1 Methodology of Research in Sociology: A Historical Introduction

N. Jayaram

Contents

1. Objective

2. Introduction

3. Learning Outcome

4. Enlightenment and the Origin of Sociology

5. Durkheim: Empiricism in Sociology

Self-Check Exercise 1

6. Radcliffe-Brown: ‘Natural Science of Society’ and Beyond

7. Weber: Hermeneutics and the Verstehen Approach

8. Marx: The Materialist Conception of History

Self-Check Exercise 1

9. Conclusion

Notes

1. Objective

In this module you will learn about the evolution of the concern for appropriate methodology in social science research. In their quest for scientific knowledge, sociologists have developed certain definite reasoning and logic to explore and understand social reality. In this module, we will deal with some basic arguments of three founding fathers of sociologists to reflect on the origin and development of methodology of research in sociology.

2. Introduction

In academic parlance, the term methodology has a number of meanings. In the narrowest and literal sense, it refers to the study of methods and procedures in an individual piece of research including a general type of research activity. Often the term ‘methodology’ is used, erroneously though, merely as a more impressive-sounding synonym for ‘method’. In the philosophy of science, the term methodology is used in a broader sense to refer to the methods of research as also the concepts and analytical structure of an academic discipline. Used thus, the term covers more complex issues that relate to (a) the assumptions that we make about the nature of reality studied (ontology1), (b) the nature of knowledge that is obtainable (epistemology2), the process of reasoning adopted (logic) in obtaining knowledge, and the tools and techniques used in the collection and analysis of data (method).

In the course of the evolution of social sciences there has been considerable reflection on the nature of their disciplines as a science, and the strategy that they can and cannot adopt to approximate the ideal of science in their quest for knowledge. This continuing reflection and strategizing in social sciences is discussed under the rubric ‘research methodology’. Reflecting as it were ‘the growing-pains of an immature discipline’, it is in sociology, than in other social sciences, that there has been a preoccupation with research methodology. Sociologists have remained, what French mathematician and philosopher Jules Henri Poincare (1854–1912) long ago called, ‘hierophants of methodology’ (Merton 1968: 141).

This module provides an historical introduction to the origin and development of methodology of research in sociology. Thematically, it deals with the methodological contributions of three founding fathers of sociology: Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Karl Marx (1818–83). The module is divided into five sections. The first section locates the origin of sociology as an academic discipline in European Enlightenment. The second section discusses empiricism in sociology by focusing on the contributions of Durkheim. The third section delineates Durkheim’s influence on British social anthropology, especially the work of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), and comments on how the methodology of the discipline has metamorphosed since then. The fourth section analyses hermeneutics and Verstehen — in sociology, the approaches associated with Weber. The fifth section presents the methodological significance of ‘the materialist conception of history’, which is mainly as associated with Marx.

The thrust of this module is to highlight the deep-rooted differences between positivist and many non-positivists, and some pronouncedly anti-positivist, methodological positions in sociology. These differences have influenced the thinking and practice of social research over a century and a half since the birth of sociology.

3. Learning Outcome

This module would acquaint you with the emergence and development of the concern for appropriate methodology particularly in sociology since the time of Comte. An understanding of the arguments of plural methodological orientations in sociology would prepare a strong ground for you to proceed to rest of the modules in the paper on Research Methodology in Sociology.

4. Enlightenment and the Origin of Sociology

Sociology, as we know it today, originated in the intellectual ferment of Enlightenment in 18th century Europe. Often referred to as ‘the Age of Reason’, this philosophical and social movement gave rise to many progressive ideas, including the value of reason and science and a commitment to social progress. The principal adherents of the Enlightenment fervently believed that human beings, without recourse to religion and the supernatural and with the help of reason and science, could account for the course of human history, to explain the socio-economic crisis confronting the European society, and formulate policies to achieve social progress.

Thus, the French social philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) thought that there was need for a new subject which employs the methods of science — observation, experimentation, and comparison. The model he had for this subject was physics, which thanks to the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) had established itself as a model for scientific inquiry. Comte, in fact, initially called the new subject he wanted developed as ‘social physics’. But on realising that the phrase ‘social physics’ had already been used by a Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, he invented a new term, sociology, which has two stems, the Latin socius (companion) and the Greek logos (study of). Though the term ‘sociology’ dates from the correspondence of Comte in 1824, it acquired wider public use with the publication of his Course de Philosophie Positive (1853). It was through the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill (1806–73) that Comte came to be known to the English-speaking world first.

