Weber, Durkheim, Marx And How They Account For Religion Essay, Research Paper
How do we account for faith – its beginning, its development, and even its continuity in modern society? This is a inquiry which has occupied many people in a assortment of Fieldss for rather a long clip. At one point, the replies were framed in strictly theological and spiritual footings, presuming the truth of Christian disclosures and continuing from at that place. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a more? realistic? attack developed. Alternatively of necessitating to believe in the truth of the faith, what was required was merely the opposite: rational withdrawal and a suspension of belief. Three people who ended up making merely that were Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.
Marx studied doctrine in Berlin under William Hegel. Hegel ’ s doctrine had a decisive influence upon Marx ’ s ain thought and theories. Harmonizing to Marx, faith is an look of stuff worlds and economic unfairness. Therefore, jobs in faith are finally jobs in society. Religion is non the disease, but simply a symptom. It is used by oppressors to do people experience better about the hurt they experience due to being hapless and exploited. This is the beginning of his remark that faith is the “ opium of the people. ” ? Peoples do non hold an nonsubjective position of the universe ; they see it from the restricted point of position of their ain positions. ? ( p.35 ) At times I may look to be concentrating more on economic instead than spiritual theory, but that is because Marx ’ s basic stance is that everything is ever about economic sciences.
Harmonizing to Marx, humans – even from their earliest beginnings – are non
motivated by expansive thoughts but alternatively by stuff concerns, like the demand to eat and last. This is the basic premiss of a materialist position of history. At the beginning, people worked together in integrity and it wasn ’ t so bad. But finally, worlds developed agribusiness and the construct of private belongings. These two facts created a division of labour and a separation of categories based upon power and wealth. This material organisation of society is what Marx calls? category consciousness. ? This, in bend, created the societal struggle that drives society.
All of this is made worse by capitalist economy which merely increases the disparity between the affluent categories and the labour categories. Confrontation between them is ineluctable because those categories are driven by historical forces beyond anyone ’ s control. Capitalism besides creates one new wretchedness: development of excess value.
For Marx, an ideal economic system would affect exchanges of equal value for equal value, where value is determined merely by the sum of work put into whatever is being produced. Capitalism interrupts this ideal by presenting a net income motivation – a desire to bring forth an uneven exchange of lesser value for greater value. Net income is finally derived from the excess value produced by workers in mills.
A labourer might bring forth adequate value to feed his household in two hours of work, but he keeps at the occupation for a full twenty-four hours – in Marx ’ s clip, that might be 12 or 14 hours. Those excess hours represent the excess value produced by the worker. The proprietor of the mill did nil to gain this, but exploits it however and keeps the difference as net income.
Economicss, so, are what constitute the base of all of human life and history – bring forthing division of labour, category battle, and all the societal establishments which are supposed to keep the position quo. Those societal establishments are a superstructure built upon the base of economic sciences, wholly dependent upon stuff and economic worlds but nil else. All of the establishments which are outstanding in our day-to-day lives – matrimony, church, authorities, humanistic disciplines, etc. – can merely be genuinely understood when examined in relation to economic forces.
It should be clear now that faith is one of those societal establishments which are dependent upon the stuff and economic worlds in a given society. It has no independent history but is alternatively the animal of productive forces. As Marx wrote, “ The spiritual universe is but the physiological reaction of the existent world. ” Marx asserts that faith is merely dependent upon economic sciences, nil else – so much so that the existent philosophies of the faiths are about irrelevant. This is a functionalist reading of faith – understanding faith is non dependent upon the content of beliefs, but what societal intent faith itself serves.
Marx believes that faith is an semblance whose main intent is to supply grounds and alibis to maintain society working merely as it is. Merely as capitalist economy takes our productive labour and alienates us from its value, faith besides takes our qualities – our highest ideals and aspirations – and alienates us from them, projecting them onto an foreigner and unknowable being called a God. Religion is meant to make illusive phantasies for the hapless. Economic worlds prevent them from happening true felicity in this life, so faith Tells them that this is All right because they will happen that true felicity in the following life.
For Marx, the job lies in the fact that merely like an opiate drug fails to repair a physical hurt – it simply helps you bury your hurting and agony, faith besides does non repair the implicit in causes of people ’ s hurting and agony – alternatively, it helps them bury why they are enduring and acquire them to look frontward to an fanciful hereafter when the hurting will discontinue alternatively of working to alter fortunes now. Even worse, this “ drug ” of faith is being administered by the same oppressors who are finally responsible for the hurting and agony in the first topographic point.
