Roots of Social Thought

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A science got its name in a footnote, apologetically

1839, Paris. The publisher Bachelier prints the fourth volume of Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive, the volume devoted to the science of society. On one page there is a footnote in which Comte all but asks the reader’s permission: he ventures to try this “new term” because he needs a single name for the positive study of social phenomena. The term is exactly equivalent to the expression “social physics” (physique sociale) that he had used before, and it is sociologie. He then confesses at once that he feels a “deep repugnance” (profonde répugnance) for the habit of systematic word-coining.

So sociology got its name in a shy footnote. One of the aims of the work was precisely this: to lay the foundations of the field then called “social physics”.

A frequently told story links the abandonment of the name “social physics” to the Belgian Adolphe Quetelet, whose 1835 book does indeed carry essai de physique sociale in its title. But Comte’s footnote does not mention Quetelet. The story lives in later accounts, not in this document, and we carry it not as established fact but as a “frequently told” explanation.

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Simmel’s summary of two centuries: freed from bonds, then dependent on one another

Among the pieces prepared for a city exhibition in Dresden in 1903 there is a short historical summary by Georg Simmel. In his account the eighteenth century called for liberation from bonds that had grown up historically in state and religion, morality and economy. The nineteenth century demanded not just freedom but a unique specialisation shaped by the division of labour, which made the individual at once incomparable and more dependent on the complementary work of others. Nietzsche’s ruthless individual struggle and socialism’s plan to suppress competition spring, he says, from the same basic motive: the individual’s resistance to being levelled and used up in a social-technical mechanism.

The IEP’s Durkheim entry paints a similar picture: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries population growth and technical innovations such as the railway and the steamship enlarged cities; the guilds collapsed and regional interdependence gave way to international interdependence.

Imagine an apprentice in a guild, and his great-great-grandchild a century later in a large industrial city. The first knows everyone and everyone knows him; the second sees hundreds of faces a day and knows none. This lesson is the story of a group of thinkers who asked, roughly, the same question: when old bonds dissolve, what holds society together, and where does the individual stand meanwhile? (That question is our summary of the lesson; the details follow in the cards below, with sources.)

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Seven names, seven birth years: who and when

You can divide the period roughly into two waves. The first: Auguste Comte (1798–1857) wanted to found sociology with the six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842); Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) followed soon after; Spencer’s Principles of Sociology appeared between 1876 and 1896.

The second wave carries the main weight of this lesson: Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) published Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft in 1887; Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) brought out three books in 1893, 1895 and 1897; Georg Simmel (1858–1918) wrote his metropolis essay in 1903 and his Soziologie in 1908; Max Weber (1864–1920) published The Protestant Ethic in 1904–05, while Economy and Society appeared after his death.

A hint: Durkheim and Simmel were born in the same year (1858); Tönnies was three years older than both, and Weber six years younger. These people also knew one another: Tönnies, Simmel and Weber, with Sombart, were among the founders of the German Sociological Society, and Durkheim published an essay of Simmel’s in L’année sociologique.

(Sources can differ even on birth and death days, so we give only the years.)

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The sociological society’s first big project was a newspaper survey

October 1910, Frankfurt. The German Sociological Society holds its first congress, and Max Weber reads the business report. He proposes a “sociology of the press” as the society’s first scientific topic and calls it “an enormous subject” (ungeheures Thema).

The first step is surprisingly concrete: Weber proposes to begin by measuring “with scissors and compass” (mit der Schere und mit dem Zirkel) how the content of newspapers has shifted over the last generation: the distribution among the advertising section, the arts-and-literature pages, the leading article and the news. Then comes the qualitative question: style, the place of emotion in the paper. The ultimate questions are big: what does the press contribute to shaping modern man, and how does it shift shared beliefs, hopes and the feeling of life?

Today the plan reads like a 1910 draft of content analysis and media-effects research (our interpretation). But the project did not succeed. In 1912, at the society’s second congress, Weber spoke of a “very special ill fortune” that had befallen the enterprise. According to Lepsius, Weber abandoned the project in 1911; around that time he had ended up in court with a newspaper and with a press scholar.

