Week 2 Readings 

Intro and Marx

Nordlinger

• %%Embedded view%%!
• Political sociology: interrelationships of political + social phenomenon
• The necessity of a sociological approach in accounting for certain political phenomena
• Importance of social factors
• Marx: all political/social phenomena are caused by the economic substructure of society
• Religion = helps maintain the structure of capitalist society
• European sociology: societies = totalities, attempted to understand relationships as a whole
  • Still relevant today
• American sociology: attempted to understand particular institutions
• Gemeinschaft relations: individuals interact in a face-to-face manner
• Gesellschaft relations: interactions take place in an impersonal fashion, involving only 1 aspect of one’s self
• Rise of comparative sociology in the 2nd half of the 19th century = due to the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution
  • 2 problems: integration of societies + protection of individual liberties
• Overlap between political philosophers + sociologists

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Glasberg & Shannon

• %%Power view%%!
• Oppression: attitudes, behaviours, and pervasive and systematic social arrangements by which members of one group are exploited and subordinated while members of another group are granted privileges
• Structure of power inequalities
• Economics: central feature to the patterns of inequality
  • Political economy: the economy is not a neutral institution
  • Capitalism
    • Inequality = whether one is an owner of the means of production or an owner only of labour-power
  • Socialism: social cooperation between workers to create wealth, means of production are controlled by the state
  • Communism: means of production are collectively owned by the workers themselves
• Most political economies are a hybrid of these types
• Patriarchy
  • Sexism, discrimination
  • Rape culture: rape and violence against women are accepted as a common feature of society
• Racism
  • White-skin privilege/superiority
• Heteronormativity
  • Sexual orientation, monogamy

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Orum

• Marx: proletariat (working class) would emerge victorious from a revolutionary confrontation with the capitalists
  • Thought that change was imminent
  • Determinism: inevitability of historical change
  • Revolution
• Alienation
• Men continually create social institutions
• Predicted a collapse of capitalism and the emergence of a communist society
• Substructure = economy; it shapes all institutions
• Superstructure = politics, state, religion, philosophy
• Capitalism limits the freedom and exercise of power by the state
• Ideology: ideas or ideals that sustain a regime
  • False consciousness
• Antecedents of revolutions
  • Economic
  • Overabundance of commodities
  • Centralization of capital
  • Proletarization (capitalists join the working class)
  • Worsening financial conditions of the average worker → verelendung: increasing misery
  • Social
  • Opposition between town and countryside
  • Communication
  • Politicization (trade unionism)
  • Class consciousness: the working class becomes aware of itself as a class
  • Political organization

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Weber and Power

Orum II

• Weber

  • Emphasis on great figures making history → charismatic personalities
  • Strength of the state: law and administration + great leadership figures
  • No social laws!
  • Politics: a continuous conflict over the control of scarce material and symbolic
  • Rationalization of life → Western society
  • Rational bureaucracy: alienation, no freedom
  • Status groups: people who share a common occupational/professional position + values/lifestyle
  • The basis for political action
  • Political associations + Parties
  • Authority = central to modern societies
  • Iron cage, we are prisoners
  • Rule of law

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Poggi

• Power: the probability, within a social relationship, of realizing one’s own even against resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests
• Weber: class, status groups, parties
• Stratification - power
  • Society’s goods can be allocated through:
  • Custom: status, status group, ideological/normative power
  • Exchange: wealth, classes, economic power
  • Command: rulership, party, political power
• The tendency for power forms to enhance one another, and together to enhance society’s power-at-large

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