Movements incapable of production without pain tend not to be reproduced. Unsatisfied tendencies atrophy, and as the impulse to live is merely the result of all the rest, it is bound to weaken as the others relax.

In the animal, at least in a normal condition, this equilibrium is established with automatic spontaneity because the animal depends on purely material conditions. All the organism needs is that the supplies of substance and energy constantly employed in the vital process should be periodically renewed by equivalent quantities; that replacement be equivalent to use. When the void created by existence in its own resources is filled, the animal, satisfied, asks nothing further. Its power of reflection is not sufficiently developed to imagine other ends than those implicit in its physical nature. On the other hand, as the work demanded of each organ itself depends on the general state of vital energy and the needs of organic equilibrium, use is regulated in turn by replacement and the balance is automatic. The limits of one are those of the other; both are fundamental to the constitution of the existence in question, which cannot exceed them.

This is not the case with man, because most of his needs are not dependent on his body or not to the same degree. Strictly speaking, we may consider that the quantity of material supplies necessary to the physical maintenance of a human life is subject to computation, though this be less exact than in the preceding case and a wider margin left for the free combinations of the will; for beyond the indispensable minimum which satisfies nature when instinctive, a more awakened reflection suggests better conditions, seemingly desirable ends craving fulfillment. Such appetites, however, admittedly

sooner or later reach a limit which they cannot pass. But how determine the quantity of well-being, comfort or luxury legitimately to be craved by a human being? Nothing appears in man’s organic nor in his psychological constitution which sets a limit to such tendencies. The functioning of individual life does not require them to cease at one point rather than at another; the proof being that they have constantly increased since the beginnings of history, receiving more and more complete satisfaction, yet with no weakening of average health. Above all, how establish their proper variation with different conditions of life, occupations, relative importance of services, etc.? In no society are they equally satisfied in the different stages of the social hierarchy. Yet human nature is substantially the same among all men, in its essential qualities. It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss. But if nothing external can restrain this capacity, it can only be a source of

torment to itself. Unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is rightly considered a sign of morbidity. Being unlimited, they constantly and infinitely surpass the means at their command; they cannot be quenched. Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture. It has been claimed, indeed, that human activity naturally aspires beyond assignable limits and sets itself unattainable goals. But how can such an undetermined state be any more reconciled with the conditions of mental life than with the demands of physical life? All man’s pleasure in acting, moving and exerting himself implies the sense that his efforts are not in vain and that by walking he has advanced. However, one does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or—which is the same thing—when his goal is infinity. Since the distance between us and it is always the same, whatever road we take, we might as well have made the motions without progress from the spot. Even our glances behind and our feeling of pride at the distance covered can cause only deceptive satisfaction, since the remaining distance is not proportionately reduced. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness. Of course, man may hope contrary to all reason, and hope has its pleasures even when unreasonable. It may sustain him for a time; but it cannot survive the repeated disappointments of experience indefinitely. What more can the future offer him than the past, since he can never reach a tenable condition nor even approach the glimpsed ideal? Thus, the more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs. Shall action as such be considered agreeable? First, only on condition of blindness to its uselessness. Secondly, for this pleasure to be felt and to temper and half

veil the accompanying painful unrest, such unending motion must at least always be easy and unhampered. If it is interfered with only restlessness is left, with the lack of ease which it, itself, entails. But it would be a miracle if no insurmountable obstacle were never encountered. Our thread of life on these conditions is pretty thin, breakable at any instant.

To achieve any other result, the passions first must be limited. Only then can they be harmonized with the faculties and satisfied. But since the individual has no way of limiting them, this must be done by some force exterior to him. A regulative force must play the same role for moral needs which the organism plays for physical needs. This means that the force can only be moral. The awakening of conscience interrupted the state of equilibrium of the animal’s dormant existence; only conscience, therefore, can furnish the means to re-establish it. Physical restraint would be ineffective; hearts cannot be touched by physio-chemical forces. So far as the appetites are not automatically restrained by physiological mechanisms, they can be halted only by a limit that they recognize as just. Men would never consent to restrict their desires if they felt justified in passing the assigned limit. But, for reasons given above, they cannot assign themselves this law of justice. So they must receive it from an authority which they respect, to which they yield spontaneously. Either directly and as a whole or through the agency of one of its organs, society alone can play this moderating role; for it is the only moral power superior to the individual, the authority of which he accepts. It alone has the power necessary to stipulate law and to set the point beyond which the passions must not go. Finally, it alone can estimate the reward to be prospectively offered to every class of human functionary, in the name of the common interest.