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The shared question: what holds society together once old bonds dissolve?

If we had to fit all the cards of this lesson into one sentence, we would say (this is our summary): classical social thought asked how social order is possible while old bonds dissolve, where the individual stands in relation to social structure, and how a person changes in the crowd of a large city.

The answers diverged. Durkheim sought the answer in shared moral commitment and the division of labour; Weber in the meaning attached to actions and in the world’s growing calculability; Simmel in the forms of interaction between people and in the psychological effects of the city; Tönnies in two kinds of association arising from two kinds of will; Marx in relations of production and class conflict.

Media research took three questions from this inheritance: (1) Integration: does media hold society together? (2) Individual and structure: how autonomous is the individual in front of media? (3) Anonymity and crowds: how do the anonymity of the city and of the mass affect people?

A warning: most of these figures did not set out to theorise the media. The link was often built later; but there are a few documented exceptions (Durkheim’s 1897 discussion of newspapers and imitation, Weber’s 1910 press plan, Tönnies’s 1922 book on public opinion). We will look at them in their turn.

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A ‘where will I meet this again?’ map

The names in this lesson come back in later lessons under other labels:

• Durkheim: social integration and the ritual reading; the 1953 study that looked at media events through this lens is in this lesson’s laboratory card. Structural functionalism is a continuation of this line: Functionalism and Symbolic Interactionism.
• Simmel: the road to the Chicago tradition. Robert Park studied with Simmel in Berlin; Park and Burgess’s 1921 textbook contains translations of Simmel. See The Chicago School and Communication.
• Tönnies: the concept of “mass society”, with its emphasis on alienation, owes much to Tönnies (Heberle’s assessment). See Mass Society and Mass Culture Theory.
• Marx: ideology and critical approaches; here only a pointer: From Marx to Ideology.
• Weber: the questions of 1910 (who owns the paper, who is the journalist, who supplies the news?) resemble the questions of later news sociology (our interpretation): The Sociology of News and Media Organizations.

This map is not a full picture of who influenced whom; it is an index showing where to find each concept.

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You did not choose your mother tongue: the social fact

You woke up this morning; you did not decide which language to think in today. Nor which currency to shop with, nor which outfit would stand out on public transport. Émile Durkheim called things of this kind “social facts” (fait social): things that exist outside the individual and impose ways of acting, thinking and feeling on him by exerting pressure.

His examples include a society’s legal code, religious beliefs, concept of beauty, monetary system, way of dressing, language. But the list does not stop there: currents of opinion and rates of marriage, birth and suicide are also social facts; statistics add up individual cases and make a shared state of mind visible. So one person’s sleepless night is an individual event, whereas a country’s annual suicide rate is a social fact.

One more subtlety: Durkheim also says that social facts cannot exist outside individuals. “Externality” means external to the other individuals; a social fact lives inside the individual too.

For media research the question that follows is this: do mass measurements, such as audience ratings, opinion polls and news consumption, show something more than the sum of individuals, a shared pattern? Those who answer “yes” stand in Durkheim’s line (our interpretation).

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Bound by being alike, or by needing one another?

Imagine two places. In one, everyone does more or less the same work, celebrates the same holidays, believes the same things. In the other, behind a single slice of bread there stands the miller, the haulier, the baker, the accountant; nobody knows the whole chain, but the chain works.

In Durkheim’s Division of Labour (1893) these two places are two kinds of solidarity. In the first, mechanical solidarity, individuals resemble one another and the collective conscience almost takes the place of individual conscience. In the second, organic solidarity, the bond comes not from likeness but from the functional interdependence of specialised parts, like the mutual need of the organs of a body.

The cause of the transition? For Durkheim, as the frequency of contact between people (“moral” or “dynamic density”) rises, competition rises too, and specialisation is the way to soften competition. Of the two factors that raise density, one is population and the other technology, especially communication and transport technology. So Durkheim, in his very first book, counts communication technology among the factors that change social structure.

Two cautions. (1) “Mechanical” does not mean “cold or bad”; it says only that the bond comes from likeness. (2) Durkheim later dropped both terms; in his later years he thought of solidarity more in symbolic and religious terms, through ritual and “collective effervescence”.

