Theorists C. Wright Mills and Emile Durkheim Term Paper

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Sociological Understandings of the Human Condition -- Comparing and Contrasting C.W. Mills and Emil Durkheim

The social theorist C.W. Mills fundamentally applied a dialectical view of the human condition to all specific phenomena of human social life. In other words, Mills saw human cultural, much like the theorist Max Weber, as a rational struggle for understanding and survival. Like Weber, Mills saw human history as an evolution of ideas, where the ideas of, for instance, Protestantism, enabled certain countries and cultures to form a more secure basis to establish capitalism over the course of the 20th century, in contrast. The division of labor and establishing control are cornerstones of rationalist social philosophy. Mills concurred with Weber that human beings could not be understood outside of the social and economic structures through which they interacted. Society as well as psychology and the family must be understood in its proper larger historical context to truly understand the human condition.

The theorist Emil Durkheim would be in concurrence with Mills that human beings and human social institutions could not be easily separated from 'the human psyche' or 'the human individual' as a construction. However, rather than viewing history and human progress in a dialectical format, Durkheim was more inclined to take an anthropological perspective.

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Durkheim based his ideas, not in economics, but in his study of so-called primitive life and social structures. Instead of seeing human beings as fundamentally rational, Durkheim was inclined to see human being's methods of grappling with the world as psychologically oriented and based in the family and having the potential for irrationality. Psychology and social life might be conjoined, but they could never simply be reduced to outer, rational, principles of history or economics.

Consider the modern problem of racism, for instance. From a rationalist perspective, C.W. Mills might state that racism in the American South, for instance, was sustained out of economic need by the aristocratic landowners who wished to hold onto their position in Southern society and their economic way of providing for their livelihoods. Impoverished Southern whites people similarly engaged in racist behavior because the African-American underclass enabled them to have some sort of superiority, to someone, in their social world, and because they could economically benefit from discrimination.

Durkheim, however, would suggest that racism is a fundamentally….....

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