The Conflict Perspective

Weber: conflict on three dimensions, not one

Weber accepted that conflict is central and denied that it is only economic. Stratification, he argued, has three separable dimensions: class, an economic position; status, social honour or prestige; and party, organised power. A group may be high on one and low on another, which is why a poor Brahmin priest and a wealthy trader of low ritual rank can each be advantaged and disadvantaged at once.

Weber's correction matters enormously in India, where ritual status and economic class do not line up, and where an answer that reduces everything to class misdescribes the society. It is developed in [Class].

Dahrendorf: conflict over authority

Ralf Dahrendorf argued that in modern industrial societies ownership and control have separated, so class in Marx's sense no longer identifies the conflict groups. The real division is between those who have authority in an association and those subject to it. Conflict is therefore permanent and general, arising in every organisation, but it is also institutionalised: modern societies have machinery, collective bargaining, courts, tribunals, elections, that regulates conflict instead of suppressing it.

That last idea is the most useful one in this chapter for a law student. On Dahrendorf's account the function of a great deal of law is not to abolish conflict but to channel it into forms that do not destroy the society.

Mills: the power elite

C. Wright Mills argued that key decisions in a modern society are taken by a small, interlocking elite drawn from the top of the political, economic and military hierarchies, whose members share background, outlook and interest.

The perspective applied to law

The conflict reading of law has four propositions, and they are worth learning as a set because they make an entire essay.

1. Law reflects the interests of dominant groups. Not necessarily by conspiracy: those who draft, legislate and adjudicate are drawn from particular sections of society and their assumptions travel with them.
2. Law is a resource used unequally. Formal equality before the law coexists with sharp inequality in the ability to use it. A right without the means to enforce it advantages whoever can afford enforcement.
3. Enforcement is selective. What is policed, and against whom, follows the distribution of power rather than the seriousness of the harm.
4. Law is also a site of struggle, and this is where the perspective becomes something other than despair. Subordinate groups have won real changes through law: abolition of untouchability, land reform, minimum wages, reservation, protection against workplace harassment. E. P. Thompson's point is the balanced one: a legal system that is nothing but an instrument of the powerful cannot even look legitimate, and to look legitimate it must sometimes actually restrain them.

Functionalism and conflict compared

A worked example

A state passes a law requiring every private school to reserve a quarter of its entry-level seats for children from disadvantaged groups, with the state reimbursing fees.

The functionalist reading: education is the institution that allocates people to positions and transmits shared values; extending access improves the system's integration and its adaptation, since talent otherwise wasted is used.

The conflict reading asks who gains and who resists. It notes which groups lobbied for the measure and which against; that reimbursement rates were set at a level that made compliance unattractive to expensive schools; that families with resources responded by moving to schools outside the scheme; and that the measure was fought through the courts by the institutions it bound. It concludes that the law is a battleground, and that the outcome will be settled by the relative strength of the contending groups rather than by the statute's words alone.

Both readings are informative. The conflict reading predicts the litigation.

Criticism

1. It overstates conflict and cannot explain cooperation. Most social life, most days, is not a struggle. People queue, keep appointments, help strangers.
2. It cannot explain stability. If interests are genuinely opposed, the puzzle is why societies hold together for centuries.
3. In its Marxist form it is economically reductive. Weber's three dimensions are the standing answer.
4. It can be unfalsifiable. If visible conflict proves the theory and visible harmony proves successful ideological domination, no observation can count against it.
5. It is value-laden. The perspective is often held by people who wish to change what they describe, which is not a fault in itself but requires the guard that Module III's chapter on objectivity discusses.

Quick revision

1. Society is an arena of groups with opposed interests competing for scarce resources.
2. Conflict is normal; order rests on power and ideology, not consensus.
3. Marx: class conflict, base and superstructure, law in the superstructure.
4. Weber: three dimensions, class, status and party; conflict is not only economic.
5. Dahrendorf: conflict is over authority, is universal, and is institutionalised in modern societies.
6. Mills: the power elite.
7. On law: it reflects dominant interests, is used unequally, is enforced selectively, and is also a site of struggle that subordinate groups have sometimes won.
8. Criticism: overstates conflict, cannot explain stability or cooperation, economically reductive in Marx, sometimes unfalsifiable.

Test yourself

1. State the central claims of the conflict perspective. That resources are scarce and unequally distributed; that groups are defined by their position in that distribution and therefore have opposed interests; that conflict rather than consensus is the normal condition of society; that order is maintained by power and by ideology; and that change comes from conflict between groups.

2. How does Weber modify Marx's account of conflict? By denying that conflict is only economic. Weber distinguishes three dimensions of stratification: class, an economic position; status, social honour; and party, organised power. A group can rank high on one and low on another, which is why Indian society, where ritual status and wealth frequently do not coincide, cannot be described by class alone.

3. What did Dahrendorf say conflict is really about, and what did he mean by institutionalising it? He argued that in modern industrial society ownership and control have separated, so the real division is between those who exercise authority in an association and those subject to it; conflict of this kind arises in every organisation. Institutionalisation means providing regular machinery, collective bargaining, tribunals, courts and elections, through which conflict is expressed and regulated rather than suppressed.

4. Give the conflict reading of law in four propositions. Law reflects the interests of dominant groups, because those who make and apply it are drawn from particular sections of society; formal equality before the law coexists with unequal capacity to use it; enforcement is selective, following power rather than harm; and yet law is also a site of struggle in which subordinate groups have won real gains, and a legal order that never restrained the powerful could not sustain its own legitimacy.

5. Give two criticisms of the perspective. That it overstates conflict and cannot account for the cooperation and routine order that make up most of social life; and that in its stronger forms it becomes unfalsifiable, since visible conflict is taken to confirm it while visible harmony is explained as successful ideological domination.