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The fourth of the four types of suicide hides in a footnote

You can call Durkheim’s typology of suicide “four types”; but the main text of Suicide (1897) treats only three. The fourth, fatalistic suicide, appears in one of the book’s footnotes.

The three main types: (1) Egoistic suicide: when the individual is cut off from social bonds, life loses its meaning; what is weak here is integration. (2) Altruistic suicide: the individual is too deeply immersed in the group; Durkheim looks for it in less differentiated societies and in armies. (3) Anomic suicide: what is weak here is regulation. When the old authority of rules dissolves, desires become unlimited and the individual remains perpetually unhappy; Durkheim calls this the “malady of infinity” (mal d’infini). Anomie means exactly this lack of rules, this breakdown of regulation. Durkheim argues that anomie has become chronic in the economic world.

The fourth type, fatalistic suicide, arises from excessive regulation: the situation of people whose future is pitilessly walled in and whose passions are crushed by an oppressive discipline. Durkheim finds it of little importance today and does not count it as a separate type.

(This card describes an academic typology of suicide; if the subject is heavy for you, feel free to skip it.)

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The same movement, two different actions: Weber’s Verstehen

Imagine two people at an auction who both raise a hand. One is bidding, the other is swatting a fly. A camera outside would record both as “hand raising”. For Weber what interests sociology is not the movement itself but the meaning of the action: an action rests on the meaning the person attributes to it, whereas behaviour can be counted without looking at inner motives. The social scientist’s effort is to understand (Verstehen) this subjective dimension of human conduct in its relation to others.

But “understanding” here does not mean empathy or intuition. According to the SEP author, in Weber understanding gains objective validity when meanings and values can be explained causally, that is, as a means to an end. So “I put myself in his place and felt it” is not enough; the action has to be placed in a means-ends nexus and explained.

Even the subtitle of Economy and Society says so: “outline of interpretive sociology”.

For media research the counterpart is this: you cannot infer from viewing figures alone why an audience member watched a news item; you must also ask what the act meant to them. When you meet approaches that focus on the audience’s production of meaning (Encoding and Decoding: Stuart Hall) in later lessons, you will recall this idea (our connection).

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An ideal type is not a perfect example but a deliberately exaggerated tool

When you see the word “ideal” in a textbook, do you tend to read it as “best”? The ideal type (Idealtypus) breaks that habit. In Weber’s definition an ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view; it gathers concrete individual phenomena into a unified analytical construct (Gedankenbild). This construct is a methodological utopia that “cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality”.

So the validity of an ideal type is tested not by being a copy of reality but by its adequacy. In our own analogy, an ideal type is a measuring rod: you set the real case beside it and see where it deviates.

Tönnies’s distinction between community and society is like this too. According to our source, Tönnies thought of these concepts not as classification boxes but as ideal types; no concrete family or firm is pure “community” or pure “society”, all are mixtures in certain proportions.

An exercise (imaginary; try it yourself): Sketch the ideal type of a “bureaucratic newsroom” with three features: written rules, a rigid division of labour, processes stripped of personal relations. Then look at a news organisation you know. Which feature is missing or excessive? The ideal type will not give you a “right answer”; it helps you see the deviation.

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Why do we obey? Three types of legitimate domination

Imagine three scenes. A traffic officer raises a hand and everyone stops without questioning her ID. The oldest man in the village says “this is how it has always been done”, and the table is laid accordingly. On a podium, a speaker with no official authority brings a hall to its feet. Nobody uses force in any of the three; but the reason for obedience differs in each.

Weber’s concern is exactly this: the mere fact that an order is obeyed is not enough for domination; the command has to be accepted as a valid norm. According to the ground of that acceptance he distinguishes three ideal types: legal-rational (the ground is impersonal rules and offices set up under them), traditional (the ground is long-standing custom and habit) and charismatic (the ground is personal devotion to the leader’s exceptional qualities).

The first two are inclined to preserve order in ordinary times; the charismatic represents extraordinary, disruptive and transformative forces. In Weber’s view, if rulers cannot supply one of these three grounds, the belief in those standards weakens among officials and the public.

