Seven Types of Society

Where sociologists take it next. Functionalism reads this sequence as growing interdependence: Durkheim's mechanical solidarity, where people cohere because they are alike and share one moral outlook, gives way to organic solidarity, where they cohere because they need each other's specialized work — and when that shift outruns the norms that govern it, he expected anomie, a condition of normlessness. Merton would separate the manifest function of the plow (more grain) from its latent ones nobody intended: cities, standing armies, hereditary elites. Conflict theory asks a sharper question of the very same list — the moment a surplus exists, someone can control it. Marx traced that from private property to class, and finally to the split between those who own the means of production and those with only their labor to sell, with alienation as the worker's lived experience of the factory. Weber read the modern end of the sequence as rationalization: calculation and efficiency spreading through bureaucracy until they harden into what he called an iron cage. Symbolic interactionism works at eye level on the same material: Cooley's looking-glass self forms differently in a band of sixty who have known you since birth than in a city of strangers, and Goffman's staged presentation of self presupposes exactly the audience of strangers that industrial cities produced — while Mead would note that the generalized other a child internalizes is assembled out of whichever society happens to be doing the raising. Comte named the discipline in the middle of the industrial upheaval, and Mills supplies the connective tissue: losing your job to automation feels like a personal trouble, but it is a public issue with a date and a technology attached.