It is important to note that Comte called his treatise Course de Philosophie Positive and not Course de Sociology; he called himself a ‘positive philosopher’ and not a sociologist. It was Comte who introduced the term ‘positivism’ into sociology. It was his conviction that to be scientific, this new subject must deal only with observable entities known directly to experience and with propositions that are directly testable. It is for this reason positivism lays emphasis on measurement and quantification. Furthermore, it also tended to offer explanations in terms of social structure rather than by reference to human intentions and motives. Comte’s conviction was shared by his English counterpart Herbert Spencer (1820–95), often referred to as ‘the English Comte’.

5. Durkheim: Empiricism in Sociology

Although Comte visualized the need for and the possibility of sociology as a positive social science, he did not himself apply the positivist methodology to the study of social reality. His vision and aspirations were realized by his compatriot Durkheim, the first empirical sociologist, who consistently applied the principles of positivist methodology to the study of human society. Durkheim wrote what is perhaps the first major exposition on research methodology in sociology. His work The Rules of Sociological Method (1966/1895) is well known and is regarded as a classic. But equally important from the methodological viewpoint are his three seminal empirical works in the positivist tradition, namely, The Division of Labor in Society (1964/1893) (being his doctoral thesis), Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1951/1897), and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965/1912), besides his three ontological essays put together by Celistin Bouglé under the title Sociology and Philosophy (1974/1924).

The ontology of Durkheim’s sociology holds society to be an objective reality and the nature of this reality to be sui generis. That is, social reality (what he termed ‘social facts’) is of its own kind and unique, which cannot be explained by a level of reality that is lower than itself. Durkheim elucidates this by outlining four orders/levels of reality in terms of increasing levels of complexity and interdependence of elements in the following order: physical (inorganic), biological (organic), psychological (individual consciousness), and social collective conscience and collective representations).

Durkheim elucidated the objective nature of social reality in answering the question ‘What is a social fact?’ ‘Social fact’, he clarified, does not mean any fact having to do with society, as understood in common parlance. Concluding the first Chapter of The Rules of Sociological Method, he defined a ‘social fact’ (which includes the whole range of facts) as

… every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations (1966: 13; italics in the original).

The epistemology of Durkheim’s sociology derives from its ontology. Since social reality is objective, it can be studied objectively. This is called empiricism. And since social reality is sui generis, it must be explained only reference to other social reality and not by reference to lower orders — physical, biological, or psychological — of reality. This is called sociologism; non sociological explanation of social reality results in the fallacy of reductionism.

Durkheim was aware that not only is the subject matter of sociology, namely, human beings in society, normative in nature, but the sociologist who studies society, who is a human being too, is normative and subject to biases. So, how can a human being, who is subjective, objectively study human beings, who are subjective? Durkheim’s methodological strategy explicitly disallowed subjective responses of individuals as valid data, as they are coloured. Obviously, Durkheim precluded ‘subjective dispositions’ as ‘objective data’; he did not accept any data that could be vitiated by the influence of the subject of the study or the scholar as the observer. Accordingly, he eschewed interview method for collecting sociological data.

Alternatively, in conformity with ‘phenomenalism’, a basic methodological principle of positivism, Durkheim looked for data on reality ‘out there’: data that can be influenced neither by the subject of the study nor the scholar studying it. In a review of A. Labriola’s ‘Essaissur la conception materialiste de l’histoire’ in Revue Philosophique (December 1897), Durkheim wrote:

I consider extremely fruitful this idea that social life should be explained, not by the notions of those who participate in it, but by more profound causes which are unperceived by consciousness, and I think also that these causes are to be sought mainly in the manner according to which the associated individuals are grouped. Only in this way, it seems, can history become a science, and sociology itself exist (quoted in Winch 2008: 22).

He identified three sets of data that are free of such limitation, namely, (i) social statistics, (ii) legal codes, and (iii) religious dogmas/myths. Each one of Durkheim’s major empirical works is based on these sets of ‘objective’ data: Suicide (1951), on social statistics; The Division of Labor in Society (1964), on legal codes; and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965), on religious dogmas/myths.

