10.1. he place of health and disease in the theories of social conflict
According to their title, the conflict theories challenge the postulate on social accord and held that if the current social order and political regime are maintained, they exist due to the fact that the dominant social groups convinced or compelled the weak public strata to acknowledge their subordinate state and social inequality.
In any type of society, the certain social groups have better access to knowledge, power, and the economic resources than subordinate social strata. Since people are not equal by nature, there always exist the reasons for external and internal conflicts. This feature was taken into consideration in the development of comprehensive social models. All the theories that assume that the society is composed of individuals and public groups with diverse and often opposite interests introduce the concept of social conflict into the core of the developed models.
The history of sociology knows many different viewpoints on nature of social conflict. According to 19th century philosopher Herbert Spencer (Turner ef al., 2002), the society is a 'superorganic aggregate' developing according to the evolutionary laws. Evolution is realized in the struggle for existence between the society and the environmental medium as well as between different societies. In this struggle the fear of living and dead culminates in a conflict. The fear of living stimulates the political actions exemplified in militarism and creating social organization and the state; the fear of dead leads to religion as a basis of culture. The social politics should be based upon the empirical study of the sociocultural context of the public phenomena. It is expected to promote the natural course of evolution by clearing it from the selfish despotism of certain individuals and social groups. Bases on these premises, H. Spencer advanced the law of 'equal freedom'. He also postulated that the main task of the state is to secure compliance to this law.