The classics on micro-macro and macro-micro

As pointed out by George Ritzer (1990: 349), the classics of sociology such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Mead were very much concerned with the micro-macro linkage� The problem of the relation of individual and his or her experience to the processes of the whole society was preoccupying them be-cause its appropriate tackling would allow to claim that they created a social science – meaning the science of the society – which would help in understand-ing individuals� In this section, I will briefly present how the relation between micro and macro was theorized by the authors recognized as classics of sociolog-ical thought� My arbitrary – though, in my opinion, not controversial – selection of classics includes: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead, and Florian Znaniecki� Much of the discussion of their views on the micro-macro linkage is indebted to authors who were analyzing and sometimes refreshing their ideas, because – what needs to be emphasized at the beginning of this section – the classics were not using the terms “micro”

and “macro�” This goes along with a postulate, expressed by George Ritzer (1990:

366), that there is a need to rethink the work of theory of the masters in line with the new perspectives on the micro-macro problem� Their interpretations require, as mentioned in the previous section, distilling the micro-macro question from overlapping questions concerning individual-society and agency-structure�

1.3.1 Karl Marx: the structural conditions

Marx’s perspective on larger collectives’ capability of action started a long tradi-tion of treating as social actors large entities who might be called actors only in an allegorical sense (Hindess 1986: 115)� Describing a social class as an actor is a generalization which is actually very similar to describing in the same way a social system� This problem is closer to the debates on agency, and it stems from the fact that Marx’s structural approach had a problem with emergence� It was a quite persuasive theory of explaining the micro-level phenomena with their macro conditions – i�e� superstructure of ideology with material ground – but it

lacked the conceptual tools of understanding how micro phenomena could be transformed into macro ones�

Contrary to Hechter (1983) and Ritzer (1990), Layder (2006: 63) interprets Marx as not very much interested in the issue of micro- and macro-levels of analysis� Nevertheless, he still believes that it is possible to find in some of Marx’s statements hints on how to resolve the issues of agency and structure, and – by the same token – resolve the issue of the micro and macro� One of the most often repeated quotations of Marx comes from the essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” (Marx 1907: 5): “Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand� The tradition of all past genera-tions weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living�” This quote opens an avenue for thinking about agency as something limited by social circumstances, but also of seeing these circumstances as an aggregated product of actions� Marx was also calling for revolutionary action in order to change social conditions� This element of Marxism is often presented as contradictory to his strong views on structural conditions influencing the situation of individuals� These incongru-ences are probably also the reason why Marx was so passionately debated among his disciples and his work led to the formation of contradictory schools� What is, for example, in contradiction with calling for revolutionary change of social conditions is another famous quote from Marx, stating that the only freedom which the market gives workers is the freedom to starve (Hechter 1983: 5)� Thus, despite possible perspectives on linking micro and macro, the problem of struc-tural explanation of agency and the focus on macro-historical processes make it possible to consider Marx as the father of structural explanations in sociology (Alexander, Giesen 1987: 7; Hechter 1983: 5)�

1.3.2 Durkheim: the collective representations

For Émile Durkheim there existed five levels of scientific analysis: the physical, chemical, biological, psychological, and social (Durkheim 1951: 325; Wiley 1988:

255)� Durkheim’s claim that society is a sui generis phenomenon impacted socio-logical thinking for the entire 20^th century� Sui generis means that the society is of its own genus and it is impossible to reduce that which is societal to other levels of analysis� This holism under the label of sociologism was a powerful legitimiza-tion for sociology at its birth as a science� The macro-level of society required its own discipline, if there was no possibility of its simple reduction to the micro-level of individual’s psychology� The sociology of Durkheim mostly considers the individual-society pairing, yet obviously his conceptualization of this relation

had important consequences for the sociological treatment of the micro-mac-ro pmicro-mac-roblem� Both levels require its own scientific disciplines – psychology and sociology respectively – but Durkheim’s vision of sociology was of an imperial kind� Sociological level of analysis was, according to him, providing powerful ex-planations for psychological phenomena� The most striking example was Suicide (Durkheim 1951), which was an analysis of social conditions’ influence on the most individual and most unexplainable act a human is capable of�

