Classical Sociologists: Durkheim, Marx and Weber

Why Study Classical Sociologists?

Three thinkers who wrote in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Durkheim, Marx and Weber — laid the foundations of modern sociology. The AQA specification requires students to understand their work in context: the ideas these men developed were responses to the dramatic social upheavals of industrialisation, urbanisation and the rise of capitalism in Western Europe. Their frameworks continue to shape how sociologists study families, education, crime and inequality today.

Durkheim and Social Solidarity

Durkheim argued that sociology must study social facts — patterns of behaviour and social forces that exist outside and above the individual, constraining how people act. Just as a physicist studies gravity, Durkheim believed the sociologist could study social facts objectively and scientifically. He pointed to rates of suicide as an example: the rate varies systematically by religion, marital status and other social factors — it is a social fact, not merely an individual choice.

Durkheim distinguished two types of social solidarity. In pre-industrial societies, mechanical solidarity bound people together through similarity — shared religion, shared work, shared community. In modern industrial societies, organic solidarity arises from interdependence: the complex division of labour means each person performs a specialised role and depends on others. This transition brought new risks. Durkheim warned that rapid social change could produce anomie — a condition of normlessness in which the usual rules no longer hold, increasing rates of crime and suicide.

Marx and Class Conflict

Marx wrote during the height of early industrial capitalism, and his analysis was shaped by the brutal conditions of Victorian factory labour. He argued that history could be understood as a succession of class struggles: in capitalist society, the key division is between the bourgeoisie — who own the means of production — and the proletariat — who own nothing but their labour power and must sell it to survive.

Marx argued that the bourgeoisie exploit the proletariat by paying them less than the full value of what they produce, pocketing the difference as profit. The legal, political and cultural institutions of society — including education, religion and the law — serve to legitimate and reproduce this exploitative relationship. The proletariat is prevented from recognising its own exploitation by false consciousness: the ruling class promotes ideas that make the existing order appear natural and inevitable.

Marx argued that material conditions (the economic base of society) determine social institutions and ideas (the superstructure). This framework — historical materialism — claims that to understand any social institution, you must first ask: who benefits economically? His analysis of capitalism predicted that growing inequality and class consciousness would eventually produce revolution and a classless communist society.

Weber: Social Action, Rationalisation and Verstehen

Weber agreed with Marx that class is important, but he offered a more complex analysis of social inequality. Where Marx saw class as determined solely by economic position (ownership of the means of production), Weber identified three distinct dimensions: class (economic position), status (social prestige) and party (political power). A wealthy entrepreneur might have high class but low status; a well-respected clergyman might have high status but modest class position.

Weber also insisted that sociology must practise verstehen — the empathetic understanding of the subjective meanings that actors give to their own behaviour. Unlike Durkheim, who treated social facts as external and constraining, Weber argued that the sociologist must also ask: what does this action mean to the person performing it? Social behaviour is meaningful behaviour.

Weber identified rationalisation as the defining trend of modern society: increasingly, all spheres of life — the economy, the law, science, bureaucratic organisations — are organised according to rational calculation, efficiency and rules rather than tradition, emotion or custom. He saw this as producing what he called the “iron cage” of bureaucracy: efficient but potentially dehumanising. This concern about the rationality of modern institutions runs through sociological debates on education, stratification and social control.