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Complete 10 pages APA formatted article: Durkheims Social Facts with Webers Bureaucracy. Social facts are a unique subject matter, according to Durkheim. This separate category of facts “consists of ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him” (Durkheim, 1982: 4). Weber’s views were different, he firmly opposed the idea “that history had some ultimate end, and seriously doubted the possibility of human liberation through a socialist revolution” (Hughes et al, 2003: 55). According to him, the organisational form of rationalisation is that of the Bureaucracy, and this too contributed greatly to the meaninglessness of modern life, with the individual becoming increasingly insignificant within the vast administrative structures. Weber perceived Bureaucracy as an “iron cage” resulting from industrialism, stifling unique human qualities in both socialist and capitalist societies.

The two scholars differed in their purpose and approach to sociology. Durkheim extended the study of science to the study of social facts, whereas Weber attempted to provide existing social studies with a better foundation. Hence, Durkheim consistently expressed his belief that social facts had distinctive properties which must be recognized in order to make the study of society more scientific. On the other hand, Weber did not pioneer a new field, his work treated old themes and known materials with new precision and from the standpoint of new questions. Durkheim’s and Weber’s different definitions of “social facts” and their divergent sociological studies of religion reveal the differences in their perspectives (Bendix, 1989).

Similarities in the work of the two social scientists include the fact that both Durkheim and Weber refer to ways of anthropomorphising society, that is, they provide a human form to society. In their individual ways, they emphasise the knowledge that both Social Facts and Bureaucracy theories respectively, dominate lives and therefore society is seen as a living thing, as seen in the&nbsp.comparison.