Meena, a sociology student, reads accounts of food riots in an English town in the early 1800s. Poor labourers and artisans who had left their villages to find work in the town gathered in the market and seized grain from traders' stores. Officials and wealthy residents called them a mob and asked the government to put the riots down, fearing for the established order. Meena finds that two scholars who studied such protests wrote about them in very different ways.
One scholar's work reflected the elites' anxiety about maintaining social order in the face of such protests. Who was this sociologist?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → Emile Durkheim
Option (1) Karl Marx — Incorrect. Scholars influenced by Karl Marx offered a different view of violent collective action. They saw protest as a response to deprivation and not as a threat to order.
Option (2) Emile Durkheim — Correct. Emile Durkheim's work reflected the elites' anxiety about maintaining social order. His writings on the division of labour, religious life and suicide show his concern with how social structures enable social integration.
Option (3) E. P. Thompson — Incorrect. E. P. Thompson was a historian influenced by Marx's ideas. He showed that the crowd had its own 'moral economy', which goes against the elites' fear of disorder.
Option (4) Max Weber — Incorrect. Max Weber is known for his work on social action and its meanings. The concern with social order and integration in the face of protest belongs to Durkheim.
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