Four: In the City
Human beings are social; they survive in groups and quickly perish alone in a hostile environment. In one sense, culture comes from a collective survival strategy, or the things human beings decide they should and must do to survive in particular place at a particular time. Culture can be unsettled when survival strategies that used to work don’t work anymore, or when different groups of people within the same society come to depend on different survival strategies. Culture is durable, meaning it’s something that people learn from an early age and don’t give up—that’s why cultural conflict can seem so messy and long-lasting. This creates problems when the environment changes very quickly. There are people alive today who were born into a home without electricity or running water, and who are now expected to be Internet-savvy.
One of the biggest sociological shifts of the past century has been urbanization, or the move by more and more people from the country, rural areas, to the city, urban areas. In 1960, about 2 billion lived in the country, and about one billion lived in the city. Currently, almost 60 percent of the world’s 8.2 billion people live in the city. We are living through the greatest single mass shift of human beings and collective survival strategies in the history of our species.
This has a lot of sociologically important effects, that are shared unevenly among different groups of people. A sharpening cultural divide between rural and urban populations is one—cultural conflict is expressed in the U.S. as a function of a two-party political system, whereby one of the greatest divides between Republican (rural) and Democrat (urban) voters can be traced to where they live. This is partly because the shared survival strategies necessary to hold together small, tightly knit communities in the face of perceived external pressures are markedly different from those required to stabilize large, densely populated centers with diverse populations. Politics changes based on current events, but often taps into deeper cultural commitments.
Mass movement to cities has led to the rapid growth of slums, or people living in urban areas without access to improved water, sanitation, sufficient living area, or durability of housing. Perhaps a quarter of urban dwellers live in such conditions right now. These are different issues from those facing rural populations who live on the land; they meet their needs by growing or harvesting food and water. What happens when expanding sewer systems or dumping industrial wastes in cities endangers clean water for people in the country, or when higher taxes are levied that put more strain on rural households to make the lives of urban slum dwellers safer?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that sociology is a science of the city. What I mean is that the changes caused by these mass movements of people, shifts in culture, sources of conflict animated early thinkers interested in where this was all going. The first person to use the word sociology in a sentence was the French thinker Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Some might call him the “father” of sociology. It’s worth pausing to ask why we feel the need to assign “founding fathers” to ideas or movements, but he’s more like the eccentric uncle of sociology. He founded an approach to the discipline called positivism, an approach that fits best with the “view from the sky,” treating sociology as a science like chemistry, physics, or biology, and arguing that the same methods can be used to study people and use that knowledge to improve society.
Comte took his positivism a bit more literally than most, envisioning a civilization ruled by a sociological priesthood and captains of industry, partnered to address moral, political, and economic problems scientifically for the greater good of humankind. He took for granted that cultural ways of knowing rooted in religion and community were in the process of dying out (more on that later). Sociology, for him, was the “queen of the sciences” and in its role was as a moral guide would most directly come to replace religion. A place for some reflexivity: the idea that the world would be better off if ruled by “people more like me” is an all-too-human bias. Sociologists distance themselves from Comte’s ideas today, hence the “eccentric uncle” bit.
The first person to really get an office at a university with the word “sociologist” on the door was Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). One of his most well-known studies was research on the social factors surrounding suicide, challenging many of the ideas about suicide in his own time (and our own). Like Comte, Durkheim was interested in where moral guidance and a sense of social connection would come from as urbanization and the trends around it became more pronounced. This led to his study on the division of labor. In simpler human groups, or those with fewer moving parts, mechanical solidarity holds things together—a shared sense of work alongside the ritual and practice of shared religious community. Think of a small town, band, or village. When societies became more complex and specialized, as with urbanization, this gave way to organic solidarity, in which individual people came to function as parts or organs of a living thing. In his work, Durkheim memorably compares a complex society to a rotting log in the forest, home to hundreds of species, that each occupy different ecological niches, and each do different kinds of work.
Bigger, more complex societies, for Durkheim, weren’t necessarily “better” than smaller ones, with simpler divisions of labor. If you’re living in a big city, you might have ever even met some of your nearest neighbors, let alone feel some kind of deep social bond with them. They might not have much in common with you, either. But, with Durkheim, it’s possible for people in more complex societies to build even stronger connections because they need each other. When I need a loaf of bread or a pound of meat, I know where to get it. And maybe I don’t feel a face-to-face connection to the farmer, rancher, grocer, or butcher, but I depend for my survival on what they do. And if they have college-age kids who want to earn a degree (or they themselves want to go to school to earn one), I as a teacher introduce them to sociology along the way. In this way, they don’t have to explain social interactions and study social issues, and I don’t have to grow my own crops or butcher my own animals. Durkheim also theorized that there were more ways this could go wrong in complex societies.
Because he focused on society as an organism, on people working together, on social solidarity, Durkheim is often thought of as a template for consensus theories, or what is sometimes called functionalism (though Durkheim himself did not necessarily think of himself in these terms). That is, these are scholars who study the social world by viewing it in terms of unity and harmony rather than division and conflict. For them, social problems are to be approached, and solved, by addressing sources of division and conflict.
