Marx And Durkheim

7 Pages 1641 Words

Sociology as an academic discipline is still very much in its youth as compared to disciplines of the natural sciences, such as biology and chemistry. The reason for sociology’s green roots is because it can be thought of as a response to modernity. The modern world only really began to develop at the turn of the 19th century and, since then, has continued to become more advanced at an exponential rate. Sociology came about as a response to modernity because people began to change the way that they lived their lives and, most significantly, how they thought about themselves and their lives. Many theorists in the 19th century, such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, wrote about this new discipline of sociology. They attempted to use sociology in order to explain the new ways that people were thinking and the new problems that arose in society because of that shift in people’s thoughts and how people lived.
Karl Marx had a very disdainful view of capitalism, which was beginning to flourish as a result of modernity. The rise of the mechanization of labour in society provided the opportunity for things to be mass produced, which in turn meant that in order to be productive, people were also treated as factors of production. Within capitalism, everything began to be commodified. This meant that everything was given a dollar value, including the labour of people. The entire commodification of society, as Marx believed, would lead people to feel alienated from their work, and even from themselves. “The more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, and the poorer he himself becomes in his inner life, the less he belongs to himself” (Sociology of Capitalism, p.178). Before modernity, this alienation of the worker, the commodification of time and labour, was never even a concept to be thought of. This was because people had always worked...