false consciousness

Examples of false consciousness in the following topics:

• The Conflict Perspective

  • Marx rejected this type of thinking and termed it false consciousness, which involves explanations of social problems as the shortcomings of individuals rather than the flaws of society.
  • Marx wanted to replace this kind of thinking with something Engels termed class consciousness, which is when workers recognize themselves as a class unified in opposition to capitalists and ultimately to the capitalist system itself.
  • Karl Marx wanted to replace false consciousness with class consciousness, in which the working class would rise up against the capitalist system.

• Class Conflict and Marx

  • Instead, they embraced a false consciousness composed of ideology disseminated by the ruling class.
  • Once the proletariat developed a class consciousness, Marx believed, they would rise up and seize the means of production, overthrowing the capitalist mode of production, and bringing about a socialist society.

• Durkheim and Social Integration

  • People's norms, beliefs, and values make up a collective consciousness, or a shared way of understanding and behaving in the world.
  • The collective consciousness binds individuals together and creates social integration.
  • At the same time, the collective consciousness is produced by individuals through their actions and interactions.
  • Through their collective consciousness, Durkheim argued, human beings become aware of one another as social beings, not just animals.
  • According to Durkheim, the collective consciousness is formed through social interactions.

• External Sources of Social Change

  • Political Process Theory argues that there are three vital components for movement formation: insurgent consciousness, organizational strength, and political opportunities.
  • "Insurgent consciousness" refers back to the notions of deprivation and grievances.
  • The insurgent consciousness is the collective sense of injustice that movement members (or potential movement members) feel and serves as the motivation for movement organization.
  • Some groups may have the insurgent consciousness and resources to mobilize, but because political opportunities are closed, they will not have any success.

• Marx's View of Class Differentiation

  • A temporary status quo could be achieved by employing various methods of social control—consciously or unconsciously—by the bourgeoisie in various aspects of social life.
  • Eventually, however, Marx believed the capitalist economic order would erode, through its own internal conflict; this would lead to revolutionary consciousness and the development of egalitarian communist society.

• Mechanical and Organic Solidarity

  • Normally operating in small-scale "traditional" societies, mechanical solidarity often describes familial networks; it is often seen as a function of individuals being submerged in a collective consciousness.
  • Collective consciousness is achieved when individuals begin to think and act in relatively similar ways.

• Introduction

  • This requires sociologists to assume a relativistic perspective that basically takes a neutral stance toward issues of right or wrong or true or false.

• Functions of Religion

  • Religion is an expression of our collective consciousness, which is the fusion of all of our individual consciousness, which then creates a reality of its own.

• Identity Formation

  • Self-concept is different from self-consciousness, which is an awareness of one's self.
  • Discuss the formation of a person's identity, as well as the ideas of self-concept and self-consciousness

• Introduction to describing one network

  • Most of the standard formulas for calculating estimated standard errors, computing test statistics, and assessing the probability of null hypotheses that we learned in basic statistics don't work with network data (and, if used, can give us "false positive" answers more often than "false negative").