These are ideal types too; real governments carry mixed grounds. How the German Herrschaft should be translated is a separate debate (in the deep card).

For media research the question is: why is the word of a source or a platform accepted as “true”, because one trusts rules, habit or a person? You will meet this question again in later lessons (our connection).

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If all the clocks in Berlin were an hour off

In 1903 Simmel runs a thought experiment: if all the clocks in Berlin suddenly went wrong in different directions, even by only an hour, the whole economic and other traffic of the city would be disrupted for a long time. A large city requires everyone to fit a rigid time schema; punctuality, calculability and exactness are its necessary conditions.

Weber takes up the same tendency on a much larger scale and calls it rationalization: the idea that in principle we can master all things by calculation, together with the stripping of the world of religious and metaphysical explanations (“disenchantment”).

But Weber does not think it is unequivocally a good development. On the one hand rationalization brings predictability and enhances the individual’s freedom; on the other, the same force can reduce a person to a cog in the bureaucratic machine. Weber expresses this second face at the end of The Protestant Ethic (1904–05) with the image of a “shell as hard as steel” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), in English translation the “iron cage”; there also occurs a warning about “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” (our translation from the SEP’s English).

If you think about today’s feeds, algorithms and automatic rankings, the image may sound familiar; but Weber did not write about them, and that reading is ours (see the today card).

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The person who comes today and stays tomorrow: Simmel’s stranger

In 1908, in an excursus to his book Soziologie (“Excursus on the Stranger”), Simmel gave sociology a figure: the stranger. But the stranger he means is not the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow; it is “the one who comes today and stays tomorrow” (der, der heute kommt und morgen bleibt). That is, the stranger has joined the group but did not belong to it from the start, and brings qualities from outside.

For Simmel the stranger is the union of nearness and distance in a single figure: the near one is far, whereas strangeness means that the far one is near. The stranger is an element of the group itself, not outside it; but his position also includes “being outside”. That the stranger in economic history is so often the trader (or the trader is regarded as a stranger) is an example.

Another feature of the stranger is “objectivity”: because he is not rooted in the group, he can look at it without taking sides. Simmel says this is not “non-participation” but a special form of participation. And one more thing: confessions that are carefully withheld from those close to us may be made even to the stranger, especially the one passing through.

This is a small example of Simmel’s sociology of “forms of sociation” (Vergesellschaftung): it looks at the form of interaction rather than its content.

Have you ever told a stranger on an anonymous forum something nobody knows? Simmel wrote this starting from the figures of the wanderer and the trader; extending it to the online setting is our interpretation, not his finding.

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Loneliness in the crowd: The Metropolis and Mental Life

One of the most memorable observations in Simmel’s 1903 essay is that nowhere can a person feel so lonely and forsaken as in the crowd of the metropolis. The mechanism works like this.

The city “intensifies nervous life” through a rapid and uninterrupted change of impressions. Man, he says, is a “creature of difference”: his consciousness is stirred by the difference between one impression and the next. The city makes these differences constant and sudden. The city dweller answers with the intellect rather than with feeling; the intellect is a shield that protects him from being uprooted.

One result is the blasé attitude: a dulling to the differences between things. This does not mean things are not perceived; it means their meaning and value are felt to be “insignificant, grey”. Simmel also ties this to the money economy: money reduces everything to a single measure. Nor does it have anything to do with stupidity; in his view stupid people are generally not blasé.

The second result is the reserved attitude (Reserviertheit): if you tried to respond inwardly to hundreds of people you would split apart psychologically. This reserve produces personal freedom, but its price may be loneliness. Simmel says this distance (and the slight antipathy beneath it) also protects the city dweller from “the blur of indiscriminate mutual suggestion”.

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Community and society: two wills, two forms of association

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are translated into English as “community” and “society”, and into Turkish as “cemaat ve cemiyet” (or “topluluk ve toplum”). But Tönnies built them not as a distinction of place but on two kinds of will.