In 1945, Harvard sociologists Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore ran with these ideas to explain social stratification, or the reason why people within societies occupy different social niches (that come with unequal rewards and standards of living). Stratification is a necessary and beneficial part of society, because stratification arises to connect the most qualified people with the most critical positions. Medical doctors go through years of difficult specialized training so that they are knowledgeable and trusted when they are working with us at our most vulnerable. Davis and Moore could also explain why professional athletes earn so much money or gain so much prestige; they do something few could do, require a lifetime of training, and can only perform at that level for a certain segment of their lives. They can also explain why bigger and more complex social groups might have more stratification; a global market economy would have greater stratification still.
There are other ways of seeing society though. Taking another look at that rotting log Durkheim describes in his work, a lot of the critters living on it are actually preying on each other. Enter conflict theories, or ways of seeing societies in terms of social conflict. It’s not that societies are all consensus or all conflict—it’s that these are both lenses to see different important things. There are too many variables in the social world to ever create a grand unified theory of sociology. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was an exemplar of conflict theory, drawing attention to social class, or the ways societies are stratified into distinct and unequal groups. For Marx there are just two social classes: the proletariat, what Marx called the working class, the “have-nots,” those former farmers moving into the city to work for wages; and the bourgeoisie, the “haves,” those who owned the factories and the machines and the tools. They participated in a system called capitalism—capital isn’t just money, though currency usually arises in larger, more complex societies. Capital is money that is invested, put to work, to earn more money.
If I start my own business, I need startup capital, or the money it will cost to buy the things I need. I become a capitalist only when I have enough money to invest and earn money. For Adam Smith (1723-1790), people who invest money take big risks, and therefore can sometimes earn big rewards. For Karl Marx, people who invest money got it from somewhere—they either stole it from someone else through conquest or used the legal system to protect and extend their economic interests at the expense of others. Unlike Smith, who considered business ownership challenging and risky; and so those who successfully did so deserved to have more wealth, for Marx, the bourgeoisie are engaged in stealing wealth by putting people to work and earning profit off the backs of their labor. Both were political economists, not sociologists, offering different analysis and value-judgements around wealth, profit, labor, and social inequality, or the extent to which some have less than others. Neither’s legacy is as simple as “father” of an economic system, much like Comte or Durkheim do not define the horizons of sociological thought.
Measuring stratification and inequality isn’t easy; and it is not difficult to find evidence that complicates a fully consensus- or conflict-based perspective. Take, for example, the idea of a millionaire, a person whose net worth, or what they own minus what they owe, equals one million dollars. Net worth is not income, or how much a person earns in salary, nor is it how much money they have in their possession. Net worth is estimated, because the value of a person’s assets may not be evident until they actually try to sell them. A person can have a high net worth and a low income, like a 70-year-old retiree who owns their house, has paid off their car, owns a boat, and has a retirement fund, but is no longer earning a salary. A person can also have a high income and a low (or even negative) net worth, like a recent law school graduate who landed a six-figure job, but who owes more than that in home, car, and student loans.
And maybe social class isn’t fully about money. Another founding sociologist, Max Weber (1864-1920) argued that inequality is rooted not just in wealth, but in social status and political power too. Weber was particularly interested in defining the middle class, complicating Marx’s arguments. A person could have a relatively high social status but a relatively moderate salary, like a professor at a prominent university or a well-known professional artist. An elected official might have significant political power, but nowhere near as much wealth as a successful entrepreneur. Some people, like members of organized crime syndicates, trade their social status for wealth. Weber is challenging economic determinism, the belief that social relationships really come down to wealth, how money moves, and material factors.
Growth of slums, cultural conflict, growing social inequality, and separation from one’s ability to provide for oneself (as has happened when farmers, hunters, fishers, and gatherers are displaced by legal, political, and other changes, and must work for wages) are some major negative effects of capitalism. However, standards of living have also improved with economic growth, as illustrated by how definitions of poverty, or those who don’t have enough resources to meet their basic needs, have changed. In much of the world, including the U.S., extreme poverty (defined as $3 per day and adjusted for inflation and costs of living between countries) afflicts a very small percentage of the population and may even be effectively wiped out in the near future; but relative poverty remains significant (more here).
A science of the city must grapple with all the complications of a world that has seen, and is seeing, more social and cultural change in a short time than ever before, changes that are fundamentally rooted in how people meet their needs and interact with each other.
Important Words
Bourgeoisie
Capitalism
Conflict theories
Consensus theories
Division of labor
Economic determinism
Extreme poverty
Income
Mechanical solidarity
Net worth
Organic solidarity
Positivism
Poverty
Proletariat
Relative poverty
Rural
Slums
Social class
Social inequality
Urban
Urbanization
Sit With It: Big Questions
What problems or blind spots might be a part of sociology as a “science of the city,” and how might this be related to social science assumptions about urbanization?
In thinking about social class in terms of both consensus and conflict, as well as Weber’s ideas about the middle class, which set of theories stands out to you more and why? Give specific examples from the text or lecture.
Image Credit: Milwaukee, WI City Hall, 1900, Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milwaukee_City_Hall_Old_Public_Domain_Photo.jpg
