The Shift from Functionalism: Marx’s Influence and Beyond

The story of how scholars came to understand society is, in many ways, the story of a great intellectual rebellion. For decades, social scientists viewed society as a well-ordered machine where every part had a purpose and everything worked together to maintain balance. Then came a wave of thinkers who asked uncomfortable questions about conflict, power, and inequality, and the foundations of social theory began to crumble. This shift, powered first by Karl Marx and later expanded by scholars across sociology and anthropology, fundamentally redefined how we study social life.

What functionalism proposed and why it gained ground 🔗

Before examining the turn away from it, it helps to understand what functionalism actually claimed. Rooted in the writings of Émile Durkheim and later refined by Talcott Parsons, functionalism presented society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. Every institution – family, religion, government, education – was seen as serving a specific purpose that kept the larger social body healthy.

This perspective drew heavily on a biological analogy. Just as organs in a body cooperate to keep a person alive, social institutions were believed to cooperate to keep society functioning. Functionalism reached the peak of its influence in the 1940s and 1950s, offering researchers a tidy framework for explaining why social structures existed and persisted.

But the framework had a glaring weakness. If every institution exists because it serves a function, how do we account for inequality, exploitation, revolt, and transformation? A theory that explained stability could not easily explain why things break apart and reconfigure. That gap would prove fatal.

Marx and the materialist challenge to static harmony 🔗

Karl Marx arrived at this intellectual puzzle with a radically different answer. His theory of historical materialism rejected the notion that social order rests on shared values or consensus. Instead, Marx argued that the engine of history lies in a materialist understanding of society – the productive process and the way humans labor to meet their needs.

For Marx, what a society looks like – its laws, its culture, its ideas – is shaped by how it produces and distributes goods. This is the famous idea of base and superstructure, where the economic base (the mode of production) shapes the political, legal, and ideological superstructure that sits above it.

Class struggle as the driver of change 🔗

If functionalism saw harmony, Marx saw contradiction. He believed every society contains within it opposing class interests, and the tension between these classes is what drives historical transformation. The feudal order gave way to capitalism because a rising merchant class clashed with landed aristocracy. Capitalism, in turn, creates its own contradictions between the bourgeoisie who own the means of production and the proletariat who sell their labor.

This was a direct rebuke of functionalist assumptions. Marx and Engels located the basis of society in the mode of production which arises out of the given state of human struggle with nature for the means of life. Conflict, not cooperation, was treated as the default condition.

Applying the materialist lens to the subcontinent 🔗

The framework also helps explain colonial and post-colonial transformations. British colonization brought about significant economic changes, shifting the economy from a feudal agrarian system to a more capitalist structure, marked by the introduction of railways, the commercialization of agriculture, and the establishment of industries. These shifts in the mode of production reshaped caste relations, urban life, and political consciousness in ways a purely functionalist analysis could never capture.

Weber’s middle path: ideas, agency, and verstehen 🔗

Marx’s materialism was powerful, but it too faced criticism for being overly deterministic. Max Weber, while sharing Marx’s interest in power and change, argued that social life could not be reduced to economic forces alone. In works such as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber showed how religious ideas and cultural values could independently shape economic behavior.

Weber introduced the concept of verstehen, which means interpretive understanding. He insisted that sociologists must try to grasp the subjective meanings people attach to their actions rather than treating them as passive products of structural forces. This emphasis on human agency opened space for a view of society that was neither mechanically stable (as functionalists claimed) nor strictly determined by economic class position (as some Marxists argued).

A conflict theorist in his own right 🔗

Weber also reframed conflict itself. While Marx emphasised economic conflict, Max Weber based his arguments on conflict about power. For Weber, struggle over status, authority, and bureaucratic control was just as important as struggle over productive resources. This widened the conflict lens considerably and made it applicable to contexts where class alone could not explain the tensions at play.

Gluckman and Leach: the anthropological rebellion 🔗

The turn away from functionalism was not confined to sociology. Social anthropology, long dominated by the structural-functionalism of Bronisław Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, faced its own reckoning. Two figures stand out in this transformation: Max Gluckman and Edmund Leach.

