ABSTRACT
In sociology, ‘conflict theory’ refers to a diverse group of theories that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s to challenge the orthodoxy of structural functionalism. Functionalists tended to assume that stable societies are generally harmonious, with conflict being seen as undesirable and aberrant. Functionalism therefore rejected the possibility that societies could be characterised in terms of long-term structural conflict between different groups. The sources of conflict theory may be traced back to the political philosophies of Hegel and Marx and to Simmel, to social Darwinism and to elite theory. Conflict theories may be broadly classified into two forms. Marxism is typical of those theories that see social conflict as occurring along a single, all important axis. In Marxism, this is class conflict, and as such is conflict over control of the economy and the means of production. Such accounts suggest that conflict will ultimately undermine social stability (leading according to Marxism to a class-based revolution, and, in elite theory, to the succession of an old and exhausted elite by a new and vital one). In contrast, the version of conflict theory that was developed by Lewis Coser (1956) from Simmel’s work suggested that conflict may also occur along a wide range of axes, and that such conflict is advantageous to the stability and growth of an open, pluralistic society. (The precise significance of conflict is therefore seen to depend upon the sorts of social and political structures within which it occurs. Open societies can tolerate and benefit from conflict in a way that closed or authoritarian societies cannot.) Coser’s account suggests that all conflicts cannot be mapped onto a single axis, such as class division. Thus, any individual protagonist could be one’s ally in one dispute and one’s enemy in another. Such pluralistic conflict serves to bind society together, for conflict is typically worked out within commonly accepted and approved social institutions, generating new ideas and motivation for gradual reform.