Emile Durkheim continued with Marx’s theories in his book The Elementary signifiers of Religious Life that was published merely a few old ages before his decease, in 1912. As Marx had argued that every category had its ain witting position of world, Durkheim went farther to show that even the most basic societal thoughts as clip, infinite and God can be seen as creative activities of society. Durkheim suggests that there is non one world but many and that this world merely exists because of the symbolic creative activities of worlds and their rites.
Durkheim studied the Aboriginal folks of Australia in an attempt to understand faith. He concluded that faith ever involves a differentiation between things that are sacred and things that are blasphemous. Durkheim uses the illustration of the totem pole that maps to keep the folk together. The totemic animate being, Durkheim believed, was the original focal point of spiritual activity because it was the emblem for a societal group, the kin. He thought that the map of faith was to do people willing to set the involvements of society in front of their ain desires. All members of the folk gather together to execute periodic totem rites, it is these rites that set the regulations for societal order. It is out to kill or harm the totem animate being and it is therefor forbidden to kill or harm one’s fellow tribesmen who name themselves after the totem.
In the modern Christian faith, Durkeim argues that the moral commandments such as The Golden Rule and The Ten Commandments are chiefly societal regulations. These regulations regulate human’s behaviour toward eachother and serve to keep a sense of societal integrity. Peoples do non follow these regulations out of their fright for Eden or snake pit but for their desire to be accepted by society. If they participate in the spiritual rites they will experience a sense of belonging, whereas those who break the regulations and avoid the rites suffer from societal isolation. To Durkheim, God is simply a symbol of society.
Max Weber ’ s sociology is the foundation of scientific sociology of faith in a sense of typological and nonsubjective apprehension. Rejecting Karl Marx ’ s evolutionary jurisprudence of category society, or Emile Durkheim ’ s sustained jurisprudence of moral society, Weber established the understanding sociology of the subjective significance of spiritual action or inactivity. He argued that the transmutation of faith allowed for societal alterations where people could now work together to derive economic wealth. In a crude society there were many Gods, those kinsmen who worshipped the same family God as you could be trusted but those aliens who worshipped a different God were? foreigners? and could non be trusted.
The rise of the great universe faiths, such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, separated the thought of the natural universe from the thought of the religious universe. Alternatively of Gods and liquors, people become widely concerned with the thought of Eden and snake pit. Weber argues that the thought of a cosmopolitan God allowed for Torahs based on consistent general rules. Religion itself can besides develop in new waies. ( P.133 ) In crude faiths one prays to the Gods to do his harvests grow or kill off enemies. In the event of a natural catastrophe the kinsmen would believe that the Gods were angry with them and go on to keep ceremonial forfeits until the conditions was better. It was this fright of the Gods that kept the crude kinsmen from swearing anyone else. In this new religious kingdom, the righteous person who follows all the rites and Torahs of his faith can still trust for redemption even if his has bad luck. ? The thoughts of good and evil can develop individually from the thoughts of worldly success and failure. ? ( P.134 )
In Weber’s composing The Protestant Ethic he discusses the function that faith played in the rise of capitalist economy. This new spiritual discovery? opened many of the doors to industrialisation: puting the footing for a moral community of trust underlying peaceable commercialism ; apologizing the legal system ; actuating people to refashion political, societal, and economic establishments in maintaining with an imperative to transform the universe more closely to the ideal. ? ( P.134 ) Religion was now responsible for uniting and enlarging a community who could populate together in peace with the same moral and ethical codification of behavior.
Weber believed that the Protestant ethic broke the clasp of tradition while it encouraged work forces to use themselves rationally to their work. Calvinism, he found, had developed a set of beliefs around the construct of predestination. Followings of Calvin believed that one could non make good plants or execute Acts of the Apostless of religion to guarantee your topographic point in Eden. You were either among the “ elect ” ( in which instance you were in ) or you were non. However, wealth was taken as a mark by you and your neighbours that you were one of the Gods chosen, thereby supplying encouragement for people to get wealth. The Protestant ethic hence provided spiritual countenances that fostered a spirit of strict subject, promoting work forces to use themselves rationally to get wealth.
This realistic attack to faith represented a cardinal paradigm displacement in how faith was to be viewed. Alternatively of necessitating clergy in order to understand faith, the demand became facts and information and research. Whether you agree with the rating of the societal map of faith as Marx did, that faith was the? opium of the people? , as Durkheim did that faith was what made moral society keep together, or with Weber’s The Protestant moral principle, it is obvious that faith played a cardinal function in the development of society.
Bibliography
1- Collins, Makowisky ; The Discovery of Society
2- www.brittanica.com
3- www.exp.com
Danielle Russo
Sociology 116
Midterm Assignment
How do we account for faith – its beginning, its development, and even its continuity in modern society? This is a inquiry which has occupied many people in a assortment of Fieldss for rather a long clip. At one point, the replies we
rhenium framed in strictly theological and spiritual footings, presuming the truth of Christian disclosures and continuing from at that place. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a more? realistic? attack developed. Alternatively of necessitating to believe in the truth of the faith, what was required was merely the opposite: rational withdrawal and a suspension of belief. Three people who ended up making merely that were Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.