As a matter of fact, at every moment of history there is a dim perception, in the moral consciousness of societies, of the respective value of different social services, the relative reward due to each, and the consequent degree of comfort appropriate on the average to workers in each occupation. The different functions are graded in public opinion and a certain coefficient of well-being assigned to each, according to its place in the hierarchy. According to accepted ideas, for example, a certain way of living is considered the upper limit to which a workman may aspire in his efforts to improve his existence, and there is another limit below which he is not willingly permitted to fall unless he has seriously bemeaned himself. Both differ for city and country workers, for the domestic servant and the day-laborer, for the business clerk and the official, etc. Likewise the man of wealth is reproved if he lives the life of a poor man, but also if he seeks the refinements of luxury overmuch. Economists may protest in vain; public feeling will always be scandalized if an individual spends too much wealth for wholly superfluous use, and it even

seems that this severity relaxes only in times of moral disturbance.x A genuine regimen exists, therefore, although not always legally formulated, which fixes with relative precision the maximum degree of ease of living to which each social class may legitimately aspire. However, there is nothing immutable about such a scale. It changes with the increase or decrease of collective revenue and the changes occurring in the moral ideas of society. Thus what appears luxury to one period no longer does so to another; and the well-being which for long periods was granted to a class only by exception and supererogation, finally appears strictly necessary and equitable.

Under this pressure, each in his sphere vaguely realizes the extreme limit set to his ambitions and aspires to nothing beyond. At least if he respects regulations and is docile to collective authority, that is, has a wholesome moral constitution, he feels that it is not well to ask more. Thus, an end and goal are set to the passions. Truly, there is nothing rigid nor absolute about such determination. The economic ideal assigned each class of citizens is itself confined to certain limits, within which the desires have free range. But it is not infinite. This relative limitation and the moderation it involves, make men contented with their lot while stimulating them moderately to improve it; and this average contentment causes the feeling of calm, active happiness, the pleasure in existing and living which characterizes health for societies as well as for individuals. Each person is then at least, generally speaking, in harmony with his condition, and desires only what he may legitimately hope for as the normal reward of his activity. Besides, this does not condemn man to a sort of immobility. He may seek to give beauty to his life; but his attempts in this direction may fail without causing him to despair. For, loving what he has and not fixing his desire solely on what he lacks, his wishes and hopes may fail of what he has happened to aspire to, without his being wholly destitute. He has the essentials. The equilibrium of his happiness is secure because it is defined, and a few mishaps cannot disconcert him.

But it would be of little use for everyone to recognize the justice of the hierarchy of functions established by public opinion, if he did not also consider the distribution of these functions just. The workman is not in harmony with his social position if he is not convinced that he has his deserts. If he feels justified in occupying another, what he has would not satisfy him. So it is not enough for the average level of needs for each social condition to be regulated by public opinion, but another, more precise rule, must fix the way in which these conditions are open to individuals. There is no society in which such regulation does not exist. It varies with times and places. Once it regarded birth as the almost exclusive principle of social classification; today it recognizes no other inherent inequality than hereditary fortune and merit. But in all these various forms its object is unchanged. It is also only possible,

everywhere, as a restriction upon individuals imposed by superior authority, that is, by collective authority. For it can be established only by requiring of one or another group of men, usually of all, sacrifices and concessions in the name of the public interest.

Some, to be sure, have thought that this moral pressure would become unnecessary if men’s economic circumstances were only no longer determined by heredity. If inheritance were abolished, the argument runs, if everyone began life with equal resources and if the competitive struggle were fought out on a basis of perfect equality, no one could think its results unjust. Each would instinctively feel that things are as they should be.

Truly, the nearer this ideal equality were approached, the less social restraint will be necessary. But it is only a matter of degree. One sort of heredity will always exist, that of natural talent. Intelligence, taste, scientific, artistic, literary or industrial ability, courage and manual dexterity are gifts received by each of us at birth, as the heir to wealth receives his capital or as the nobleman formerly received his title and function. A moral discipline will therefore still be required to make those less favored by nature accept the lesser advantages which they owe to the chance of birth. Shall it be demanded that all have an equal share and that no advantage be given those more useful and deserving? But then there would have to be a discipline far stronger to make these accept a treatment merely equal to that of the mediocre and incapable.

