Durkheim

SUMMARY: The famous Emile Durkheim was one of the most significant functionalists during the nineteenth century. Most of his scholarly work centered on one basic concept which dealt with what held society together. As a functionalist, Durkheim tried to argue that society is a social system consisting of various integrated parts, he called this Functional Interdependence or Organic Solidarity. This meant that our society is like a living organism with separate parts, each of these …

…notions of the society overall. Karl Marx on the other hand, happens to be the total opposite of Durkheim because Marx would have thought that the whole idea of the collective conscious is informed only by certain aspects and it actually falls into his view of the false consciousness. Also in opposition to Marx, Durkheim sees no real tension between classes; therefore he really didn’t purely believe in class struggle the way Marx did.