The first is Wesenwille (natural will): an action is willed out of a person’s nature, out of an inclination, a habit, or for its own value. The second is Kürwille (elective will): an action is willed to reach an end, choosing among means. Gemeinschaft is the association that arises from natural will: kinship, neighbourhood, town, spiritual community. Gesellschaft arises from elective will: contracts, groups based on common interest, special-purpose associations.

Tönnies does not present these as pure categories; they are ideal types. Pure Gemeinschaft and pure Gesellschaft do not exist in reality; every concrete association contains something of each in certain proportions. Tönnies compares them to chemical elements combined in varying proportions.

A note: the 1887 book was hardly known outside a small circle of scholars for about thirty years; interest came after the First World War, with a generation disillusioned with the existing social order.

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Is society an organism? Three answers from Spencer to Simmel

Does society work like a body? Herbert Spencer gave an answer close to “yes”: he saw society as an “organic” whole; for him social life was an extension of the life of a natural body, and social “organisms” obeyed the same evolutionary principles as biological ones. But in Spencer the parts were mutually dependent rather than subordinate to the whole; the individual had an identity and value of his own. (A note: the phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Spencer, not Darwin; yet according to the SEP author it is wrong to call Spencer a “coarse social Darwinist”.)

According to the IEP, Durkheim’s use of the organic analogy and his analysis of how the parts of society form a functioning whole were largely inspired by Spencer’s functionalist analysis. But Durkheim opposed the utilitarian view, Spencer included, that society begins when individuals come together: Division of Labour is regarded as a refutation of that view; for him collective life gives rise to the individual, not the other way round. Society is a reality of its own kind (sui generis), irreducible to the sum of individuals.

Simmel opened a third road: society is not a substance, an organism or an irreducible entity; it is the sum of the reciprocal interactions (Wechselwirkung) between individuals.

An exam hint: “organism” is Spencer, “reality of its own kind” is Durkheim, “sum of interactions” is Simmel.

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Does order arise from consensus or from conflict? A short meeting of Durkheim and Marx

Imagine a large national ceremony being broadcast on television. Ask a researcher what is visible in that ceremony and you may get two different answers.

The first is the Durkheim line: order arises from shared moral commitments; legitimate authority rests on a moral foundation too. Preserving social order requires that these values be reaffirmed often.

The second is the Marx line. In Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology (1845–46) occurs the sentence: in every epoch the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. The class that has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production. The SEP author regards this as the core of the theory of ideology. In this lesson Marx is only a pointer: the detail is in the lesson From Marx to Ideology.

Durkheim did not find Marx scientific; according to the IEP author he considered him dogmatic and Marxism needlessly conflictual. The echo of these two views in media research is documented: to the 1953 coronation reading Norman Birnbaum wrote a reply in 1955; in his view divergence and tension, not shared values, are normal in modern urban-industrial societies.

These two questions remain the two questions of media research today: “what shared value does this broadcast reaffirm?” and “whose interest does this broadcast serve, and which idea does it make dominant?”

Step by step

The method of Suicide: an inquiry that advances by elimination

Durkheim’s 1897 book is not a storybook but a book of elimination. You can read the logic of its march from the table of contents:

1. An objective definition. First, suicide is defined objectively, in a way that avoids arbitrary exclusions.
2. From case to rate. What is studied is not single suicides but a society’s social rate of suicide; Durkheim argues that this rate differs between societies and is stable within a society, and is therefore a phenomenon of its own kind.
3. Eliminate extra-social explanations. In Book I he tries in turn psychopathic states and alcoholism, race and heredity, climate and season, and finally imitation, and finds each insufficient to explain the rate.
4. Compare social milieus. In Book II social milieus such as religious communities and the army are compared.
5. Types. The cause of the rate is explained as the degree to which groups integrate and regulate the individual; the anomic and the other types emerge from this step.

The data he uses are official statistics; some he took from tables compiled by others (Morselli’s charts, for example), some from Ministry of Justice records.

Lab

Exercise: a television ceremony in 1953 and Durkheim’s spectacles

A documented event: in June 1953 the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was broadcast live on television; Richard Dimbleby’s hushed narration accompanied it on television and wireless. People without sets crowded into the homes of those who had them; in the following year rentals and sales of sets shot up.