Having defined the ontology and epistemology of social facts, Durkheim explained the ‘rules’ of the ‘method’ to be followed in their scientific study. The importance of his work The Rules of Sociological Method (1966) lies in the fact that it was for the first time that a sociologist had written explicitly and exclusively on research methodology to be followed in sociology as a social science. Moreover, this book was published after Durkheim had completed his three important empirical works; thus, it was an articulation of methodological precepts based on the practice of research. Notwithstanding the criticisms that are levelled against it, the Rules is still important as guideline for procedures in sociological study.

Durkheim spelt out five stages of social scientific investigation:

i. definition of the subject matter in terms of some observed characteristics: observation of social facts;

ii. description of normal types after a study of many cases: distinction between the normal and pathological;

iii. classification into species, genera, etc.;

iv. comparative and causal investigation of the reasons for variation: explanation of social facts; and,

v. to attempt to discover any general laws that might emerge in the course of these various stages: establishment of sociological proof.

Self Check Exercise 1:

1. How did Enlightenment contribute to scientific thinking?

The Enlightenment thinkers fervently believed in the value of reason and science. They believed that human beings, without recourse to religion and the supernatural and with the help of reason and science, could account for the course of human history, to explain the socio-economic crisis confronting society, and formulate policies to achieve social progress.

2. What methods did Comte prescribe?

August Comte visualized the need for and the possibility of sociology as a positive social science. Hence, he prescribed the use of three positivist methods — observation, experimentation, and comparison.

3. What methodology did Durkheim prescribe?

Durkheim was the first sociologist to apply the positivist methodology to the study of social reality. For him, social reality is objective; hence it can be studied objectively. The first and most fundamental methodological rule, for him, is to consider social facts as ‘things’. Durkheim’s methodological strategy explicitly disallowed subjective responses of individuals as valid data, as they are coloured. In conformity with ‘phenomenalism’, a basic methodological principle of positivism, Durkheim looked for data on reality ‘out there’: data that can be influenced neither by the subject of the study nor the scholar studying it. He identified three sets of data that are free of such limitation, namely, (i) social statistics, (ii) legal codes, and (iii) religious dogmas/myths. He also spelt out five stages of scientific investigation in sociology.

6. Radcliffe-Brown: ‘Natural Science of Society’ and Beyond

The early development of anthropology, especially social anthropology in England, was indelibly influenced by positivism and the methodological insights of Durkheim. Durkheim’s ontology emphasized the importance of collectivities and institutions. Where could one observe human beings in interaction with one another under stable conditions, uninfluenced by external forces? The answer was inevitably in tribes, island societies, and isolated and remote villages, whose societies and cultures thus became social laboratories. His search for elementary forms of religion — ‘the most primitive and simple religion which is actually known’ — led him to the Australian aborigines (1965). Studying such societies, he firmly believed, not only should aid us in disengaging their constituent elements, but would also facilitate their explanation (ibid.: 19).

Interestingly, the early concept of ‘community’ was defined as (a) group of people, (b) living in a (physical) boundary, (c) who shared a ‘we’ feeling. Community, so viewed, was a concrete entity, not an abstraction or virtual reality that it is now. The isolated and generally insulated communities had several characteristics that were helpful in understanding society and culture: (a) they were small in size and lived in compact groups, (b) they were well integrated and cohesive, and (c) they were stable and without change; for many of them, time was not meaningful in the chronological or linear sense, and they reckoned time in cyclical terms. Such small and stable communities could be directly observed; observation of objective reality was a scientific method. This anthropological project, with methodological propositions deriving from positivist inspiration is well enunciated in Radcliffe-Brown’s classic A Natural Science of Society (1957; see also Srinivas 1976).

At the theoretical level, the related concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘function’ implied in Durkheim’s sociology were explicitly delineated by Radcliffe-Brown and extended by other anthropologists. The concept of ‘function’ was further analysed by Polish-British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942). These theoretical developments later re-entered sociology through the works of Marion J. Levy Jr (structuralism), Robert K. Merton (functionalism), and Talcott Parsons (structural-functionalism). The ontological and epistemological positions of these theoretical frameworks had a bearing on research methodology in the social sciences in general.

However, the sustained and deeper engagement of anthropologists with isolated and insulated communities gradually took their methodological orientation away from what Durkheimian positivism prescribed. A key development was studying the community in its existential context; what came to be known in social research as ethnography (for a detail discussion on ethnography, read Module RMS 25).

The emphasis on holistic understanding in ethnography was in marked contrast to the idea of atomism,4 an important epistemological principle of positivism.

