This research examines the sociological work of Durkheim, Marx, and Barthes, with reference to their treatment of theoretical antinomies, or unresolvable contradictions embedded into accounts of social structure, form, and change, and their impact on American interactionist and French structuralist social theory. The research will set forth the context of the emergence of modern social theory and then discuss how the work of Marx, Durkheim, and Barthes offers a way of analyzing the relative situations of individuals, groups, and societies as a whole.
It does not take much examination of the history of social theory to see that varieties of conflict, alienation, and paradox appear inherent in the relationships between individual and individual, between individual and group, between individual and/or group and society at large. Endless varieties of dyadic, intergroup, and intrasocietal encounters suggest that the reality of social organization and social actors may not easily be reduced to one description. Yet the impulse to make sense of what eludes understanding persists because the individual is a social being, subject to great external influences yet also an actor in those influences. As Mead, associated with symbolic interactionism, states: "The life-process takes place in individual organisms, so that the psychology which studies that process in its creative determining function becomes a science of the objective world" (Mead 278).
Making sense of social interactions is a key feature of classical social theorists. Marx defines society in terms of "man's reciprocal action" (Marx, "Society and Economy" 136), which he formulates as power relationships between capital and labor. Capital is power because it controls means of production. Labor is simply an instrument of production. This structure of society sets up a permanent contradiction because labor cannot escape capital and form an alternative social environment even though i...