Gluckman and the paradox of ritualised rebellion 🔗

Max Gluckman, working in southern Africa, refused to treat conflict as an aberration that threatened social order. Instead, he examined how conflict could be built into the very fabric of a society. He is associated with the concept of ritualised rebellion – the idea that societies often institutionalise moments of dissent, reversal, and tension as a way of managing them.

Consider how festivals and carnivals across many cultures allow hierarchies to be temporarily inverted, with those at the bottom symbolically taking the role of those at the top. In Manchester Anthropology ritual was generally seen as functioning to displace conflict, with the ultimate emphasis being that harmony can be achieved despite the conflicts. Gluckman’s genius lay in showing that conflict and cohesion were not opposites – they were intertwined.

He also studied colonial situations with a sharp eye. Using his Dual-Spheres Model, Gluckman discussed his observation that in the situation of colonialism, industrialization and labor migration actually strengthen tribal political and kinship systems where one would expect them to break apart. This nuanced view broke with the tidy functionalist expectation that modernisation would smoothly dissolve traditional structures.

Leach and the oscillation of social systems 🔗

Edmund Leach pushed even further. His classic study Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) examined the Kachin people and shattered the assumption that social systems tend toward equilibrium. Leach argued that Kachin villages oscillate between egalitarian (gumlao) and hierarchical (gumsa) forms within a regional system, driven by individual strategies and manipulations of kinship and property rules.

In other words, society was not a stable machine; it was a restless, shifting field where individuals continually negotiated, manipulated, and transformed the rules. Leach challenged the prevailing structural-functionalism of British anthropology, arguing that Kachin society was marked by constant movement between egalitarian and hierarchical systems, depending on external pressures and internal tensions.

Leach’s emphasis on human agency, ambiguity, and historical contingency gave anthropology a new methodological vocabulary. Researchers could now study societies as they actually were – messy, contested, and changing – rather than as idealised equilibrium models.

Neo-evolutionary theory and the return of change 🔗

As functionalism receded, older evolutionary ideas returned, but in a revised form. Early evolutionists like Herbert Spencer had imagined all societies moving along a single ladder from simple to complex. That unilinear view had been rightly criticised. Neo-evolutionism, developed by thinkers such as Leslie White and Julian Steward, corrected the excesses.

Steward proposed the concept of multilinear evolution – the idea that societies do not follow a single universal path, but evolve in distinct ways depending on their specific environmental conditions. This meant two communities in similar environments might develop parallel features without direct contact, but the evolutionary path itself was no longer assumed to be universal.

Crucially, neo-evolutionism also introduced probability into the picture – social evolution was no longer seen as inevitable or predetermined, but as shaped by contingency, environment, and human agency. This allowed change and conflict to take centre stage without abandoning the idea that societies do transform in patterned ways.

The lasting legacy of the shift 🔗

By the 1960s, the dominance of functionalism had visibly weakened. By the 1980s, its place was taken in Europe by more conflict-oriented approaches, and more recently by structuralism. The intellectual ecosystem had become pluralistic: conflict theories, interpretive sociology, neo-evolutionary frameworks, and processual anthropology all coexisted, each offering a different angle on social reality.

What does this shift really mean for those studying public institutions and governance today? It means understanding that policy, administration, and social behaviour cannot be explained by appeals to stability or equilibrium alone. Inequalities, class tensions, bureaucratic struggles, caste-based mobilisation, and regional variations all demand frameworks that take conflict and change seriously. Marx opened the door; Weber, Gluckman, Leach, and the neo-evolutionists walked through it and built new rooms.

The turn away from functionalism is, ultimately, a story about intellectual honesty. When a theory cannot account for the most important features of human life – struggle, transformation, agency – the theory must change, not the facts.

What do you think? If conflict is a normal feature of social life rather than a breakdown of order, how should policymakers design institutions that can absorb dissent without collapsing? And when you look at recent shifts in your own society, do they feel more like the gradual adaptations functionalists described or the dynamic oscillations Leach observed among the Kachin?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_functionalism
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/history/ch10.htm
4. https://polsci.institute/political-theory/historical-materialism-marx-social-change/
5. https://gyansanchay.csjmu.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Theories-of-Social-Change.pdf
6. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/the-manchester-school/
7. https://www.sociologyguide.com/thinkers/edmund-leach.php
8. https://anthroholic.com/edmund-leach
9. https://sociology.institute/introduction-to-sociology/diverse-theories-social-change-perspectives/