An essential component of ethnography was the idea of fieldwork, which involved an extended engagement with the communities, ‘immersion’ in the life-world of the community that is studied. Participant observation emerged as a sine qua non of ethnography. Over the decades, several methodological innovations have enriched anthropological research, in particular, and social research, in general. These innovations are today discussed under the rubric ‘qualitative approach’. Furthermore, the role of the anthropologist began acquiring new dimensions (see Geertz 1988).

7. Weber: Hermeneutics and the Verstehen Approach

The first major step to consciously move away from the positivist tradition, if not break with it completely, was taken by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) who introduced the idea of hermeneutics and Verstehen into the philosophy of social sciences. Hermeneutics (Greek hermeneus, an interpreter) — the theory and method of interpreting meaningful human action — is a contribution of theology to philosophy and the social sciences. It originated prior to the introduction of printing to address the errors resulting from hand-copying of the Bible. The objective was to recover the ‘authentic’ version of the Bible. The term was brought into philosophy in the late 19th century by Dilthey.

Hermeneutics, as a methodology, distinguished disciplines that investigate human beings, society, and history (Geisteswissenschaften, literally ‘sciences of the spirit’) from natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften, literally ‘sciences of the nature’). Unlike the natural sciences, which focus on the external manifestations of a phenomenon, the human studies, including sociology, ‘seek an understanding (Verstehen) of their essentially meaningful subject-matter’ (Quninton 1977: 281) through interpretation. The term has since been more broadly applied by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to emphasize the methodology of his investigations into the nature of human existence.

The epistemological thrust of hermeneutics was that human action as an expression of ‘lived experience’ requires a special method of analysis, namely, interpretation. The interpretation of the action can take place through two modes:

i. Focussing on the relation of the ‘creator’ of an act, book, or picture to the ‘interpreter’: the interpreter putting himself in the position of the creator to under the latter’s act. The presumption here is that both the creator and the interpreter share a common humanity; that is, both are expressions of the same spirit.

ii. The individuals — both the creator and the interpreter — are disregarded, and human action is interpreted in relation to a wider context which gives it meaning. For example, a painting can be understood by reference to the outlook or worldview of the society in which it is produced. Similarly, an analyst can construct such a worldview out of its individual manifestation — the circular relation is called the ‘hermeneutic circle’.

Dilthey’s ideas were developed and extended by his compatriot sociologist Max Weber, who perhaps laid the foundation for an alternative to the positivist approach to the study of social reality. In fact, most of the subsequent advances in social research methodology — symbolic interactionism (George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer), dramaturgy (Erving Goffman), sociological phenomenology (Alfred Schutz), social construction of reality (Peter Berger), and ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel) — have their bases in Weberian methodological thoughts.

Weber, more than any other sociologist, reflected on the methodological issues in the social sciences. Émile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1966) was basically an attempt at spelling out the principles of research for arriving at valid sociological knowledge, in the light of his own articulations of what sociology is all about. Weber, however, went beyond such a concern and discussed many other issues relating to methodology, especially as they are unique to the social sciences, and particularly to sociology. His emphasis on understanding, and the issues involved in it, was a major contribution to the methodology of social sciences.

Weber’s emphasis on ‘understanding’ has been carried to its extreme by the adherents of qualitative approach to social research, as opposed to the emphasis on generalising in the positivist tradition, which necessitated quantitative data and statistical analysis. It must be observed, qualitative–quantitative is a misunderstood binary in social research, and has inadvertently led to methodological fundamentalism, with those doing qualitative research debunking and deriding quantitative research and vice versa. Weber, to be sure, did not eschew generalization; he, in fact, developed the idea of ‘ideal type’ as an analytical tool for comparison and generalization.

‘Sociology’, Weber defined, ‘is a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects’ (1964: 88). His reference to ‘causal explanation’ may appear to reveal the positivist streak in his thinking. But, by shifting the analytical focus on to the individual actor, Weber differed from his predecessors — Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, Ferdinand Tonnies, Henry S. Maine, etc. — whose sociology was based on social structural terms. Even when Weber conceptualized collectivities, it was in terms of social behaviour rather than social structure.