In the same year Edward Shils and Michael Young read the event through Durkheim’s spectacles in The Sociological Review: to them the ceremony was “an act of national communion”; from Durkheim they took the idea that the shared feeling of believers cannot be “purely illusory”.

The exercise (your job; there is no ready answer):

1. In Durkheim’s terms, write: what shared value is being reaffirmed in the ceremony? How does television spread it?
2. Look for the counter-reading: in 1955 Birnbaum said that divergence is normal in modern societies and that dissent persisted on the margins. In 1975 Lukes criticised such “neo-Durkheimian” readings for using too simple a notion of social integration, for looking at too narrow a selection of ceremonies, and for missing that ceremonies can be read as elements in the “mobilization of bias”.
3. Choose your own event: a live broadcast, a national match or a mourning ceremony you know from recent years. Ask the same three questions: What is affirmed? Who is inside and who outside? What would I call “integration” and what “mobilization of bias”?

This is an exercise; the result depends on your observation, and there is no ready correct answer.

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Evidence 1: race or religion? Advancing by elimination

The most instructive part of Durkheim’s Suicide is the explanations he eliminates. He takes up, for example, the view that ties the higher German rate of suicide to race. In Austria, Germans and Slavs living in the same social milieu show a similar tendency; in Switzerland, when he compares German and French cantons of the same religion, he finds no marked difference between the two groups among Catholics. His conclusion: the difference comes not from “blood” but from the civilisation and milieu one lives in.

Then he turns to religions. In his account the rate is generally high among Protestants and low among Catholics and especially Jews. To the question “is it because Catholics are a minority?” he says no: the immunity is explained by the Catholic church’s allowing the individual less religious individualism, that is, by its tighter integration of the group; he applies the same logic to the Jewish community.

The general conclusion of this part: the suicide rate is directly related not to religion itself but to how tightly a social group envelops the individual, that is, to integration.

A caution: these are statistics from the end of the nineteenth century and Durkheim’s own interpretations; instead of redrawing the tables today, learning the logic of the method will serve you better: rather than confirming one explanation, eliminate its rivals one by one.

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Evidence 2: in 1897 Durkheim put newspapers to the test

“Does a newspaper report spread suicide?” was a question on the table before Durkheim, and he takes it seriously in Book I of Suicide. In his account suicide can spread from individual to individual; the real issue is whether this changes the social rate.

The first test is geographical: if imitation mattered, high rates should spill over borders to neighbours. Yet while Germany is surrounded by Protestant regions with high suicide rates, three Catholic regions (the Rhineland provinces with Westphalia, Bavaria and Posen) stand on the map like islands with values below 100 per million; the Catholic south of Switzerland is likewise sharply set off from its Protestant north. Durkheim says that no country ever imposes its inclination on its neighbours by the mere prestige of example.

The second test concerns newspapers: if imitation mattered, rates should vary with the place newspapers hold in public attention. But it is the number of readers, not of newspapers, that counts: in a decentralised country there may be many newspapers, each little read, whereas a single paper like the Times or the Petit Journal reaches a large public. Durkheim admits he cannot offer regular proof; but he says France and England are hardly inferior to Denmark and Saxony in press, though less suicide is seen there.

His conclusion: suicide can spread from individual to individual, but imitation does not determine the social rate. In his view what matters is not the fact of speaking about it but the manner in which one speaks: “ce n’est pas le fait d’en parler, c’est la manière dont on en parle” (we keep the original French).

A century later David Phillips reported in 1974 that in Britain and the United States suicides rose right after suicide stories published in newspapers. The same question, two scales, two answers. (If the subject is heavy for you, you can skip this card.)

Myth check

Myth: ‘the classical theorists theorised the media’

What people assume. Mass-communication theories were born directly from Comte, Durkheim and Weber; these names were media theorists.

What the sources say. The main projects of these figures lay elsewhere: the founding of a science of society, the division of labour, religion, money, the city, domination. There are exceptions that touch the media directly, and all of them are interesting: Durkheim in 1897 held his discussion of newspapers and imitation; Weber in 1910 presented his press-research plan; Marx and Engels in 1845 used the notion of the “means of mental production”; Tönnies in 1922 wrote his critique of public opinion.