The connection between individual and societal in Durkheim’s theory is made through the concept of representations� In his sociology there is no place for the micro-phenomena of interaction (Wiley 1988: 257)� On the one hand, collec-tive representations are synthesis of individual representations� But on the other hand, collective representations allow individuals to think, perceive reality, and communicate� The collective representations return to individuals as master cat-egories (Durkheim, Mauss 1963)� The lack of interactional level in Durkheim’s sociology creates a quite large distance between micro and macro, which makes his conception of micro-macro fragile� There is a place mostly for structural and dispositional explanations in this theory, but the relational explanations are omitted� Another possible link between micro and macro in Durkheim’s sociol-ogy is the social organization� In case of “primitive” societies, the contact of in-dividual and society through collective representations, strengthened by religion was immediate – mechanical� In case of modern societies having a complicated division of labor, the organic contact of the individual and society was mediated through secondary and occupational groups (Durkheim 1933)� This mode of theorizing about society opened the way for groupism, which for a long time was the main sociological perception of social structure� The open question for future theoretical studies and revitalization of old concepts remains: was the is-sue of anomie – disconnection of an individual from society – an artifact of Durkheim’s theoretical framework, or was it rather a genuine social problem? If I am right that Durkheim’s theory had a conceptual problem with relations and connecting micro- and macro-levels, then the answer to this question would be that the conception of anomie was an artifact�

1.3.3 Weber: the methodological individualism

Max Weber, praised by so many as one of the founders of sociology, among other important contributions defining sociological debates for more than a century, introduced methodological individualism into the sociological toolkit for un-derstanding the social reality� As Lars Udehn (2001: 97) phrased it: “By way of extreme simplification, I suggest that Weber took methodological individualism

from the Austrian School of Economics, supported it by a neo-Kantian view of concept formation and turned it into subjectivist methodological individualism with the help of Dilthey and Simmel�” Max Weber rejected what was foundation-al for classicfoundation-al sociologists (like Durkheim), being the use of collective concepts such as Volk, Volkgeist, or “general will�” According to him, the German Histori-cal School, influenced by German Romanticism and Hegel, relied on metaphysi-cal concepts, and the study of society and its economy should take as a point of departure individual beliefs (Weber 1975; Udehn 2001: 98)� Max Weber was very much influenced by economics (many considered him rather as a historian of economy) and modern economy formed with strong individualistic assump-tions� Later in this chapter I will discuss how transferring the developments from the field of economics to the field of sociology contributed to the understanding of the micro-macro relations�

Weber in his promotion of methodological individualism was very critical to all forms of holism, thus the subject of sociology for him was not society but so-cial action (Weber 1978)� In fact, the concept of society was recognized by him as useless –it was rather a category of practice, which for scientific inquiries could be reduced to social relations and social institutions (Weber 1971: 36; Udehn 2001: 99)� Social action could be studied only with the use of the meaningful understanding method (Verstehen)� Weber, trained not only in economics and sociology but also in law, treated collective actors (organizations, states, and all possible legal persons) as reducible to the actions of human individuals� Thus, he was fully aware that their actorhood was a category of common practice and the use of language, and therefore that the human individuals under study were the ones to give meanings to the acts of collectives� Individuals attach the meaning to actions of other individuals and take them into consideration when acting – this is constitutional for Weber’s use of the concept of social relationship�

Larger social structures exist for Weber only in the sense that individuals attach meaning to them and thus they drive their actions� It could be said that this way of thinking preceded Thomas’ theorem (Thomas, Thomas 1928) that defining a situation as real has real consequences� Micro, for Weber, is concentrated mostly on actions of individuals and individuals relating to other individuals� He was not interested in individual-society paring as he refuted the notion of society� The perspective on the micro-macro link was taken by Weber with micro as a point of a departure� The best example are his writings on the emergence of capital-ism (Weber 1930; 1978)� In essence, in the view of Weber, capitalcapital-ism as a social formation – understood as the organization of formally free labor in methodi-cal, rational, and disciplined work (Birnbaum 1953: 137) – developed, because a

growing number of merchants began to emphasize this-worldly values� The ag-gregation of individual actions driven by the motive to earn and then reinvest the profits transformed the whole order of economy� Of course, there were also certain conditions, such as the development of the bureaucratic state, legal citi-zenship, and complex of military, administrative, and religious factors, that played important role in the process (Collins 1980)� Yet, the key element for the emer-gence of the capitalism were the values which drove the actions of individuals� The unanticipated consequence of these individuals’ actions was the reshaping of the organization of economy (Birnbaum 1953)� The theory of Max Weber was praised by Alexander and Giesen (1987:15) at the first synthetic formulation of the micro-macro problem� Undoubtedly, his introduction of methodological individualism in order to understand macro-processes was revolutionary for sociological theory�

1.3.4 Simmel: sociability and money

Georg Simmel is conventionally recognized as the founder of the relational ap-proach in sociological theory� His other idea, which later turned in the attempts to resolve sociological pairings, is his processual approach to society� Frank Lechner (1990) claimed that Simmel’s focus on individuals, small groups, and relations is consequential for macrosociology� Simmel’s study of social differ-entiation is a study of co-creation of modernity as a macro-phenomenon and individuality as a micro-phenomenon� As he claimed, in society, which is be-coming increasingly diverse, a human individual participates in more than just one social circle and enacts numerous social roles (Simmel 1980; Lechner 1990)�

This process transformed the human individual into an individuality – a coher-ent coher-entity which is capable of being in these differcoher-ent circumstances�

Simmel rejected the idea that society, understood as aggregation of indi-viduals, is an object of sociological study� For him, the object of sociology was sociability (Vergesellschaftung) – a process of continuous interaction between individuals� Simmel was therefore looking at the micro-macro problem from the micro-position and he did not perceive that there exists any kind of sui gen-eris macro-entity� Yet, as Lechner (1990: 172) claims, Simmel was interested in studying a larger process that was making the encounters of individuals possible:

“Sociability, as specifically social form, is quite independent of either objective (functional, specific) or subjective (psychological, emotional) contents; rather, it is the form of interaction in which individuals from different specialized sphere can engage without having to give up any part of their individual autonomy�”

In The Philosophy of Money (Simmel 1978), Simmel argued that contacts be-tween individuals require mediation and some sort of standardization� Money,

in his view, is here a perfect tool which serves not only for economic exchanges, but also contributes to the process of individualization, as it makes the human individual more independent from specific collectivities� The work of Simmel is called impressionistic, it usually took the form of essays, and his approach rejected the possibility of creating theoretical systems� Yet, his remarks still clude quite a lot of valuable, theoretical framing for the connection between in-dividuals involved in never-ending interactions and exchanges, and larger scale processes� What is interesting for the subject of this book is that Simmel was not only interested in the individual-society pairing, but he also brought into the equation interactions and mediating entities�

1.3.5 Mead: “The self, the I, and the me” – and the society

George Herbert Mead is recognized as a classic thinker for interactionist sociol-ogy, symbolic interactionism, and interpretive thinking in the social sciences� For this reason, the references to this author will be found mostly in works of scholars interested in analysis on the micro-level� There is not much to be found in Mead’s work on macro-processes and, as Alexander and Giesen (1987: 9) put it, Mead lacked an institutional theory linking the interactions with larger social entities�

Yet, as George Ritzer (1990: 349) claims, Mead was also among the founders of sociology who were very much concerned with the micro-macro link in the the-ory, despite the fact that he was not using this kind of terminology� Mead’s biggest concern was how the society shapes different aspects of the human individual constitution, yet in his work there are also remarks on the individuals’ influence on society� Thus, in his view it is apparently a feedback mechanism�

In his considerations on the expression of self, Mead highlights that “me” is a member of social group or community, while “I” is expressed in relation with others� “Me” is said to be more sophisticated and suppressing the “I” (Mead 1934:

207)� The “self” is a product of the tension between “I” and “me�” Thus, a human individual cannot be considered without his or her relation to other individuals and a social group as an important reference� This analysis is well known and was a strong drive for the development of social psychology and micro-oriented sociology� Mead also had some remarks about the impact of an individual on larger social entities, but he did not conduct an in-depth analysis of this part of the micro-macro interdependency�

As to the aforementioned feedback mechanism, Mead (1934: 202) described it in the following words: “The individual, as we have seen, is continually react-ing back against this society� Every adjustment involves some sort of change in the community to which the individual adjusts himself�” When an individual

is an artist, inventor, or scientist, then – according to Mead – his or her impact on society is stronger: outstanding individuals are even capable of forming so-ciety� Mead was mostly interested in the individual-society pairing, or maybe rather – using his words – “individual-community” pairing� Yet, this pairing has consequences for other pairings and passages of Mead’s work on realization of self in social situations are also quoted in regards to the agency-structure pairing;

thus, they are consequential for the micro-macro pairing� Mead analyzed mostly phenomena occurring on the micro-level – how an individual is shaped in inter-actions with other individuals and how an individual perceives himself or herself in relation to the society� Yet, he also provided statements about the change on the macro-level� This relation is not theorized by him: he simply states that an individual triggers some (usually) incremental changes of the larger grouping�

1.3.6 Znaniecki: from the attitude to norm and back

According to Norbert Wiley (1988: 260), the most interesting conceptualization of the micro-macro link in classical sociological theory was the one provided by William I� Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918) in their work on Polish im-migrants to the USA� On the individual level, members of social groups were attributed with subjective attitudes, while on the societal level, were the values – objective elements of culture� This shows that another important sociological pairing which troubled the authors was the subjective-objective� Yet, Thomas and Znaniecki’s approach was processual and structurational: they were neither micro- or macro-imperialists� In their view, individual attitudes were in constant interplay with societal values, so “structural closure was never complete” (Wiley 1988: 260)� Thomas and Znaniecki, like other classics, were also obsessed with de-marcation between disciplines of social sciences� According to them, social psy-chology was the study of attitudes, while sociology was the study of social values�

The interplay of attitudes and values has, in Thomas and Znaniecki’s sociology, consequence for the on-going process of social disorganization and reorganiza-tion� In their processual approach there are always individuals with attitudes un-fit to the social values causing perpetual social change� Another perspective on the relation between individual and society was presented in Znaniecki’s (1934) interest in positive deviance discussed in his book Ludzie teraźniejsi a cywilizacja przyszłości [Contemporary People and the Civilization of the Future]� According to this conception, some of the individuals not fitting into society – but in a posi-tive and not negaposi-tive way – are agents of societal reorganization�

1.3.7 Summary

This brief presentation of the classics’ vision of the micro-macro link in sociolog-ical theory leads to three most important conclusions� Firstly, the micro-macro link, although not defined using this particular terms of micro and macro, was a problem of concern for the classics� They were working hard on understanding how the phenomena that can be noticed on the ground level (acts of individuals and their interactions) are related to larger entities such as society, class, or his-torical formation� Secondly, for most of the classics, the key sociological pairing was the individual-society, and the key concern was understanding how the in-dividual was connected to society – even if the concept of society was refuted, as in the case of Simmel and Weber� Thirdly, it is possible to find in the works of the classics seeds of all current approaches to dealing with the micro-macro problem

This brief presentation of the classics’ vision of the micro-macro link in sociolog-ical theory leads to three most important conclusions� Firstly, the micro-macro link, although not defined using this particular terms of micro and macro, was a problem of concern for the classics� They were working hard on understanding how the phenomena that can be noticed on the ground level (acts of individuals and their interactions) are related to larger entities such as society, class, or his-torical formation� Secondly, for most of the classics, the key sociological pairing was the individual-society, and the key concern was understanding how the in-dividual was connected to society – even if the concept of society was refuted, as in the case of Simmel and Weber� Thirdly, it is possible to find in the works of the classics seeds of all current approaches to dealing with the micro-macro problem