Roles Of Individuals And Societies

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Term Paper Title	Roles Of Individuals And Societies
# of Words	1186
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.74

Roles of Individuals and Societies

Roles of Individuals and Societies

     The early twentieth century marked a period of rapid industrial and
technological change in a society which began to redefine the roles of the
individual and society.  Max Weber and Sigmund Freud were two revolutionary
thinkers of the time who recognized the importance of this relationship and
tried to determine whether the power balance between society and the individual
was tilted in one particular direction or the other. A world becoming an
increasingly complex and restrictive forced these thinkers to ask themselves if
society had indeed finally become a force too dynamic for the individual to
manipulate; that if in fact it was society that had mastered the man.   Although
both thinkers provide radically different views of culture and society they are
both essentially trying to answer the same question: does the individual control
society or does society control the individual?
     The relevance of such an argument might first be debated, for one might
first respond to this question with some doubt; surely we have control of
ourselves, do we all not have control of our own faculties at this very moment?
At this moment you are reading or being subjected to a reading of this paper,
therefore if this indeed is not fufilling some immediate obvious desire it is
accomplishing some sort of other goal.  Likely this goal is to achieve an
education but again we might ask ourselves why?  Surely we all want to further
our scholarly qualities and develop our minds but more likely this again has an
underlying goal:  to succeed in society.  Society has shown us that in most
cases it requires a good deal of education in order to succeed.  Therefore we
might entertain the question, is our presence here a product of our own desires
or that of society's?  The point of this reasoning is only to point out
something we may not immediately recognize:  regardless of what our own free
will may dictate, we cannot help but be influenced by the values and morals of
modern-day society.  And it is because of this influence, the rewards which it
offers and the punishments which it threatens, that the individual has found
himself actually being manipulated by this larger body.
        Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud expresses this point in his greatest
achievement, Civilization and Its Discontents.  Pointing out this conflict
between the individual and society Freud concludes, “. . . the two processes of
individual and...

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