According to Weber, it is ‘erroneous … to regard any kind of psychology as the ultimate foundation of the sociological interpretation of action’ (1978: Vol. 1, 19). For Weber, ‘psychology’ meant an explanation of human action in terms of inherent characteristics of individuals independent of their social environment. Apparently, this is similar to Durkheim’s sociologism and Vilfredo Pareto’s (1848-1923) sociology. However, the similarity ends there: unlike Durkheim or Pareto, Weber emphasized the relevance and indispensability of information about the ‘inner mental states’ to scientific explanation. According to him, behaviour devoid of ‘subjective meaning’ falls outside the purview of sociology.

By emphasising the ‘subjective meaning’ — thereby, values, and beliefs — Weber also challenged Marx’s methodological position. Weber’s epistemology accords primacy to ‘consciousness’ vis-à-vis ‘social reality’, whereas the reverse is the case with Marx’s epistemology. This is illustrated well in his analysis of the relation between religion (the realm of consciousness) and economy (the realm of social reality) in his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Thus, though, to start with, he was strongly influenced by the German historical school, later he became critical of Marx’s (as also Hegel’s) conceptions.

Weber insists that in order to explain an action we must interpret it in terms of its subjectively intended meaning, something quite distinct from its objectively valid meaning: that is, explanation of an individual’s action in terms of (a) the consequences s/he intended to have, her/his purpose, rather than in terms of (b) its actual effects. The categories (a) and (b) could be and are at variance sometimes.

Verstehen as a method involves grasping the end, that is, how the actor perceives that it can be achieved

(a) by asking the individual, or (b) by inferring it by generalizing from our previous knowledge of behaviour in society, or both. Here lies the epistemological foundation of interview as a method of data collection; a method in which the responses of the participants in the study (‘respondents’, so-called) to the questions framed by the researcher yields data for understanding the social reality (in qualitative approach) and even generalising about it (in quantitative approach). This method has several techniques depending upon the background of the ‘respondents’, the size and spread of the sample, and the purpose of research: questionnaire (canvassed personally or mailed or web-based); structured semi-structured interview schedule (for conducting interview face-to-face or via telephone or teleconferencing); unstructured interview guide or check list, etc.

Verstehen, it must be emphasized, has nothing to do with introspection or any special ability of the sociologist to empathize with her/his subjects. Human beings used this (interpretive understanding) in everyday life. In sociology, this method of understanding is not arbitrary; it involves verification by statistical or comparative analysis of many cases, and very occasionally by laboratory experiments.

Weber did not carry on methodology for its own sake, but only as a means of clarifying the problems of empirical research. This is more than clear in his work The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism— first published in 1904–05 in the form of a series of essays; the most famous as well as the most controversial of his works. This book reveals Weber’s interest in generalizations (à la positivism), notwithstanding his explicit emphasis on understanding (à la interpretivism). Weber’s ontological assumption was that the behaviour of human beings is intelligible in the context of their general conception of existence. Since religious dogmas are an integral part of their world view, they can render the behaviour of individuals intelligible. In fact, Weber went on to argue that religious conceptions are actually a determinant of economic behaviour and consequently one of the causes of economic change.

Methodologically, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism is important as it exemplified the utility of ideal types for ‘measuring and comparing’ real life action for arriving at generalizations. Ideal type constitutes a systematic synthesis of Weber’s epistemological doctrine: it emphasizes the interdependence of history and sociology, on the one hand, and the conflict between construct and reality

— a dialectical process contributing to better understanding of social reality. There are three reasons for developing ideal types:

i. the necessity of understanding the radical reconstruction of logical structure of the social sciences, arising from the doctrine that the existence of causal relationships can be logically demonstrated only by generalized theoretical category, either explicitly or implicitly;

ii. to escape the individualising particularising approach of German Geisteswessenschaft and historicism; and

iii. since no science can study all concrete reality, neither can any scientific tool study infinite diversity of particular phenomena, object may be one, ways of looking at it may be many.

Selection and abstraction is inevitable in science. In the social sciences, this poses a dilemma: the social scientist will have to use either ‘general concepts’, thereby leaving out what is most decisive, or ‘traditional concepts’, which allows no room for comparison with related phenomena. It is to overcome this dilemma that Weber introduced ideal-typical construction, a procedure that he viewed as ‘indispensable for heuristic as well as expository purposes’ (1949: 90). ‘An ideal type’, Weber wrote in his classic essay ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’,

is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absence concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct (Gedankenbild) (ibid.; italics in the original).

