Theoretical Contrasts: Durkheim, Weber & Marx
Freedom & Control in the Modern World
- Freedom Enlightenment:
-goal was to prove oneself through intellectual development, or to seek re-justification of society, people have to be free from strains of old feudal older
- modern world has enhanced human capacities to transform physical environment and fashion for useful things for people
- greater degree of freedom
- development of science and rational thinking liberates our minds from superstition (weber concerned with this), we are freer thinkers
- rights and freedoms 300 years ago would be unthinkable now formally extended to people around the world

Progress, stagnation or regression in the modern world?
- see a lot of un-freedom in the practice in the world
- world is more irrational thank thinkers wanted to see
- a lot of superstition and regression in rights (progress but also regression)
- project of human freedom has not been fully realized

Durkheim, Marx & Weber on the setback of freedom in modern society
- each theorists believe that human freedom was being undermined through the social processes that could be understood through their analysis

Durkheim
- Individual freedom; organic social whole; morality
- concerned less about freedom about the negative social effects of individuals into the social organism
- strange notion of freedom
- begins from social organism, individual has to relate to that social whole; has to do so through a moral order
- From traditional to modern society; dislocation/fragmentation of collective conscious
- involved element of division of labour (society differentiated as individuals become more dis-similar to one another)
- the collective conscious that once cohered society through a moral order (religion) becomes dislocated and fragmented and does not operate the collective conscious
- traditional to modern involved organic to mechanic
- organic has not yet been fully achieved
- the moral regulation of a collective conscious has not yet completely come about
- have an incomplete of the tradition to organic solidarity generation anomie (deficit of moral and normative regulation)
-Anomie
- feelings of ruthlessness – don’t know your place in society
- moral breakdown that is the root cause of economic crisis/class conflict
- society must develop some sort of new moral order to overcome these feelings of anomie, deficit of moral regulation
- is the individual subject to anomie free? In a sense yes (he is free from the traditional moral constraints, norm of regulations, values that exist externally to individual) but, true freedom cannot be achieved under conditions of a deficit of moral regulation
- anomie is the partial breakdown of social integration
- since human beings social creatures, only be free in and through society, genuine freedom must involve the re-integration of the individual into society
- cannot be done in a forced way (follow order, do this job like it)
- talking about the voluntary willing internalization of the common moral order
- freedom is not the absence of moral constraint, it is the willful acceptance of moral constraints that are suitable for the modern world
- not sure the views of the economist
Anomie, moral regulation, and freedom
- smith Mandeville Hobbes, Locke, for them the isolated individual is free and society imposes restrictions, erodes freedom
- Durkheim you cant be free against society, only within society
- cant persist ego to impose self interest
- Durkheim draws on by Rousseau (general will), but also Saint-Simon
- Durkheim’s view optimistic about freedom in the modern world (hasn’t been achieved really, observes disruption of society caused by transition of modern world, but feels its temporarily and can be fixed by moral means)
- division of labour given birth to un-freedom (capitalist) capitalism not be altered or done away with, but individuals attitudes towards there role can