Exam 5: Heirs to Order and Progress

Durkheim's views of religion were conditioned by the fact that, like many generations of his family before him, he was a practicing Rabbi.

Anthropologists who have studied messianic religious movements, such as the Native American Ghost Dance or Melanesian Cargo Cults, have drawn more heavily from the ideas of Durkheim than from Weber.

According to Weber, Protestantism developed primarily because a rising bourgeoisie (capitalist class) wanted to free itself from the restraints of the Catholic church on money lending.

Durkheim's notion of mechanical solidarity-that people in "primitive" societies are largely alike in their personalities and outlooks-is a viewpoint widely accepted among modern anthropologists.

Like Franz Boas, but unlike most nineteenth-century social thinkers, Durkheim believed that race was not a determinant of one's behavior.

Suicide was most likely in Protestant societies such as Sweden rather than Catholic countries such as Italy or Spain, Durkheim believed, because the Catholic Church taught that the practice was a mortal sin.

Weber subscribed to a naturalistic orientation, which tried to account for the desires and beliefs of individuals based on the specific social and historical context in which they lived.

Durkheim believed, like Marx, that an increasingly complex division of labor in modern industrial society would lead to growing conflict between classes.

The primary function of social facts, Durkheim argued, is to make collective life possible by promoting social solidarity.

Although Weber disagreed with Marx over the origins of capitalism, he agreed with him that the primary source of conflict in modern society was between the proletariat and bourgeoisie.