But like the one first mentioned, this discipline can be useful only if considered just by the peoples subject to it. When it is maintained only by custom and force, peace and harmony are illusory; the spirit of unrest and discontent are latent; appetites superficially restrained are ready to revolt. This happened in Rome and Greece when the faiths underlying the old organization of the patricians and plebeians were shaken, and in our modern societies when aristocratic prejudices began to lose their old ascendancy. But this state of upheaval is exceptional; it occurs only when society is passing through some abnormal crisis. In normal conditions the collective order is regarded as just by the great majority of persons. Therefore, when we say that an authority is necessary to impose this order on individuals, we certainly do not mean that violence is the only means of establishing it. Since this regulation is meant to restrain individual passions, it must come from a power which dominates individuals; but this power must also be obeyed through respect, not fear.

It is not true, that human activity can be released from all restraint. Nothing in the world can enjoy such a privilege. All existence being a part of the universe is relative to the remainder; its nature and method of manifestation

accordingly depend not only on itself but on other beings, who consequently restrain and regulate it. Here there are only differences of degree and form between the mineral realm and the thinking person. Man’s characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body’s yoke, but is subject to that of society.

But when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence; thence come the sudden rises in the curve of suicides which we have pointed out above.

In the case of economic disasters, indeed, something like a declassification occurs which suddenly casts certain individuals into a lower state than their previous one. Then they must reduce their requirements, restrain their needs, learn greater self-control. All the advantages of social influence are lost so far as they are concerned; their moral education has to be recommenced. But society cannot adjust them instantaneously to this new life and teach them to practice the increased self-repression to which they are unaccustomed. So they are not adjusted to the condition forced on them, and its very prospect is intolerable; hence the suffering which detaches them from a reduced existence even before they have made trial of it.

It is the same if the source of the crisis is an abrupt growth of power and wealth. Then, truly, as the conditions of life are changed, the standard according to which needs were regulated can no longer remain the same; for it varies with social resources, since it largely determines the share of each class of producers. The scale is upset; but a new scale cannot be immediately improvised. Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things. So long as the social forces thus freed have not regained equilibrium, their respective values are unknown and so all regulation is lacking for a time. The limits are unknown between the possible and the impossible, what is just and what is unjust, legitimate claims and hopes and those which are immoderate. Consequently, there is no restraint upon aspirations. If the disturbance is profound, it affects even the principles controlling the distribution of men among various occupations. Since the relations between various parts of society are necessarily modified, the ideas expressing these relations must change. Some particular class especially favored by the crisis is no longer resigned to its former lot, and, on the other hand, the example of its greater good fortune arouses all sorts of jealousy below and about it. Appetites, not being controlled by a public opinion become disoriented, no

longer recognize the limits proper to them. Besides, they are at the same time seized by a sort of natural erethism simply by the greater intensity of public life. With increased prosperity desires increase. At the very moment when traditional rules have lost their authority, the richer prize offered these appetites stimulates them and makes them more exigent and impatient of control. The state of deregulation or anomy is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining.

But then their very demands make fulfillment impossible. Overweening ambition always exceeds the results obtained, great as they may be, since there is no warning to pause here. Nothing gives satisfaction and all this agitation is uninterruptedly maintained without appeasement. Above all, since this race for an unattainable goal can give no other pleasure but that of the race itself, if it is one, once it is interrupted the participants are left empty- handed. At the same time the struggle grows more violent and painful, both from being less controlled and because competition is greater. All classes contend among themselves because no established classification any longer exists. Effort grows, just when it becomes less productive. How could the desire to live not be weakened under such conditions?

This explanation is confirmed by the remarkable immunity of poor countries. Poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraint in itself. No matter how one acts, desires have to depend upon resources to some extent; actual possessions are partly the criterion of those aspired to. So the less one has the less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely. Lack of power, compelling moderation, accustoms men to it, while nothing excites envy if no one has superfluity. Wealth, on the other hand, by the power it bestows, deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only. Reducing the resistance we encounter from objects, it suggests the possibility of unlimited success against them. The less limited one feels, the more intolerable all limitation appears. Not without reason, therefore, have so many religions dwelt on the advantages and moral value of poverty. It is actually the best school for teaching self-restraint. Forcing us to constant self-discipline, it prepares us to accept collective discipline with equanimity, while wealth, exalting the individual, may always arouse the spirit of rebellion which is the very source of immorality. This, of course, is no reason why humanity should not improve its material condition. But though the moral danger involved in every growth of prosperity is not irremediable, it should not be forgotten.

