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Difference Between Weber And Durkheim

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Max Weber and Emile Durkheim are considered the “founding fathers of Sociology”. Their writing in the late 19th century reflected revolutionary changes in the modern European society in the wake of Enlightenment, French revolution, industrial revolution and finally the emergence of capitalist system. Although, both of them studied the society, its structure and trends, but their methodology and theoretical approach were different. In the early years of his life, Durkheim was influenced and impressed by the evolutionary perspective of Herbert Spencer and later, drawing inspiration from the works of August Comte. Whereas, Weber owed his approach much to the Neo-Kantian Philosophy. Therefore, When Durkheim represented French intellectual sociological …show more content…

On one side, Durkheim studied social factor that determines suicide and he drawn that the level of human interaction in society. For him, sociology was a new scientific discipline that could be characterised by two of its feature- firstly, the study of social facts and secondly, like other social sciences, it was empirical in study as tries to follow a logical method of data collection. On contrary, Weber argued that the overall of the social sciences was to develop an “interpretative understanding of social actions”. Such sciences were very different from the natural sciences but he was first to discuss a complex form of “Objectivity” that social science needed to cultivate while, conducting “empathetic understanding” by putting oneself in other shoes with allowing personal bias. This kind of Objectivity was referred “value neutrality” by Weber. He also suggested a methodological tool for doing sociology- Ideal type designed to help analysis. In addition to the comparative aspect of ideal-types, Weber's concept is also epistemological. While for, Durkheim’s epistemology, like his ontology, based on collective subjectivism. Weber also argued that our concepts about the world never truly represent the world in its totality. Rather, because they are made in our head (from ideas), there is always a disjuncture between empirical observation and "truth." The ideal type acknowledges this

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