Tönnies’s book is especially striking. According to Heberle, Tönnies saw an element of will in public opinion; he described the public opinion of a whole society as a view claiming to be the only true one, and wrote that anyone who does not share it may be regarded as disloyal. This may be an idea similar to the spiral of silence you will meet in later lessons (our interpretation; we do not claim a relation of influence).

But these were scattered touches, not a continuous media theory. The real inheritance is indirect: concepts, questions and criteria that media researchers took over later, such as Park’s study with Simmel or Shils and Young’s use of Durkheim.

Myth check

Myth: ‘Gemeinschaft is the village, Gesellschaft is the city’

What people assume. Community is warm and rural, society cold and urban; so online settings must be either a “cold society” or a “warm community”.

What the sources say. First: according to Heberle, Tönnies designed these concepts not as classification boxes but as ideal types; neither pure Gemeinschaft nor pure Gesellschaft exists, and every concrete association carries some of each. Rural sociologists at first equated rural life with Gemeinschaft uncritically; later they had to refine that application.

Second: the criterion is not place or formality but will. Gemeinschaft-like associations can be formed by conscious acts of joining, such as betrothals or religious orders; a small group meeting to play chess may be Gesellschaft-like and yet less formally organised than a Gemeinschaft-like corporate group such as a village community.

Third: a warning in Turkish sources is that the concept of cemaat is often used, in times of instability, to build the idea of a “nostalgic and imagined” traditional society. So “cemaat” is not always a lived reality; it is often a longed-for image.

Do people in an online setting come together by choosing for a purpose, or out of habit and value? That is where Tönnies’s question works; the “digital village” analogy is not enough for this lesson (our interpretation).

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Critique: did the Durkheim line see too much consensus?

Criticisms of Durkheim and his successors come from two directions, and there is a reply in both.

The consensus assumption. In 1955 Birnbaum objected to Shils and Young’s coronation reading: in a modern urban-industrial society divergence and tension are more widespread than universally shared morals. In 1975 Lukes criticised such “neo-Durkheimian” analyses for conceiving integration too simply and for not seeing ceremonies as elements in the “mobilization of bias”. But as McGuigan notes, Birnbaum’s “conflict” reading also stayed within the functionalist framework; the two sides shared more assumptions than it seemed.

Determinism. Durkheim is charged with seeing society as crushing over the individual. His defenders say that social facts exist to the extent that individuals adopt them, and that in Durkheim there is no antagonism between individual and society.

The objection to Weber. The IEP author reports the common criticism that Weber’s theory of authority is too “operational” and fails to account for the normative dimension; in Durkheim legitimacy is tied to a moral foundation.

Towards the end of the lesson these objections give you a habit: read every concept by asking “what does it see, and what can it not see?”

Lab

Exercise: the 1910 ‘morning ragout’ and the 1903 ‘nervous life’ in your feed

Two documented sentences side by side:

Weber, in 1910, says that modern man has grown used to swallowing, before he goes to work, a “ragout” from every field of cultural life in the newspaper: he is forced to glide from politics to theatre and everything in between, and that this is not a matter of indifference is obvious. Simmel, in 1903, writes that in the city the “rapid and uninterrupted change of impressions” intensifies nervous life and leads to the blasé attitude.

An exercise (try it on your own phone; there is no ready answer):

1. Scroll a morning feed for five minutes. How many different topics went by? Count the transitions between topics.
2. Ask Weber’s question: how does this feed shape “modern man” in you? Ask Simmel’s question: do these differences stir anything in you, or do they all feel “grey”?
3. Be honest with yourself: do not present this as evidence. It is self-observation; neither Weber nor Simmel wrote about feed applications. Extending their sentences to today is our interpretation.
4. Try the opposite reading too: might the same feed also have awakened curiosity, new connections or closeness in you? Simmel’s reading of the city is not wholly negative either: he counts freedom and a cosmopolitan outlook among what the city brings.