III

If anomy never appeared except, as in the above instances, in intermittent spurts and acute crisis, it might cause the social suicide-rate to vary from time to time, but it would not be a regular, constant factor. In one sphere of social

life, however—the sphere of trade and industry—it is actually in a chronic state. For a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing

industrial relations from all regulation. Until very recently, it was the function of a whole system of moral forces to exert this discipline. First, the influence of religion was felt alike by workers and masters, the poor and the rich. It consoled the former and taught them contentment with their lot by informing them of the providential nature of the social order, that the share of each class was assigned by God himself, and by holding out the hope for just compensation in a world to come in return for the inequalities of this world. It governed the latter, recalling that worldly interests are not man’s entire lot, that they must be subordinate to other and higher interests, and that they should therefore not be pursued without rule or measure. Temporal power, in turn, restrained the scope of economic functions by its supremacy over them and by the relatively subordinate role it assigned them. Finally, within the business world proper, the occupational groups by regulating salaries, the price of products and production itself, indirectly fixed the average level of income on which needs are partially based by the very force of circumstances. However, we do not mean to propose this organization as a model. Clearly it would be inadequate to existing societies without great changes. What we stress is its existence, the fact of its useful influence, and that nothing today has come to take its place.

Actually, religion has lost most of its power. And government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant. The most opposite schools, orthodox economists and extreme socialists, unite to reduce government to the role of a more or less passive intermediary among the various social functions. The former wish to make it simply the guardian of individual contracts; the latter leave it the task of doing the collective bookkeeping, that is, of recording the demands of consumers, transmitting them to producers, inventorying the total revenue and distributing it according to a fixed formula. But both refuse it any power to subordinate other social organs to itself and to make them converge toward one dominant aim. On both sides nations are declared to have the single or chief purpose of achieving industrial prosperity; such is the implication of the dogma of economic materialism, the basis of both apparently opposed systems. And as these theories merely express the state of opinion, industry, instead of being still regarded as a means to an end transcending itself, has become the supreme end of individuals and societies alike. Thereupon the appetites thus excited have become freed of any limiting authority. By sanctifying them, so to speak, this apotheosis of well-being has placed them above all human law. Their restraint seems like a sort of sacrilege. For this reason, even the purely

utilitarian regulation of them exercised by the industrial world itself through the medium of occupational groups has been unable to persist. Ultimately, this liberation of desires has been made worse by the very development of industry and the almost infinite extension of the market. So long as the producer could gain his profits only in his immediate neighborhood, the restricted amount of possible gain could not much overexcite ambition. Now that he may assume to have almost the entire world as his customer, how could passions accept their former confinement in the face of such limitless prospects?

Such is the source of the excitement predominating in this part of society, and which has thence extended to the other parts. There, the state of crisis and anomy is constant and, so to speak, normal. From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned, but so too is possibility abandoned when it in turn becomes reality. A thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once known. Henceforth one has no strength to endure the least reverse. The whole fever subsides and the sterility of all the tumult is apparent, and it is seen that all these new sensations in their infinite quantity cannot form a solid foundation of happiness to support one during days of trial. The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present’s afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. Weariness alone, moreover, is enough to bring disillusionment, for he cannot in the end escape the futility of an endless pursuit.

We may even wonder if this moral state is not principally what makes economic catastrophes of our day so fertile in suicides. In societies where a man is subjected to a healthy discipline, he submits more readily to the blows of chance. The necessary effort for sustaining a little more discomfort costs him relatively little, since he is used to discomfort and constraint. But when every constraint is hateful in itself, how can closer constraint not seem intolerable? There is no tendency to resignation in the feverish impatience of men’s lives. When there is no other aim but to outstrip constantly the point arrived at, how painful to be thrown back! Now this very lack of organization

characterizing our economic condition throws the door wide to every sort of adventure. Since imagination is hungry for novelty, and ungoverned, it gropes at random. Setbacks necessarily increase with risks and thus crises multiply, just when they are becoming more destructive.

