Quotes Flashcards
“Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things - but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces- but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines- but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into…”
Marx.
Alienation
Workers are losing control over their lives, b/c they are losing control of their work
They are no longer autonomous because they are producing for someone else
They are no longer self-realized
The working class is selling its labour to capitalists and is alienated from every aspect of it (alineation from product, process of production, self, and species).
“Men who are possessed by the passion of physical gratification generally find out that the turmoil of freedom disturbs their welfare, before they discover how freedom itself serves to promote it… The fear of anarchy perpetually haunts them, and they are always ready to fling away their freedom at the first disturbance”
Tocqueville.
Self-interest properly understood
Self-interest vs. self-interest properly understood
USA has the second, France the first
Short sighted self-interest interests lead people to value public tranquility over liberty
Tocqueville is against this, and this liberty should be maintained at all costs
“We must be clear that all activity which is governed by ethical standards ca be subsumed under one of two maxims, which are fudamentally different from, and irreconcilably apposed, to each other. The ethical standards may either be based on intentions or on responsability.”
Weber.
Ethic of responsability and ethic of conviction
Ethic of responsability and ethic of conviction
Under ethic of responsability, one judges one’s action in terms of the foreseeable results (means over ends)
Under ethic of ultimate ends (intentions), one takes actions on the basis of one’s pure and good intention (ends over means)
“The thought that man has obligations towards the possessions entrusted to him, to which he subordinates himself either as obedient steward or actually as a ‘machine for acquisition’, lays its chilly hand on life. The greater the possessions become, the sterner becomes – provided the ascetic attitude to life can stand the test – the sense of responsibility for them, the feeling that one must preserve them undiminished for God’s glory and increase them by unceasing labour.”
Weber, p. 159
“Status situation may depend on class situation, either directly or in a roundabout way. But it is not determined by it alone: possession of money and the position of an entrepreneur are not, in themselves alone, qualifications for status…On the other hand, status situation, either in combination with other things or by itself, may influence a class situation, without for that reason being identical with it.”
Weber
“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.”
Weber
“One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means”
Weber
He’s talking about rationalization, how we don’t believe in magic or spirits anymore but focus on calculating and rationalizing everything. This is what leads to disenchantment
“However that may be, these arguments in themselves already show that the old hope for a revolutionary cataclysm, which gave the Communist Manifesto its power of enchantment, has mellowed into an evolutionary conception, that is, a conception of gradual development of old economy, with its entrepreneurs competing on a massive scale, into a regulated economy, whether regulation is done by state officials or by cartels in which officials participate”
Weber
“They are pathetic experts in political triviality: they lack the deep instincts for power of a class which has been called to political leadership…If we are the political opponents of the working class, it is because there is no greater disaster that can befall a great nation than leadership by a politically uneducated philistineclass…”
Weber Weber on the working class. He was an elitist and believed that working class people weren’t capable of leadership
“But the character of these soteriologies, which was still ultimately gnostic and mystical, offered no basis for the development of a methodological rational, inner-worldly mode of life which would be adequate to them. As a result, to the extent that their religion was sublimated under the influence of the salvation doctrines, however, the decisive influence of the various forms of savior religion”
Weber
“Clearly, the life of the petty bourgeois, especially the urban artisan and small businessman, is much further removed from any kind of connection with nature than is that of the peasant, so that dependence on the use of magic to influence the irrational forces of nature cannot play the same part in his life as in the peasant’s. On the contrary, the economic conditions of his life are essentially more rational, which means, in this context, that they are much more amenable to calculation and to the influence of means rationally chosen to achieve a given end.”
Weber
Elective affinity, how different people (businessman vs. peasant) will believe different things based on their beliefs/ ideology and their material circumstances/ environment.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets with arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.
Weber.
Iron Cage.
If, as we may accept, the synthesis sui generis which every society constitutes yields new phenomena, differing from those which take place in the individual consciousness, we must also admit that these facts reside exclusively in the very society itself which produces them, and not in its parts - that is, its members
Durkheim (p. 69)
The function of a social fact can only be social, that is to say, it consists in the production of socially useful effects. No doubt it may and does happen that it also serves the individual. But this fortunate outcome is not its immediate cause. We can thus complete the preceding proposition by saying: The function of a social fact must always be sought in its relation to somesocialend.
Durkheim p. 74
The social molecules which cohere in this way can act together only in so far as they have no action of their own, as with the molecules of inorganic bodies… The individual consciousness, considered in this light, is a simple appendage of the collective type and follows all of its actions, as the possessed object follows those of its owner. In societies where this type of solidarity is highlydeveloped,theindividualisnothisownmaster.
Durkheim p. 139
To achieve any other result, the passions first must be limited. Only then can they be harmonisedwith capacities and satisfied. But since the individual has no way of limiting them, this must necessarily be accomplished by some force outside him. A regulative force must play the same role for moral needs which the organism plays for physical needs. This means that the force can only be moral.
Durkheim p. 76
“As a consequence of such changes, the correspondence between the aptitudes of individuals and the kind of activity assigned to them is broken in a whole large area of society; constraint alone, more or less violent and direct in character, ties them to their functions. Hence the solidarity which results is defective and strained.”
Durkheim
Men did not begin by imagining gods; it is not because they conceived of them in a given fashion that they became bound to them by social feelings. They began by linking themselves to the things which they made use of, or which they suffered from, in the same way as they linked each of these to the other – without reflection, without the least kind of speculation.
Durkheim p. 219
This is Durkheim on religion, totemism, and collective effervescence. People perform rituals to feel connected to one another, create cohesion and solidarity
“How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
Smith.
- Theory of moral sentiments: sympathy, impartial spectator, imaginative projections
- Selfishness (self-interest), but also empathic. Humans can be both.
“The division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any man wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”
Smith.
- Division of labour is crucial for productivity
- Universal opulence for everyone: principle of exchange and trade & self-interest (dexterity, productivity, time)
- Unintended consequence of human nature; happened on its own.
- Self-interest in the market
“The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives.”
Smith.
- Fair wages for workers; workers should be rewarded fairly because the more you pay workers the more they will work
- This is moral and utilitarian: increase human capital and they produce more
“Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent. As against bourgeois society, the state machine has consolidated its position so thoroughly that chief of the Society of December 10 suffices for its head, and adventurer blown in from abroad, elevated on the shield by a drunken soldiery, which he has bought with liquor and sausages, and which he must continually ply with sausage a new.”
Marx.
Under Louis Bonaparte, according to Marx, the bureaucratic and military apparatus seemed to have become utterly independent of the will of any particular social group. Marx always says superstructure (politics, ideology, etc.) is secondary to base (economics)—Here Marx seems to be contradicting himself. L. Bonaparte did not represent any social class
