Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber: Sociological Views and Theories

The sociological views of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim all assert that various aspects of our identity or lifestyle are fully a product of the society in which we live. Despite this assertion, each theorist views the impact of society and its manifestation of our identity in a different way. All three of these men used the Industrial Revolution and capitalism to shape their theories of social identity, especially the identity created by capitalism's division of labor. The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in the recent history of the world. Heilbroner (1968, p. 53) notes that a new "theological" point of view underpinned this social and economic paradigm shift toward "mechanical" rather than "organic" solidarity among individuals. This analysis will provide a comparison and contrast of the positions of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber with respect to the impact of the "new" capitalist society on individual identity.

Marx theorized that society was an organism similar to the human body where each part performs a distinct function. Marx saw the basic division in society as existing between owners and non-owners of the means of production. This division largely "determined the character" of other areas of activity and of society as a whole at any given historical period (Hess, Markson, and Stein, 1989, p. 12). Marxist sociology and economic theory posited the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the prole

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989, p. 12). The social structure which Durkheim recognized was one in which individual lives are played out in a society with a preexisting set of rules governing economic activity as well as family life. These rules and economic constraints or privileges directly influence identity development. Durkheim argued that individual identity becomes eroded in a capitalist and elite-controlled society, "By putting himself under the wing of society, individuals make themselves also, to a certain extent, dependent upon it" (Giddens, 1971, p. 117). There is only so much individual freedom or expression of identity such a socially-dependent scenario permits. Durkheim also recognized that feudalism was giving way rapidly in the face of the Industrial Revolution, but saw that revolution as far more potentially liberating than did Karl Marx. He rooted much of his social theory and his concept of the effects of the division of labor in the notion of anomie. Anomie - literally "without norms" - refers to what Durkheim perceived as an increasingly characteristic trait of man in urban industrial society (Anderson, 1971, p. 58). The individual (i.e. identity), he argued, had been torn from the community-binding norms of traditional s

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