Yet these dispositions are so inbred that society has grown to accept them and is accustomed to think them normal. It is everlastingly repeated that it is man’s nature to be eternally dissatisfied, constantly to advance, without relief or rest, toward an indefinite goal. The longing for infinity is daily represented as a mark of moral distinction, whereas it can only appear within unregulated consciences which elevate to a rule the lack of rule from which they suffer. The doctrine of the most ruthless and swift progress has become an article of faith. But other theories appear parallel with those praising the advantages of instability, which, generalizing the situation that gives them birth, declare life evil, claim that it is richer in grief than in pleasure and that it attracts men only by false claims. Since this disorder is greatest in the economic world, it has most victims there.

Industrial and commercial functions are really among the occupations which furnish the greatest number of suicides (see Table XXIV). Almost on a level with the liberal professions, they sometimes surpass them; they are especially more afflicted than agriculture, where the old regulative forces still make their appearance felt most and where the fever of business has least penetrated. Here is best called what was once the general constitution of the economic order. And the divergence would be yet greater if, among the suicides of industry, employers were distinguished from workmen, for the former are probably most stricken by the state of anomy. The enormous rate of those with independent means (720 per million) sufficiently shows that the possessors of most comfort suffer most. Everything that enforces subordination attenuates the effects of this state. At least the horizon of the lower classes is limited by those above them, and for this same reason their desires are more modest. Those who have only empty space above them are almost inevitably lost in it, if no force restrains them.

Table XXIV Suicides per Million Persons of Different Occupations

* When statistics distinguish several different sorts of liberal occupation, we show as a specimen the one in which the suicide-rate is highest.

† From 1826 to 1880 economic functions seem less affected (see Compte-rendu of 1880); but were occupational statistics very accurate? ‡ This figure is reached only by men of letters.

§ Figure represents Trade, Transportation, and Industry combined for Saxony. —Ed.

Anomy, therefore, is a regular and specific factor in suicide in our modern societies; one of the springs from which the annual contingent feeds. So we have here a new type to distinguish from the others. It differs from them in its dependence, not on the way in which individuals are attached to society, but on how it regulates them. Egoistic suicide results from man’s no longer finding a basis for existence in life; altruistic suicide, because this basis for existence appears to man situated beyond life itself. The third sort of suicide, the existence of which has just been shown, results from man’s activity’s lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings. By virtue of its origin we shall assign this last variety the name of anomic suicide.

Certainly, this and egoistic suicide have kindred ties. Both spring from society’s insufficient presence in individuals. But the sphere of its absence is not the same in both cases. In egoistic suicide it is deficient in truly collective activity, thus depriving the latter of object and meaning. In anomic suicide, society’s influence is lacking in the basically individual passions, thus leaving them without a check-rein. In spite of their relationship, therefore, the two types are independent of each other. We may offer society everything social in us, and still be unable to control our desires; one may live in an anomic state without being egoistic, and vice versa. These two sorts of suicide therefore do not draw their chief recruits from the same social environments; one has its principal field among intellectual careers, the world of thought—the other, the industrial or commercial world.

IV But economic anomy is not the only anomy which may give rise to suicide.

The suicides occurring at the crisis of widowhood, of which we have already spokenxi are really due to domestic anomy resulting from the death of husband or wife. A family catastrophe occurs which affects the survivor. He is not adapted to the new situation in which he finds himself and accordingly offers less resistance to suicide.

But another variety of anomic suicide should draw greater attention, both because it is more chronic and because it will serve to illustrate the nature and functions of marriage.

In the Annales de demographie internationale (September 1882), Bertillon published a remarkable study of divorce, in which he proved the following proposition: throughout Europe the number of suicides varies with that of divorces and separations [Table XXV illustrates such variations]. . . .

Table XXV Comparison of European States From the Point of View of Both Divorce and Suicide

INDIVIDUAL FORMS OF THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF SUICIDE

One result now stands out prominently from our investigation: namely, that there are not one but various forms of suicide. Of course, suicide is always the act of a man who prefers death to life. But the causes determining him are not of the same sort in all cases: they are even sometimes mutually opposed. Now, such difference in causes must reappear in their effects. We may therefore be sure that there are several sorts of suicide which are distinct in quality from one another. But the certainty that these differences exist is not enough; we need to observe them directly and know of what they consist. We need to see the characteristics of special suicides grouped in distinct classes corresponding to the types just distinguished. Thus we would follow the various currents which generate suicide from their social origins to their individual manifestations.

