Key Concepts in Sociology: Bourdieu, Weber, Durkheim, Williams
Bourdieu’s Sociology of Science
For Bourdieu, scientific truth is located between the “epistemological binomial” formed by logicism (with its tendency toward objectivism and the propositional) on one side, and historicism (with its relativistic and skeptical tendency) on the other. The sociological critique of science thus presents itself as an overcoming of this “scholarly tradition” (what we might call the traditional propositional logic of science). This tradition tends to view science and scientific systems as crystallized, conclusive, and perfect systems of propositions already established in a science (say, in its “context of justification”), rather than, by contrast, as something launched into a science or into “science(s) in training.” Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of science is concerned primarily with the analysis of the socio-transcendental conditions of knowledge. In this sense, his work can be regarded as embedded in the tradition of historicizing and socializing the Kantian transcendental subject. For the objectivity that science presupposes essentially depends on observation conditions being collective and socially ready. As Bourdieu states, “there is no objective reality independent of observation conditions without questioning the fact that what is observed when certain these conditions, retains the character of objectivity.”
Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism
Weber defines the “spirit of capitalism” as the ideas and habits that favor the rational pursuit of economic gain. Weber notes that this spirit exists not only in Western culture when we consider this attitude in individuals, and that we must also take into account that these individuals—”heroic entrepreneurs,” as he calls them—could not, by themselves, establish a new economic order (capitalism). Among the trends identified by Weber was the greed for profit with minimal effort, the idea that labor is a curse and a burden to be avoided, especially when gains exceed what is necessary for a modest life. “For a way of life well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism,” Weber wrote, “can outperform others, must originate somewhere, and not just isolated individuals but as a way of life common to whole groups of people.”
Durkheim’s Social Facts
Social facts are the object of study of sociology, and their main feature is the ability to be imposed on individuals beyond what they think. Social facts relate to all that the community has taught as essential to itself; that is, all that is done in such a way that it may have an external coercion on the individual or be general throughout the area of a given society and have its own existence, regardless of the individual manifestations that have been made. Not every social phenomenon is a social fact; to be one, it must be external to individuals, exert coercion, be widespread within society, and exist independently of individual manifestations.
Raymond Williams: The Idea of Culture
“The idea of culture is a general reaction also a general and important change in the conditions of our life together.” Therein lies its historical significance, but also its failure. A “reaction” is somewhat less deliberate than a “response,” and not an appropriate category to classify the learning process of the speaker as a later stage of change. The idea of culture is a revelation, in the sense that a psychic symptom reveals, insistent in its register, a real state of things, but not a simple nor sufficient account of this. The idea of culture is not so much to be learned as a warning that, however, there is something to learn.