SOCI 1001H Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Complex Number, Traditional Authority, Anomie
14 Jun 2018
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Conceptualizing Society: The Classical Sociological Tradition
Introduction
• Three founding fathers of sociology, first sociologists to try to systematically make sense
of the capitalistic society, start of discipline of sociology, outcomes of changes that went
on in the past are the outcomes that structure society today:
• Karl Marx
• Emile Durkheim
• Max Weber
Understanding Society
• The basics of understanding any society are understanding its underlying system of
producing thing
• How production, distribution, and consumption work are socially organized
determines wide structures of the society
• Across different types of societies, there are different systems and ways of doing
these three processes
• Mode of Production (Karl Marx): consists of the means of production and the relations of
production
• Social relations: how people are organized around production
• The nature of the mode of production influences almost all other aspects of the
society and culture
Capitalist Mode of Production
• Means of production:
• Advanced technologies
• Large-scale capital
• Private property
• Relations of production:
• Means of production are privately owned by a few, collectively worked upon by
many for a wage, a two-class system
• One class owns privately, the other class does not own but works using
property and tools on behalf of class that owns them
Characteristics of Capitalist Society
• Commodities/profit/commodification:
• Relations of production are organized around principle of private property
• Commodities are produced based on exchange for a profit
• Commodities mean there is more than just product being sold, which is
unique to a capitalist society
• Person selling products must exchange them for more money than it
costs them to produce it
• Process of commodification expands throughout the society
• For capital to go, the society must find more things that can be turned into
a commodity
• Complex division of labour:
• The way in which things were produced became more complex, creating a more
complex work process
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