This morphological classification, which was hardly possible at the commencement of this study, may be undertaken now that an aetiological classification forms its basis. Indeed, we only need to start with the three kinds of factors which we have just assigned to suicide and discover whether the distinctive properties it assumes in manifesting itself among individual persons may be derived from them, and if so, how. Of course, not all the peculiarities which suicide may present can be deduced in this fashion; for some may exist which depend solely on the person’s own nature. Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon. But these causes in turn must stamp the suicides they determine with a shade all their own, a special mark expressive of them. This collective mark we must find.

To be sure, this can be done only approximately. We are not in a position to describe methodically all the suicides daily committed by men or committed in the course of history. We can only emphasize the most general and striking characteristics without even having an objective criterion for making the selection. Moreover, we can only proceed deductively in relating them to the respective causes from which they seem to spring. All that we can do is to show their logical implication, though the reasoning may not always be able to receive experimental confirmation. We do not forget that a deduction uncontrolled by experiment is always questionable. Yet this research is far from being useless, even with these reservations. Even though it may be considered only a method of illustrating the preceding results by examples, it would still have the worth of giving them a more concrete character by connecting them more closely with the data of sense-perception and with the details of daily experience. It will also introduce some little distinctiveness into this mass of facts usually lumped together as though varying only by shades, though there are striking differences among them. Suicide is like mental alienation. For the popular mind the latter consists in a single state, always identical, capable only of superficial differentiation according to circumstances. For the alienist, on the contrary, the word denotes many nosological types. Every suicide is, likewise, ordinarily considered a victim of melancholy whose life has become a burden to him. Actually, the acts by which a man renounces life belong to different species, of wholly different moral and social significance.

SOURCE: Reprinted with permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from Suicide: A Study in Sociology by Émile Durkheim, translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, edited by George Simpson. Copyright © 1951 by The Free Press.

Copyright renewed © 1979 by The Free Press. All rights reserved.

iDurkheim incorrectly gives this figure as 51 percent.—Ed. iiIn 1874 over 1873.—Ed.

iiiSee Starck, Verbrechen und Vergehen in Preussen, Berlin, 1884, p. 55. ivDie Gesetzmässigkeit im Gesellschaftsleben, p. 345.

vSee Fornasari di Verce, La criminalita e le vicende economiche d’Italia, Turin 1894, pp. 7783. viIbid., pp. 108–117.

viiIbid., pp. 86–104. viiiThe increase is less during the period 1885–90 because of a financial crisis.

ixTo prove that an increase in prosperity diminishes suicides, the attempt has been made to show that they become less when emigration, the escape-valve of poverty, is widely practiced (See Legoyt, pp. 257–59). But cases are numerous where parallelism instead of inverse proportions exist between the two. In Italy from 1876 to 1890 the number of emigrants rose from 76 per 100,000 inhabitants to 335, a figure itself exceeded between 1887 and 1889. At the same time suicides did not cease to grow in numbers. xActually, this is a purely moral reprobation and can hardly be judicially implemented. We do not consider any reestablishment of sumptuary laws desirable or even possible.

xiSee above, Book II, Ch. 3.

Introduction to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

In his final and most theoretically acclaimed book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim sought to explain the way the moral realm worked by focusing on religion. Durkheim saw religious ceremonies not merely as a celebration of supernatural deities, but as a worshiping of social life itself, such that as long as there are societies, there will be religion (Robertson 1970:13).

In other words, for Durkheim, social life—whether in traditional or modern society—is inherently religious, for “religious force is nothing other than the collective and anonymous force” of society (Durkheim 1912/1995:210). The worship of transcendent gods or spirits and the respect and awe accorded to their power is in actuality the worship of the social group and the force it exerts over the individual. No matter how “simple” or “complex” the society, religion is thus a “system of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members, and the obscure but intimate relations which they have with it . . . for it is an eternal truth that outside of us there exists something greater than us, with which we enter into

communion” (ibid.:257). For Durkheim, this outside power, this “something greater” is society.

In saying that social life is inherently religious, Durkheim defined religion in a very broad way. For Durkheim, “religion” does not mean solely “churchly” or institutional things; rather, religion is a system of symbols and rituals about the sacred that is practiced by a community of believers. This definition of religion is often called “functionalist” rather than “substantive” because it emphasizes not the substantive content of religion, such as particular rituals or doctrines (e.g., baptisms or bar mitzvahs, or belief in an afterlife, higher beings, etc.), but the social function of religion.

