Though a passionately political man, Weber was just as eager as Comte was for sociology to produce ‘value-free facts’ about society – that is, facts free from the personal or collective values of the scientists carrying out the research. At the same time, Weber was at pains to point out that science could not provide values or tell us how to live; it could only provide new facts which might help us in our decisions about how to live. He thought that the most salient fact about the modern world is that it brings disenchantment. It is a world in which, he said, ‘the gods neither have nor can have a home’.35 Modernity, for Weber, meant rationality, the organisation of affairs based on the trinity of efficiency, order and material satisfaction. This for him was achieved by means of legal, commercial and bureaucratic institutions that increasingly govern our relations with one another. The problem, as he saw it, was that commercial and industrial society, whatever freedoms and other benefits it has, brings disenchantment into our lives, eliminates any ‘spiritual purpose’ for mankind.36 He didn’t think there was anything to be done about this; disenchantment was here to stay and had to be lived with.
A final point of Weber’s was that the new human sciences, of which sociology was one, were fundamentally different from the natural sciences. While we can ‘explain’ natural occurrences in terms of the application of causal laws, human conduct is ‘intrinsically meaningful’, and has to be ‘interpreted’ or ‘understood’ in a way which has no counterpart in nature.37 This Weberian dichotomy has remained vivid and pertinent down to our own day.
Hardly less influential than this dichotomy, at the time anyway, was the distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936). In 1887 he characterised pre-modern societies as based on Gemeinschaft (community), whereas modern societies he said were based on Gesellschaft (association). Communities in the traditional sense grow organically and have ‘sacred’ values which are shared by everyone, most of which are unquestioned. Societies in the modern world, on the other hand, are planned along rational, scientific lines and are maintained by bureaucracies. It follows, Tönnies said, that there is inevitably something artificial and arbitrary about modern societies, with no guarantee that the people we associate with will share our own values. This view was often expressed by the arts of modernism (Chapter 36).
The fourth of the great nineteenth-century German sociologists was Georg Simmel, who in 1903 published an essay, ‘The metropolis and mental life’. He explained there that ‘The psychological foundation, upon which metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.’38 For Simmel, who taught both Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukács, the vast new cities of the nineteenth century (metropolises, not medieval university towns) were a new type of space, with important implications for human interaction, ‘a space that both excites and alienates . . . a place that leads to the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture . . .’39 If the first phrase sounds like the city the impressionists were trying to portray, that explains why Simmel was known as ‘the Manet of philosophy’ in Berlin. His other influential point was his distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ culture. Objective culture for Simmel was what we would call ‘high culture’, what Matthew Arnold described as the best that has been thought, written, composed, and painted. This culture was objective in that it was ‘out there’, in concrete form, for everyone to see, hear, or read, and Simmel thought that how people related to this ‘canon’ of works was the best way in which to define a society or culture. On the other hand, in ‘subjective culture’, said Simmel, an individual seeks ‘self-fulfilment and self-realisation’ not in relation to any culture ‘out there’ but through his or her own resources. Nothing – or very little – is shared in subjective culture. Simmel thought that the classic example of subjective culture was the business culture; everyone was turned in on his or her own particular project. In such a world everyone could be more or less satisfied with their lot yet be unaware of the collective dissatisfaction, manifested as alienation. In 1894 Simmel became the first person to teach a course specifically called sociology.40
Simmel leads us back to France again, for his opposite number there was Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). The son of a rabbi from Lorraine, a Jew and a provincial, Durkheim was doubly marginal, which perhaps gave an edge to his observations. France had been through some regular periods of turbulence since 1789 – the revolution of 1848, the Franco-Prussian War and siege of Paris, 1870–1871 – and this gave Durkheim an abiding interest in the conditions of social stability, what determines and what destroys it, and which factors give individuals a sense of purpose, keep them honest and optimistic.41
In a career sense, Durkheim was a beneficiary of a raft of changes then overtaking higher education in France. Following the siege, and the Commune, the French republicans and Catholic monarchists had fought for control, especially in education, with the republicans eventually emerging victorious. Among their priorities was the reform of the universities, where departments of scientific research were established, on the German model. Durkheim was caught up in these changes: by 1887 he was on the faculty at Bordeaux University, where he offered a new course: ‘social science’.42 And so, when the authorities restructured Bordeaux, along with the other universities, Durkheim was perfectly positioned to take advantage and invent (at least in France) the brand-new discipline of sociology. Sensing his moment, he moved quickly, to produce a textbook on the subject and two, narrower, more polemical works, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), and Suicide (1897). A year later, he also established a journal, L’année sociologique. In 1902 he was promoted to the Sorbonne.
Suicide is his best-known book. On the face of it, as Roger Smith says, this does not appear to be a sociological topic.43 It is nothing if not intimate, private, subjective (Gide was later to argue that suicide is in principle inexplicable). But that was Durkheim’s point: to show that psychology had a sociological dimension. In the first part of his book, he used statistics to show that suicide rates varied, for example, according to whether someone was Protestant or Catholic, whether they lived in the countryside or in the town. This had never been done before and people were shocked by his findings. But Durkheim himself was not satisfied with these more obvious variables. He also thought that less tangible social features were just as important, and he divided suicides into egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. ‘Egoism’ he described as ‘a measure of a society’s failure to become the focus of the individual’s sentiments’.44 In a society where such failures show themselves, a high proportion of people are aimless and ‘unintegrated’. ‘Anomie’ he defined as a general measure of a society’s lack of norms, which mean that many people lead unregulated lives, with numerous side-effects such as high crime. Durkheim was arguing, therefore, that there is such a thing as society, that there are social phenomena – egoism, anomie – that in a sense exist outside individuals and cannot be reduced to biology or psychology.45