Marx studied doctrine in Berlin under William Hegel. Hegel ’ s doctrine had a decisive influence upon Marx ’ s ain thought and theories. Harmonizing to Marx, faith is an look of stuff worlds and economic unfairness. Therefore, jobs in faith are finally jobs in society. Religion is non the disease, but simply a symptom. It is used by oppressors to do people experience better about the hurt they experience due to being hapless and exploited. This is the beginning of his remark that faith is the “ opium of the people. ” ? Peoples do non hold an nonsubjective position of the universe ; they see it from the restricted point of position of their ain positions. ? ( p.35 ) At times I may look to be concentrating more on economic instead than spiritual theory, but that is because Marx ’ s basic stance is that everything is ever about economic sciences.
Harmonizing to Marx, humans – even from their earliest beginnings – are non
motivated by expansive thoughts but alternatively by stuff concerns, like the demand to eat and last. This is the basic premiss of a materialist position of history. At the beginning, people worked together in integrity and it wasn ’ t so bad. But finally, worlds developed agribusiness and the construct of private belongings. These two facts created a division of labour and a separation of categories based upon power and wealth. This material organisation of society is what Marx calls? category consciousness. ? This, in bend, created the societal struggle that drives society.
All of this is made worse by capitalist economy which merely increases the disparity between the affluent categories and the labour categories. Confrontation between them is ineluctable because those categories are driven by historical forces beyond anyone ’ s control. Capitalism besides creates one new wretchedness: development of excess value.
For Marx, an ideal economic system would affect exchanges of equal value for equal value, where value is determined merely by the sum of work put into whatever is being produced. Capitalism interrupts this ideal by presenting a net income motivation – a desire to bring forth an uneven exchange of lesser value for greater value. Net income is finally derived from the excess value produced by workers in mills.
A labourer might bring forth adequate value to feed his household in two hours of work, but he keeps at the occupation for a full twenty-four hours – in Marx ’ s clip, that might be 12 or 14 hours. Those excess hours represent the excess value produced by the worker. The proprietor of the mill did nil to gain this, but exploits it however and keeps the difference as net income.
Economicss, so, are what constitute the base of all of human life and history – bring forthing division of labour, category battle, and all the societal establishments which are supposed to keep the position quo. Those societal establishments are a superstructure built upon the base of economic sciences, wholly dependent upon stuff and economic worlds but nil else. All of the establishments which are outstanding in our day-to-day lives – matrimony, church, authorities, humanistic disciplines, etc. – can merely be genuinely understood when examined in relation to economic forces.
It should be clear now that faith is one of those societal establishments which are dependent upon the stuff and economic worlds in a given society. It has no independent history but is alternatively the animal of productive forces. As Marx wrote, “ The spiritual universe is but the physiological reaction of the existent world. ” Marx asserts that faith is merely dependent upon economic sciences, nil else – so much so that the existent philosophies of the faiths are about irrelevant. This is a functionalist reading of faith – understanding faith is non dependent upon the content of beliefs, but what societal intent faith itself serves.
Marx believes that faith is an semblance whose main intent is to supply grounds and alibis to maintain society working merely as it is. Merely as capitalist economy takes our productive labour and alienates us from its value, faith besides takes our qualities – our highest ideals and aspirations – and alienates us from them, projecting them onto an foreigner and unknowable being called a God. Religion is meant to make illusive phantasies for the hapless. Economic worlds prevent them from happening true felicity in this life, so faith Tells them that this is All right because they will happen that true felicity in the following life.
For Marx, the job lies in the fact that merely like an opiate drug fails to repair a physical hurt – it simply helps you bury your hurting and agony, faith besides does non repair the implicit in causes of people ’ s hurting and agony – alternatively, it helps them bury why they are enduring and acquire them to look frontward to an fanciful hereafter when the hurting will discontinue alternatively of working to alter fortunes now. Even worse, this “ drug ” of faith is being administered by the same oppressors who are finally responsible for the hurting and agony in the first topographic point.
Emile Durkheim continued with Marx’s theories in his book The Elementary signifiers of Religious Life that was published merely a few old ages before his decease, in 1912. As Marx had argued that every category had its ain witting position of world, Durkheim went farther to show that even the most basic societal thoughts as clip, infinite and God can be seen as creative activities of society. Durkheim suggests that there is non one world but many and that this world merely exists because of the symbolic creative activities of worlds and their rites.