According to Weber, ‘The ideal typical concept will help to develop our skill in imputation in research: it is no “hypothesis” but it offers guidance to the construction of hypotheses. It is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description’ (ibid.). Moreover, in its conceptual purity, ideal type ‘cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality’, but is ‘arrived at by the analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality’; ‘It is a utopia’ (ibid.). Most varied criteria may be used in the construction of an ideal type, depending upon researcher’s purpose, point of view, values, etc. Incidentally, ideal type does not refer to moral ideals or that ‘ought to be’.

As different from, nay opposed to, the concepts in the natural sciences, an ideal type is characterized by the following:

i. it is formulated in terms of subjective categories — Verstehen — of the intended meaning of an action to the actor;

ii. it does not formulate the actual concrete meaning of an action, but an extreme limiting case; and

iii. the formulation of such generalized ideal types is not the goal of social sciences – they are only instruments of analysis of concrete historical problems. This last point is based on Weber’s conviction that no stable theory in social science is possible.

The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism is also important methodologically, as validation of its conclusions warranted the use of the method of difference, besides the method of agreement— the methods of logical proof in classical experimental design formulated by John Stuart Mill (1930). Since experimentation was not possible about the thesis that Weber was advancing, he relied on comparative method as the alternative way of adducing logical proof, as experimentation has as its basis comparison between the control group and the experimental group (and ‘before’ and ‘after’). This led Weber to undertake a series of historical comparative studies of religion – ancient Judaism, Confucianism and Taoism (the religions of China), Hinduism and Buddhism (the religions of India).

Significantly, Weber’s analysis of ideal types appeared in his long essay on ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’ (1949: 49–112). This, together with his essays on ‘The Meaning of “Ethnical Neutrality” in Sociology and Economics’ (ibid.: 1–47) and ‘Science as Vocation’ (in Gerth and Mills 1970/1958: 129–56) constitute what is perhaps the landmark treatment of the issue of objectivity and value freedom/neutrality in sociology and other social sciences that has remained a point of reference in discussions on the subject.

Weber’s problem is articulated succinctly by Aron:

The sciences of culture — history and sociology — propose to understand human productions which create values or are defined with reference to values. It might be said that science is a rational activity whose goal is to arrive at judgements of fact which will be universally valid. The problem, therefore, is to know how one can formulate judgements of fact which are universally valid about works defined as creations of values (1970: 193).

8. Marx: The Materialist Conception of History

Marx — the multifaceted German scholar, revolutionary, and prophet of communism, contributed significantly to the methodology of social research. As a scholar, it is difficult to identify him with any particular social science discipline — economists, political scientists, and sociologists have, no doubt, incorporated him as a key contributor to the enrichment of their respective disciplines. He was a scholar par excellence of the bourgeois society and the capitalist economic system: he was primarily concerned with their origin and development, structure and functioning, and diagnosis and prognosis. In his intellectual explorations, he adopted a unitary social scientific approach, as against the then prevalent trend toward fragmentation of social sciences.

Marx broke away from the mainstream German intellectual tradition of idealism and embraced materialism. Nevertheless, he understood the significance of historical method for understanding human society and the changes it undergoes. He ingeniously brought together history and materialism. To understand ‘Marx’s methodological perspective [it] must be distinguished from Marxism as a political ideology’ (Jayaram 2008: 10). It is important to note that Marx himself did not advance his methodological perspective as an ‘ism’, an ideology. In fact, Marx never used the expression ‘historical materialism’, and still less ‘dialectical materialism’ — the former was the creation of Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856–1918), a first-generation Russian Marxist, and the latter, the coinage of Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), a long-time comrade and collaborator of Marx. ‘This is not merely a linguistic point; it signifies the open-ended nature of his approach to history’ (Jayaram 2008: 11), which he preferred to call ‘the materialist conception of history’.

In conformity with the mainstream positivism, which was developing as the foundational paradigm for the social sciences, Marx consciously cleared materialism of all its metaphysical strapping. For this, he took recourse to the ancient Greek philosophical tradition of dialectics.3 As the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, and the richest in content, Hegelian dialectics was considered by Marx (and his collaborator Engels) to be the greatest achievement of classical German philosophy. Although Marx borrowed dialectics from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), he turned it upside down: for Hegel, thought develops all by itself, independently of and despite nature; for Marx human thought studies and, as it were, photographs dialectics of natural and social development.

