Conflict: Ancient Chinese philosophers, the Taoists specifically, saw conflict as the ever-recurring but forward-leaning dialectical spiral of Night and Day -- that is, of Yin and Yang. It was a 'fatal embrace' of sorts destined to always produce Tomorrow, and never yesterday. Plato, the Greek philosopher, likewise saw conflict as a dialectical engagement. In his case, it was a clash between good and evil; and, indeed, he held that "each thing has its evil and good". This dichotomy between 'good' and 'evil' (or Self and Other) characterized (and still does) certain conceptions of the phenomenology of conflict situations.
Karl Marx, the most consequential proponent of conflict, argued that class struggle was the real driver of epochal change in all human society. This struggle was powered the underlying modes and relations of production/reproduction and distribution in society at large. Those modes and relations were at once unequal, exploitative and unjust -- and contrary to human nature. The contradiction(s) thus build into the relations led to inevitable conflict (in a Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis format) and the pressure to resolve it -- typically and logically in the direction of a new economic and social order. Contradiction, it has been argued even by more recent scholars such as Marcuse, always has (built into it) the drive toward its resolution.
In his paper titled "Social Conflict and the Theory of Social Change", Lewis Coser explored the functions of conflict (he clearly preferred the term conflict to violence) in the broader context of social change. His exploration focused on: (a) the impact of social conflict on change within enduring social systems, with particular reference to consequences for such concerns as "institutional rigidities, technical progress and productivity", and, (b) the "relation between social conflict and changes [or overhauls/overthrows] of social systems" (Coser, 1957: 197).
One clear outcome of this exploration was Coser's proposition, inspired by George Sorel, that "conflict prevents the ossification of the social system by exerting pressure for innovation and creativity." He wrapped up his optimistic conception of the operation, and consequence, of social conflict in the following terms:
"The clash of values and interests, the tension between what is and what some groups feel ought to be, the [contest] between vested interests and new strata and groups demanding their share of power, wealth and status...[all of which] have been productive of vitality."
Georg Simmel has presented perhaps the most intriguing and refreshing post-Marxian characterization of the idea and process of conflict. His version offers, as in a wedding, the opportunity to bring into the conversation "something new and something old, something borrowed and something blue" (that is, something that's not red -- figuratively).
He argues that conflict is inseparable from social interaction, and thus “sociation”; and is even itself a form of sociation. He sees conflict, indeed, as “one of the most vivid interactions” and, as an example of social interaction, by definition beyond the scope of social acts by the lone individual. Furthermore, conflict is not the cause of some sort of pathology of human interaction, but the resolution or ‘cure’ of such pathology READ MORE
