GOD/SOCIETY heaven? heavens

“We refer to the “markets,” just as in the Bible the word Elo-him, a masculine plural noun in Hebrew, meaning the gods, is used to speak of the one God: “In the beginning, God [Elohim] created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).” (Dupuy)

Human Action vs. Social Structure

Emile Durkheim (social facts)

Is there a que ion of obligation or only desire?

- vs. Herbert Spencer (utilitarian) - “Survival of the fittest” as an answer to relentless Change. Hypothesised organic movement towards confederations of integrated heterogeneities (primitive to military to industrial to ”negative regulative industrial”). However this thesis celebrated “greed [as] the great agent in the elevation of the human race … and in the evolution of the universe”. (Pierce) It provided no counter-force to the prevailing individualism, breakdown of traditional authority, loosening of social bonds and moral coldness (anomie).

Max Weber (existential orient.)

- Sociology’s theoretical precursor Louis de Bonald wrote “‘Nature creates society, men rule the government. Since Nature is essentially perfect, it creates, or intends to create, a perfect society; since he is essentially depraved, man plays havoc with administration or tends constantly to botch it” (Natural Laws)

- Father of Sociology “Comte conceived of human deeds as links in the ‘great chain of being’ ... Only some human actions can indeed attach themselves to this chain ...” (Only a superior intelligence can grasp ’social nature’)

- To Durkheim society imposes moral constraints on human action, ie, “The individual submits to society and this submission is the condition of his liberation….”

- Society is the good incarnate, and its social ideals form a psychic reality of soft coercion, a ‘conscience collective’ :“between God and society lies the choice”.

- “Durkheim called the scholars of the social to ‘bow before facts’. These facts, in Durkheim’s vocabulary, are moral commands, constitutive of the ‘collective consciousness’ of ‘the group’.”