For Durkheim, the primary function of religion is to encode the system of relations of the group (Eliade and Couliano 1991:2). It focuses and reaffirms the collective sentiments and ideas that hold the group together. Religious practices, accordingly, serve to bind participants together in celebration of the society (Robertson 1970:15). As Durkheim (1912/1995:429) states: There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which makes its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments.

According to Durkheim, religion consists of two categories: “beliefs” and “rites.” Beliefs include relatively intangible “states of opinion,” “representations” (symbols) and “thought”; while rites include actual “practices” and “action.” While clearly religious beliefs and rites (or thought and action) are intimately intertwined, Durkheim analytically separates the relatively intangible (beliefs) from the relatively tangible (rites) aspects of religion. For instance, a cross is a symbol or marker that stands for something else. It is a representation that calls up specific collective ideas and meanings, namely the crucifixion of Christ, which is emblematic of Christian spirituality or tradition. Wearing a cross on a necklace often means that one is a Christian. It identifies the wearer as a member of a specific religious community or specific shared ideas (e.g., a religious tradition in which Jesus Christ is understood as the son of God). Most important, symbols such as the cross are capable of calling up and reaffirming shared meaning and the feeling of community, regardless of one’s physical whereabouts (i.e. they evoke an imagined community, in Benedict Anderson’s terms). As Durkheim (1912/1995:232) states, “Without symbols, social sentiments could have only a precarious existence.”

© Philip Gould/Corbis

Photo 3.4a Congregation Taking Communion at a Catholic Church

© Tony Arruza/Corbis Photo 3.4b Fans at Sporting Event Doing “the Wave”

Both churchgoers and sports fans engage in communal ritual acts. As Durkheim (1912/1995:262) states, “It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to some object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison.”

By contrast, a ritual is a highly routinized act, such as saying the pledge of allegiance, or taking communion. Though rituals are often highly symbolic

acts (for instance, the Christian ritual of communion symbolizes and commemorates a historical event in the life of Jesus, and many churches require individuals to profess belief in the meanings behind the ritual in order to take part in it); Durkheim analytically separates beliefs from rites, in order to emphasize that rituals are acts that literally create communion, that is,— actual participation in the unity (“communion”) of believers (McGuire 1997:187). Most interesting, this analytical separation of beliefs from rites enables Durkheim to assert that rituals can unite a social group regardless of individual differences in beliefs or strength of convictions. It is the common experience and focus that binds the participants together. Because the central issue for Durkheim is shared meanings and communal

practice and experience Durkheim sees no essential difference between “religious” and “secular” beliefs and rites. “Let us pray” (an opening moment in a religious service) and “Let us stand for the national anthem” (an opening moment of a baseball game) are both ritual acts that bond the individual to a community. In exactly the same way, Durkheim suggested that there is no essential difference between religious holidays, such as Passover or Christmas, and secular holidays, such as Independence Day or Thanksgiving. Both are collective celebrations of identity and community (see Edles 2002:27–30). Individuals know they are moved; they just don’t understand the real causes for their feelings. Religious ritual moments are ones in which the moral authority of the group is perceived as (or chalked up to) a spiritual force.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim explains that symbols and rituals are classified as fundamentally sacred or profane. The sacred refers to the extraordinary, that which is set apart from and “above and beyond” the everyday world. In direct contrast to the sacred realm, is the realm of the everyday world of the mundane or routine, or the profane. Most important, objects are intrinsically neither sacred nor profane; rather, their meaning or classification is continually produced and reproduced (or altered) in collective processes of ritualization and symbolization. Thus, for instance, lighting a candle can either be a relatively mundane task to provide light or it can be a sacred act, as in the case of the Jewish ritual of lighting a candle to commemorate the Sabbath (McGuire 1997:17). In the latter context, this act denotes a sacred moment as well as a celebration. This points to the central function of the distinction between the sacred and the profane. It imposes an orderly system on the inherently untidy experience of living (Gamson 1998:141). Thus, for instance, ritual practices (e.g., standing for the national anthem or lighting a candle to commemorate the Sabbath) transform a profane moment into a sacred moment, while sacred sites (churches, mosques, synagogues) differentiate “routine” places from those that compel attitudes of

awe and inspiration. The symbolic plasticity of time and space is especially apparent in the way devout Muslims (who often must pray in everyday, mundane settings in order to fulfill their religious duties) carry out the frequent prayers required by their religion. They lay down a (sacred) prayer carpet in their office or living room, thereby enabling them to convert a profane time and space into a sacred time and space. This temporal and spatial reordering transforms the profane realm of work or home into a spiritual, sacred domain. Such acts, and countless others, help order and organize our experience of the world by carving it into that which is extraordinary or sacred and that which is unremarkable or profane.

