C

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

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

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

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

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