As thought and used by Marx, dialectics, as opposed to metaphysics, is a method of studying and understanding things in their real change and development (Cornforth 1971: 50). Dialectics (a) emphasizes the interconnections existing among phenomena, and (b) regards the phenomena of the world as processes in constant motion, development and change. It posits that natural and social changes occur in accordance with certain abstract laws, called the laws of dialectics.

In his rejection of metaphysics and synthesising dialectics with materialism, Marx apparently rooted himself firmly in positivism. However, his ontology and epistemology, and therefore, his methodology, are different in that Marx committed himself to ‘realism’ rather than ‘nominalism’. He eschewed preconceived notions and arbitrary abstractions. As he stated in The German Ideology (with Engels, 1845–46),

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and their material conditions of life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way (Marx and Engels 1976/1845–46: 31; italics added).

Although ‘the materialist conception of history’ embodies the ontology and epistemology of Marx’s methodology for studying socio-economic reality, nowhere in his writings do we find a comprehensive and systematic discussion on it; it occurs in fragmentary form, scattered in his speeches and all his early work. The German Ideology contains the most sustained, imaginative and impressive exposition of Marx’s theory of history. The best single statement by Marx himself, though only in an abstruse summary form, is contained in his ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859, reproduced in Bottomore and Rubel [1963: 67–69]. Unlike Durkheim and Weber, Marx did not write a treatise on methodology. Perhaps, as Isaiah Berlin (1973: 56) has noted, Marx did not regard ‘the material conception of history’ as a new philosophical system so much as a practical method of social and historical analysis, and a basis for political strategy.

Self-check Exercise- 2

1. What is hermeneutics?

Hermeneutics is the theory and method of interpreting meaningful human action. It emphasizes the need to understand from the perspective of the social actor. It originated prior to the introduction of printing to address the errors resulting from hand-copying of the Bible. The objective was to recover the ‘authentic’ version of the Bible. The term was brought into philosophy in the late 19th century by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey’s ideas were later developed and extended by his compatriot sociologist Max Weber, who perhaps laid the foundation for an alternative to the positivist approach to the study of social reality. Hermeneutics, as a methodology, contradicts the natural science model of focusing on the external manifestations of a phenomenon; it rather seeks an understanding (what Weber called Verstehen) of their essentially meaningful subject-matter through interpretation.

2. What is Weber’s major contribution to the methodology of social sciences?

Max Weber laid a strong foundation for an alternative to the positivist approach to the study of social reality. In fact, most of the subsequent advances in social research methodology — symbolic interactionism, dramaturgy, sociological phenomenology, social construction of reality, and ethnomethodology — have their bases in Weberian methodological thoughts. His emphasis on understanding, and the issues involved in it, was a major contribution to the methodology of social sciences. He stressed on the interpretation of subjectively intended meaning of a social action, something quite distinct from its objectively valid meaning. While dealing with these issues, he has also dealt in detail on the issue of objectivity and value freedom/neutrality in sociology. Interestingly, as compared to his predecessors, Weber shifted his analytical focus on to the individual actor. But he was categorical in arguing that behaviour devoid of ‘subjective meaning’ falls outside the purview of sociology. As against Marx’s methodological position, Weber’s epistemology accords primacy to ‘consciousness’ vis-à-vis ‘social reality’. This is illustrated well in his analysis of the relation between religion (the realm of consciousness) and economy (the realm of objective reality).

Notwithstanding his explicit emphasis on understanding, Weber was interested in generalizations. In his effort to clarify the problems of empirical research, he also developed the idea of ‘ideal type’ as an analytical tool for comparison and generalization. As a heuristic device, the concept is helpful to develop our skill in imputation in research.

3. What methodology did Marx prescribe?

Marx adopted a unitary social scientific approach, as against the then prevalent trend toward fragmentation of social sciences. He stressed on the significance of historical method for understanding human society and the changes it undergoes. Though he brought history and materialism together, his approach to history was open-ended. He however believed that natural and social changes occur in accordance with certain abstract laws, called the laws of dialectics. In arguing so, he rejected metaphysics and synthesized dialectics with materialism. Here, Marx apparently rooted himself firmly in positivism. Yet, as he avoided preconceived notions and arbitrary abstractions, he committed himself to ‘realism’ rather than ‘nominalism’.

9. Conclusion

It must be obvious that sociology as an academic discipline has been characterized by plural methodological orientations. These methodological orientations, no doubt, have been refined over time. However, the roots of all methodological debates in contemporary sociology could be traced to the original methodological contributions of three main founding fathers of the discipline, namely, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx.