Durkheim studied the Aboriginal folks of Australia in an attempt to understand faith. He concluded that faith ever involves a differentiation between things that are sacred and things that are blasphemous. Durkheim uses the illustration of the totem pole that maps to keep the folk together. The totemic animate being, Durkheim believed, was the original focal point of spiritual activity because it was the emblem for a societal group, the kin. He thought that the map of faith was to do people willing to set the involvements of society in front of their ain desires. All members of the folk gather together to execute periodic totem rites, it is these rites that set the regulations for societal order. It is out to kill or harm the totem animate being and it is therefor forbidden to kill or harm one’s fellow tribesmen who name themselves after the totem.
In the modern Christian faith, Durkeim argues that the moral commandments such as The Golden Rule and The Ten Commandments are chiefly societal regulations. These regulations regulate human’s behaviour toward eachother and serve to keep a sense of societal integrity. Peoples do non follow these regulations out of their fright for Eden or snake pit but for their desire to be accepted by society. If they participate in the spiritual rites they will experience a sense of belonging, whereas those who break the regulations and avoid the rites suffer from societal isolation. To Durkheim, God is simply a symbol of society.
Max Weber ’ s sociology is the foundation of scientific sociology of faith in a sense of typological and nonsubjective apprehension. Rejecting Karl Marx ’ s evolutionary jurisprudence of category society, or Emile Durkheim ’ s sustained jurisprudence of moral society, Weber established the understanding sociology of the subjective significance of spiritual action or inactivity. He argued that the transmutation of faith allowed for societal alterations where people could now work together to derive economic wealth. In a crude society there were many Gods, those kinsmen who worshipped the same family God as you could be trusted but those aliens who worshipped a different God were? foreigners? and could non be trusted.
The rise of the great universe faiths, such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, separated the thought of the natural universe from the thought of the religious universe. Alternatively of Gods and liquors, people become widely concerned with the thought of Eden and snake pit. Weber argues that the thought of a cosmopolitan God allowed for Torahs based on consistent general rules. Religion itself can besides develop in new waies. ( P.133 ) In crude faiths one prays to the Gods to do his harvests grow or kill off enemies. In the event of a natural catastrophe the kinsmen would believe that the Gods were angry with them and go on to keep ceremonial forfeits until the conditions was better. It was this fright of the Gods that kept the crude kinsmen from swearing anyone else. In this new religious kingdom, the righteous person who follows all the rites and Torahs of his faith can still trust for redemption even if his has bad luck. ? The thoughts of good and evil can develop individually from the thoughts of worldly success and failure. ? ( P.134 )
In Weber’s composing The Protestant Ethic he discusses the function that faith played in the rise of capitalist economy. This new spiritual discovery? opened many of the doors to industrialisation: puting the footing for a moral community of trust underlying peaceable commercialism ; apologizing the legal system ; actuating people to refashion political, societal, and economic establishments in maintaining with an imperative to transform the universe more closely to the ideal. ? ( P.134 ) Religion was now responsible for uniting and enlarging a community who could populate together in peace with the same moral and ethical codification of behavior.
Weber believed that the Protestant ethic broke the clasp of tradition while it encouraged work forces to use themselves rationally to their work. Calvinism, he found, had developed a set of beliefs around the construct of predestination. Followings of Calvin believed that one could non make good plants or execute Acts of the Apostless of religion to guarantee your topographic point in Eden. You were either among the “ elect ” ( in which instance you were in ) or you were non. However, wealth was taken as a mark by you and your neighbours that you were one of the Gods chosen, thereby supplying encouragement for people to get wealth. The Protestant ethic hence provided spiritual countenances that fostered a spirit of strict subject, promoting work forces to use themselves rationally to get wealth.
This realistic attack to faith represented a cardinal paradigm displacement in how faith was to be viewed. Alternatively of necessitating clergy in order to understand faith, the demand became facts and information and research. Whether you agree with the rating of the societal map of faith as Marx did, that faith was the? opium of the people? , as Durkheim did that faith was what made moral society keep together, or with Weber’s The Protestant moral principle, it is obvious that faith played a cardinal function in the development of society.
Bibliography
1- Collins, Makowisky ; The Discovery of Society
2- www.brittanica.com
How do we account for faith – its beginning, its development, and even its continuity in modern society? This is a inquiry which has occupied many people in a assortment of Fieldss for rather a long clip. At one point, the replies were framed in strictly theological and spiritual footings, presuming the truth of Christian disclosures and continuing from at that place. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a more? realistic? attack developed. Alternatively of necessitating to believe in the truth of the faith, what was required was merely the opposite: rational withdrawal and a suspension of belief. Three people who ended up making merely that were Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.
