What Conflict Theory Claims

Conflict theory is one of the broad theoretical traditions into which contemporary sociology is conventionally divided, alongside structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and more recent synthetic approaches. The label is somewhat misleading. It suggests a single school with a single doctrine; in fact it names a family of related but distinct traditions — the Frankfurt School, the American institutional sociology of C. Wright Mills, the analytical turn associated with Ralf Dahrendorf, the synthetic conflict sociology of Randall Collins, and contemporary extensions in the sociology of inequality — that share a basic analytical starting point and otherwise differ on a great deal (Collins 1975, pp. 56-61). A student who finishes this topic thinking conflict theory is a single doctrine has misunderstood it. The tradition is a big tent, and the pluralism is a sign of its vitality rather than a weakness.

The shared analytical move, in compressed form, is this: social order is produced by and through ongoing struggles over resources, status, and meaning, rather than by consensus around shared values. The structural-functionalist default position of mid-twentieth-century American sociology — associated above all with Talcott Parsons — treated social systems as integrated through shared normative frameworks and understood order as the default to be explained (Parsons 1951, pp. 36-45). Conflict theorists, across their varied positions, invert this. Order is not the default; it is something continually produced by actors with differential power, and the normative consensus that functionalists take as the foundation of social integration is, for conflict theorists, typically itself a product of asymmetric power — the worldview of the dominant, generalized and presented as if shared (Dahrendorf 1959, pp. 161-164).

Importantly, this analytical starting point does not require Marxist politics. Max Weber, whose work this module examined in the previous topic, was a conflict theorist in this sense: his sociology of domination and his treatment of class, status, and party all start from the premise that social order is patterned by struggles over scarce goods that different groups value differently (Weber 1922/1978, pp. 926-940). Weber was not a Marxist. Lewis Coser, whose The Functions of Social Conflict (1956) helped revive explicit conflict analysis in postwar American sociology, drew primarily on the German sociologist Georg Simmel — not Marx — to argue that conflict is a ubiquitous feature of social life and that it has integrative as well as disruptive consequences (Coser 1956, pp. 23-38). The conflict-theoretic starting point is compatible with a range of political positions; what it excludes is the claim that social order rests primarily on consensus.

The previous topic on Marx presented historical materialism and noted that the Marxian toolkit has shaped twentieth-century sociology far beyond the circle of those who identify as Marxists. This topic traces one of the most important of those lines of influence: the line from Marx, through a series of twentieth-century developments, into a general conflict-theoretic approach that is now a standard part of how sociologists analyze inequality, institutions, and power. The trajectory has a distinctive character. Each major development preserves the conflict-theoretic starting point while stripping away some feature of classical Marxism — the philosophical teleology, the labor theory of value, the political program, the two-class model, even the privileging of economic conflict itself. What remains at the end is a general analytical framework that is compatible with many empirical and political orientations.

Three features of the tradition are worth noting up front because they recur across the developments traced below. First, conflict theorists tend to treat institutional arrangements as solutions to recurrent distributional problems rather than as expressions of shared values — laws, schools, welfare systems, and corporate governance are analyzed in terms of whose interests they serve and whose they subordinate. Second, conflict theorists tend to be skeptical of claims to value neutrality made by powerful actors, including by social scientists, and to examine how such claims function to legitimize particular arrangements (Horkheimer 1937/1972, pp. 188-200). Third, conflict theorists tend to treat cultural forms — media, education, religion, science — as simultaneously expressive of and constitutive of power relations, rather than as autonomous spheres to be analyzed separately from material conditions. These three features are shared across the Frankfurt School, the Millsian American tradition, Dahrendorf, Collins, and contemporary extensions, even as those traditions differ sharply on many other questions.