In discussing the different methodological orientations, it has been observed as to how each one of them entails particular methods for the collection and analysis of data in social research. Thus, when particular methods are used in social research, it is necessary to keep the ontological and epistemological assumptions they make. For instance, the use of secondary data and observation are primarily embedded in the positivist tradition and the use of the interview method and ethnography are embedded in the Verstehen and related theoretical positions. If this is not kept in mind, the researcher may arrive at conclusions that may not be sustained. Of course, there is the possibility of mixing methods, or what is called triangulation. But, then, the researcher must be clear as to what is being mixed with what and for what purpose; this mixing of methods is not randomly done.

One offshoot of the positivism versus anti-positivism methodological debate has been the distinction between ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ approaches in social research. Since the 1980s, this distinction has become entrenched in social science research and social scientists are even divided into camps, each challenging the validity, reliability, and rigour of the other.

One should recognize that quantity and quality are two dimensions of a thing, one amenable for measurement and the other can only be described to capture its essence. As such, they could be viewed as complementary rather than being opposed to each other.

Notes:

Ontology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature existence reality. Ontological issues are concerned with being, that is, with what is, and what we believe to exist.
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that deals with the theory of knowledge or the theory of how people come to have knowledge of the external world. In sociology, this term is more loosely used to refer to the procedures and methods used to acquire sociological knowledge. Epistemological issues are concerned with knowing, that is what sort of statements will we accept to justify7 what we believe to exist.
The term dialectics is derived from the Greek dialego, meaning to discuss or to debate, but its connotation is wider in philosophy; it ceases to be a mere method of argument, and becomes a method of investigation applicable to both nature and society.
Atomism refers to the possibility of analysing the component parts of a totality and analysing a given part in isolation of its relation to the totality.

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Reading Material

Aron, Raymond. Main Currents in Sociological Thought (Vol. 2). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970.
Berlin, Isaiah. ‘Historical Materialism’, in Karl Marx edited by Tom Bottomore. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973. p. 56–68.
Bottomore, Tom B. and Maximilien Rubel. Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963.
Cornforth, Maurice. Dialectical Materialism: An Introductory Course. Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1971.
Durkheim, Émile. The Rules of Sociological Method (Eighth edition, translated by Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller and edited by George E.G. Catlin). New York: The Free Press, 1966.
1. ––––. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (translated by Joseph Ward Swain). New York: The Free Press, 1965/1915.
Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
Gerth, H.H. and C.W. Mills (eds.). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (trans. H.H. Gerth and Mills). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970/1958.
Jayaram, N. ‘Why Read Marx Now?’ (Dr Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya Memorial Lecture, Bangalore, 20 May 2007). Bengaluru: Ma-Le Prakashana, 2008. pp. 7–22.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works (Vol. 5: 1845–47). Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976.
Merton, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure (enlarged edition), New York: The Free Press, 1968.
Quinton, Anthony. ‘Hermeneutics (2)’, in The Fontana dictionary of Modern Thought edited by Alan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass. London: Fontana Books, 1977. p. 281.
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald. A Natural Science of Society. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957.
Srinivas, M. N (ed.). Method in Social Anthropology: Selected Essays by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Weber, Max. The Methodology of the Social Sciences (trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A.
Finch). New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1949.
1. ––––. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, ed.
with an introduction by Talcott Parsons). New York: The Free Press, 1964/1947.
1. ––––. Economy and Society (2 vols). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978/1922.
Winch, Peter. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (2nd Routledge Classic edition, with a new introduction by Raimond Gaita). London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

Additional Readings

Blaikie, N. Approaches to Social Enquiry. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993.
Cornforth, Maurice. Dialectical Materialism: An Introductory Course. Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1971.
Fletcher, Ronald. The Making of Sociology (Vol. 2). London: Nelson, 1972.
Halfpenny, P. Positivism and Society: Explaining Social Life. London: Allen and Unwin, 1982.
Hawthorn, Geoffrey. Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Jayaram, N. (ed.). “Social Research Methods: Persistent Issues and Emergent Trends”, The Indian Journalof Social Work, 67 [1 and 2], January–April (2006): 1-20.
Jones, Robert Alun. Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverley Hills, California:SAGE Publications, 1986.
Kuper, Adam. Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School, 1922–72. Harmondsworth,Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973.