From The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

Émile Durkheim

PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion, and consist in representations; the second are determined modes of action. Between these two classes of facts, there is all the difference that separates thought from action.

The rites can be defined and distinguished from other human practices, moral practices, for example, only by the special nature of their object. A moral rule prescribes certain manners of acting to us, just as a rite does, but which are addressed to a different class of objects. So it is the object of the rite that must be characterized, if we are to characterize the rite itself. Now it is in the beliefs that the special nature of this object is expressed. It is possible to define the rite only after we have defined the belief.

All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred (profane, sacré). This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought; the beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are either representations or systems of representations which express the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers which are attributed to them, or their relations with each other and with profane things, But by sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a

word, anything can be sacred. A rite can have this character; in fact, the rite does not exist which does not have it to a certain degree. There are words, expressions and formulae which can be pronounced only by the mouths of consecrated persons; there are gestures and movements which everybody cannot perform. If the Vedic sacrifice has had such an efficacy that, according to mythology, it was the creator of the gods, and not merely a means of winning their favour, it is because it possessed a virtue comparable to that of the most sacred beings. The circle of sacred objects cannot be determined, then, once for all. Its extent varies infinitely, according to the different religions. That is how Buddhism is a religion: in default of gods, it admits the existence of sacred things, namely, the four noble truths and the practices derived from them.i

Up to the present we have confined ourselves to enumerating a certain number of sacred things as examples: we must now show by what general characteristics they are to be distinguished from profane things.

One might be tempted, first of all, to define them by the place they are generally assigned in the hierarchy of things. They are naturally considered superior in dignity and power to profane things, and particularly to man, when he is only a man and has nothing sacred about him. One thinks of himself as occupying an inferior and dependent position in relation to them; and surely this conception is not without some truth. Only there is nothing in it which is really characteristic of the sacred. It is not enough that one thing be subordinated to another for the second to be sacred in regard to the first. Slaves are inferior to their masters, subjects to their king, soldiers to their leaders, the miser to his gold, the man ambitious for power to the hands which keep it from him; but if it is sometimes said of a man that he makes a religion of those beings or things whose eminent value and superiority to himself he thus recognizes, it is clear that in any case the word is taken in a metaphorical sense, and that there is nothing in these relations which is really religious.ii

On the other hand, it must not be lost to view that there are sacred things of every degree, and that there are some in relation to which a man feels himself relatively at his ease. An amulet has a sacred character, yet the respect which it inspires is nothing exceptional. Even before his gods, a man is not always in such a marked state of inferiority; for it very frequently happens that he exercises a veritable physical constraint upon them to obtain what he desires. He beats the fetish with which he is not contented, but only to reconcile himself with it again, if in the end it shows itself more docile to the wishes of its adorer. . . . To have rain, he throws stones into the spring or sacred lake where the god of rain is thought to reside; he believes that by this means he forces him to come out and show himself. . . . Moreover, if it is true that man

depends upon his gods, this dependence is reciprocal. The gods also have need of man; without offerings and sacrifices they would die. We shall even have occasion to show that this dependence of the gods upon their worshippers is maintained even in the most idealistic religions.

But if a purely hierarchic distinction is a criterium at once too general and too imprecise, there is nothing left with which to characterize the sacred in its relation to the profane except their heterogeneity. However, this heterogeneity is sufficient to characterize this classification of things and to distinguish it from all others, because it is very particular: it is absolute. In all the history of human thought there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition of good and bad is nothing beside this; for the good and the bad are only two opposed species of the same class, namely morals, just as sickness and health are two different aspects of the same order of facts, life, while the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common. The forces which play in one are not simply those which are met with in the other, but a little stronger; they are of a different sort. In different religions, this opposition has been conceived in different ways. Here, to separate these two sorts of things, it has seemed sufficient to localize them in different parts of the physical universe; there, the first have been put into an ideal and transcendental world, while the material world is left in full possession of the others. But howsoever much the forms of the contrast may vary,iii the fact of the contrast is universal.

This is not equivalent to saying that a being can never pass from one of these worlds into the other: but the manner in which this passage is effected when it does take place, puts into relief the essential duality of the two kingdoms. In fact, it implies a veritable metamo