This laboratory also reminds you of a distinction in media research: “measurement, essay or self-observation?” The 1910 plan offers measurement, the 1903 essay interpretation, and your own feed only a starting point.

Story

Durkheim’s most famous reader in Istanbul: Ziya Gökalp

The early 1910s, Salonica (a city of the Ottoman Empire then). A man is telling the young people of the Committee of Union and Progress about French sociologists whose names they are hearing for the first time: Durkheim, Fouillée, Tarde, Le Bon. His name is Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924).

In Salonica, Gökalp had a sociology (içtimaiyat) course included in the curriculum of this school. In 1913 he was appointed professor of sociology at the Istanbul Darülfünun (the Ottoman university), and in 1915 he led the founding of the first sociology institute.

What he took from Durkheim was not just a name. According to the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, in holding that studies must be not “nefsî (subjective)” but “şey’î (objective)” Gökalp was following Durkheim, and he saw society as a reality distinct from and independent of the individuals who compose it. He also adopted the idea of the transition from mechanical to organic society through population density and the division of labour; but out of fear that culture (hars) would be erased by civilisation (medeniyet), he distinguished the two.

The same entry stresses that it would not be right to say Gökalp adopted Durkheim “blindly”. (That the word “şey’î” evokes Durkheim’s chose is our interpretation.)

This card rests only on two encyclopedia entries; exactly what Gökalp took from Durkheim, and what he did not, is a subject for separate research.

Card

This is how exams ask it

Frequent patterns

• “Who coined the term sociology?” → Comte (Cours, fourth volume, 1839).
• “Social facts must be treated as things” → Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895).
• “Mechanical and organic solidarity” → Durkheim, The Division of Labour (1893). “Anomie, types of suicide” → Durkheim, Suicide (1897).
• “Ideal type, Verstehen, three types of legitimate domination, rationalization” → Weber.
• “The stranger, the metropolis and mental life, blasé, forms of sociation” → Simmel (1903 and 1908).
• “Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft” → Tönnies (1887). “Wesenwille–Kürwille” is his too.
• “Survival of the fittest” → Spencer (not Darwin).

Tempting wrong answers

• “Durkheim coined the term sociology” → no, Comte.
• Mixing up the birth years of Durkheim and Simmel: both 1858; Tönnies 1855, Weber 1864.
• “Durkheim’s four types of suicide take equal room in the main text” → the fourth (fatalistic) appears only in a footnote.
• Ideal type = best example → no, a deliberately one-sided construct.
• Gemeinschaft = village, Gesellschaft = city → no, ideal types; the distinction is the kind of will.

Alternative names used in Turkish

• Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft: cemaat–cemiyet or topluluk–toplum (community–society).
• Sociology: in older usage “içtimaiyat” or “ilm-i içtimâ”.
• Ideal type: ideal tip.

Typical exam question patterns were written from general patterns; whichever source you read, memorise the term and the year side by side.

Summary

Summary card: a map you can reuse

• The shared question: while old bonds dissolve, what holds society together, where does the individual stand, and how does the city crowd change a person? (our summary)
• Comte (1798–1857): presented the term “sociology” hesitantly in a footnote in 1839; the law of three stages.
• Spencer (1820–1903): the “organic” view of society; the phrase “survival of the fittest” is his.
• Durkheim (1858–1917): the social fact (treat it as a thing), mechanical and organic solidarity, anomie and the types of suicide (the fatalistic one in a footnote); the newspaper–imitation test in 1897.
• Weber (1864–1920): Verstehen, the ideal type, three types of legitimate domination, rationalization; the 1910 press-research plan.
• Simmel (1858–1918): forms of sociation, the stranger, the metropolis and mental life (blasé, reserve, loneliness).
• Tönnies (1855–1936): Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft (two wills, ideal types); in 1922 the critique of public opinion.
• Marx (1818–1883): only a pointer in this lesson; “the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class”.
• Next lessons: functionalism and interactionism, Chicago, mass society, critical approaches.
• Warnings: concepts change shape in translation (thing, authority/domination, iron cage); the “classical” canon was built later; the classics did not theorise the media continuously, they left scattered touches.