In capitalist societies, Durkheim wrote, division of labor becomes so specialized that everyone is doing different things. Instead of punishing members of a society for failure to assimilate to common values, organic solidarity allows people with differing values to coexist.

Figure 2. Durkheim viewed societies as multicellular organisms like the ones pictured here. The structure of the cell is society and the cells within the organism are individuals.

Karl Marx. Karl Marx based his conflict theory on the idea that modern society has only two classes of people: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production: the factories, businesses, and equipment needed to produce wealth. The proletariat are the workers.

Durkheim was himself an atheist, but he worried that religion had become implausible just as its communal side would have been most necessary to repair the fraying social fabric.

Marx’s main argument is that class is determined by economic factors alone, whereas in contrast, Weber argues that social stratification cannot be defined solely in terms of class and the economic factors which affect class relationships.

In the sense in which Durkheim uses the terms, communism is a doctrine advocating a rigid control over economic activities by the central organs of the community motivated primarily by a sense of the dangers of uncontrolled economic interests to the higher ends of the community. . . . Since this is an ever-recurring …

Immanuel Kant is believed to have had the greatest influence on any philosopher of modern times. Kantian philosophy was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built—particularly as it was developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

The functionalist perspective sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. This approach looks at society through a macro-level orientation and broadly focuses on the social structures that shape society as a whole.

In the late 19th century French Sociologist Émile Durkheim laid the primary foundations of Structural Functionalism. Durkheim’s theory was, at least in part, a response to evolutionary speculations of theorists such as E. B.