Debate Between Marx and Weber

To Durkheim, men were creatures whose desires were unlimited. Unlike other animals, they arenot satiated when their biological needs are fulfilled. "The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulateinstead of filling needs." It follows from this natural insatiability of the human animal that his desires can only be held in check by external controls, that is, by societal control. Society imposes limits on human desires and constitutes "a regulative force [which] must playthe same role for moral needs which the organism plays for physicalneeds." In well-regulated societies, social controls set limits onindividual propensities so that "each in his sphere vaguely realizes the extreme limits on individual propensities so that "each in his sphere vaguely realizes the extreme limits set to his ambitions and aspires to nothing beyond. . . . Thus, an end or a goal [is] set to the passions."

When social regulations break down, the controlling influence of society on individual propensities is no longer effective and individuals are left to their own devices. Such a state of affairsDurkheim calls anomie, a term that refers to a condition of relative normlessness in a whole society or in some of its component groups. Anomie does not refer to a state of mind, but to a property ofthe social structure. It characterizes a condition in which individual desires are no longer regulated by common norms and where, as a consequence, individuals are left without moral guidance in the pursuitof their goals.

Although complete anomie, or total normlessness,is empirically impossible, societies may be characterized by greater orlesser degrees of normative regulations. Moreover, within anyparticular society, groups may differ in the degree of anomie that besets them. Social change may create anomie either in the wholesociety or in some parts of it. Business crises, for example, may havea far greater impact on those on the higher reaches of the social pyramid than on the underlying population. When depression leads to a sudden downward mobility, the men affected experience a de-regulation in their lives--a loss of moral certainty and customary expectations thatare no longer sustained by the group to which these men once belonged. Similarly, the rapid onset of prosperity may lead some people to a quick upward mobility and hence deprive them of the social support needed in their new styles of life. Any rapid movement in the social structure that upsets previous networks in which life styles are embedded carries with it a chance of anomie.

Durkheim argued that economic affluence, by stimulating human desires, carries with it dangers of anomic conditions because it "deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only," while "poverty protects against suicide because itis a restraint in itself." Since the realization of human desires depends upon the resources at hand, the poor are restrained, and henceless prone to suffer from anomie by virtue of the fact that they possess but limited resources. "The less one has the less he is tempted toextend the range of his needs indefinitely."

By accounting for the different susceptibility to anomie in terms of the socia lprocess--that is, the relations between individuals rather than the biological propensities of individuals-- Durkheim in effect proposed a specifically sociological theory of deviant behavior even though hefailed to point to the general implications of this crucial insight. Inthe words of Robert K. Merton, who was the first to ferret out in this respect the overall implications of Durkheim's thought and to develop them methodically, "Social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in non conforming rather than conforming conduct."

Durkheim's program of study, the overriding problems in all his work, concerns the sources of social order and disorder, the forces that make for regulation or de-regulation in thebody social. His work on suicide, of which the discussion and analysisof anomie forms a part, must be read in this light. Once he discovered that certain types of suicide could be accounted for by anomie, he couldthen use anomic suicide as an index for the otherwise unmeasurable degree of social integration. This was not circular reasoning, as could be argued, but a further application of his method of analysis. He reasoned as follows: There are no societies in which suicide does not occur, and many societies show roughly the same rates of suicide overlong periods of time. This indicates that suicides may be considered a"normal," that is, a regular, occurrence. However, sudden spurts in the suicide rates of certain groups or total societies are "abnormal" andpoint to some perturbations not previously present. Hence.