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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Émile Durkheim’s major works are among the founding texts of the discipline of sociology, but his importance lies also in his immense legacy and subsequent influence upon others.
In this book, Philip Smith examines not only Durkheim’s original ideas, but also reveals how he inspired more than a century of theoretical innovations, identifying the key paths, bridges, and dead ends – as well as the tensions and resolutions – in what has been a remarkably complex intellectual history. Beginning with an overview of the key elements of Durkheim’s mature masterpieces, Smith also examines his lesser known essays, commentaries and lectures. He goes on to analyse his immediate influence on the
Année Sociologique group, before tracing the international impact of Durkheim upon modern anthropology, sociology, and social and cultural theory. Smith shows that many leading social thinkers, from Marcel Mauss to Mary Douglas and Randall Collins, have been carriers for the multiple pathways mapped out in Durkheim’s original thought.
This book will be essential reading for any student or scholar seeking to understand this fundamental impact on areas ranging from social theory and anthropology to religious studies and beyond.
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Contents
Cover
Front Matter
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 Durkheim’s Life and the Four Major Books
About this Chapter, About this Book
Early Life
The Division of Labor in Society
The Rules of Sociological Method
Suicide
Toward the Elementary Forms
The Elementary Forms
2 Durkheim’s Other Works and the Contributions of His Students
Durkheim’s Remaining Ideas and Works
3 Durkheimian Thought, 1917–1950
France
British Structural Functionalism
The United States
4 Through the Cultural Turn, 1950–1985
Parsons and Systems Theory
Lévi-Strauss and Structuralism
British Anthropology and Mary Douglas
The United States: Empirical Studies in the Structural Functionalist Idiom
5 Into the Twenty-First Century: Durkheim Revived, 1985–2020
Jeffrey Alexander and the Strong Program
Randall Collins and Interaction Ritual
Other Durkheimian Work in Sociology in the United States
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1
Durkheim and his schoolmates, Épinal, c.1874. Durkheim is standing second from t…
Figure 2
Durkheim and the class that entered the ENS in 1879. There is some uncertainty a…
Figure 3
Durkheim lecturing at the Sorbonne c.1911. The presence of notebooks suggests th…
Figure 4
Durkheim at the lectern c.1908. Note the characteristically intense expression.
Figure 5
Durkheim standing in his office c.1911. Clearly he was a precise dresser. The ph…
Figure 6
Durkheim working at his desk, Paris c.1911. This is a remarkable, informal image…
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
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Durkheim and After
The Durkheimian Tradition, 1893–2020
Philip Smith
polity
Copyright © Philip Smith 2020
The right of Philip Smith to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1831-9
All images reproduced courtesy of Davy, Georges. n.d. (c.1911). Émile Durkheim: choix de textes avec étude du système sociologique. Paris. Editions Louis-Michaud.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Smith, Philip (Philip Daniel), 1964- author.Title: Durkheim and after : the Durkheimian tradition, 1893-2020 / Philip Smith.Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In this book, Philip Smith examines not only Émile Durkheim’s founding texts of sociology, but also reveals how he inspired more than a century of theoretical innovations, identifying the key paths, bridges, and dead ends -- as well as the tensions and resolutions -- in what has been a remarkably complex intellectual history”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2019027623 (print) | LCCN 2019027624 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509518272 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509518289 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509518319 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Durkheim, Émile, 1858-1917. | Durkheim, Émile, 1858-1917--Influence. | Durkheimian school of sociology. | Sociologists--France--Biography. | Sociology--History.Classification: LCC HM479.D87 S54 2020 (print) | LCC HM479.D87 (ebook) | DDC 301.092 [B]--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027623LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027624
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface and Acknowledgments
There have been many books about Durkheim and his works, especially for the crucial period from about 1893 to 1917. This one is different. It looks at Durkheim and also the long Durkheimian tradition in social thought. It looks at lineages and connections and covers the span of around one hundred and thirty years of published scholarship from 1893 to 2020. It is at once an introduction, a review, a critical commentary, and a narrative about how things unfolded. To date this is the first book-length effort to attempt this task.
We move fast and I offer basic cultural literacy in a relatively short text. I hope that in around two hundred pages this book gives readers a sense of the terrain. About one-third of the material is on Durkheim himself. It covers his main contributions and his life. This is what I hope will be a time-efficient but somewhat detailed introduction. I have tried to be uncontroversial, and also comprehensive by sweeping up his less well-known thoughts. The remaining two-thirds look to the legacy and its relationship to his original ideas. We investigate the work of the students Durkheim inspired directly, and also the rise of structural functionalism, structuralism, systems theory, normative functionalism, and cultural sociology and anthropology. Material is organized with reference to such traditions and also in terms of nations. This does not reflect the sin of “methodological nationalism” but rather the empirical reality that creative intellectual activity has tended to cluster in specific paradigms in specific national contexts in specific epochs. As one door closes another opens, often in another country.
Our concern with all these diverse traditions of Durkheimian work is not whether scholars at one time or another read Durkheim accurately or “got him right” or “really understood him.” It is with how they interpreted his legacy, picked up certain ideas and ran with them, played with them, expanded them, perhaps improved upon them. To be clear: this is not a book of Durkheim scholarship that attempts to provide a brilliant new, or more precise, or more sensitive reading of Durkheim, or of anyone else. Nor is it a report about scholarship on Durkheim that provides an encyclopedic history of reception (although there is some of this here). It is rather a text about the more significant uses of Durkheim and his tradition for creative social explanation and theory building. The attempt made here is to offer an introduction and overview of a vibrant and significant paradigm as it shaped social thought and empirical work, attracted talented thinkers and researchers, and gave birth to new ideas, theories, and visions of the social world. Other books on the Durkheimian legacy are possible, perhaps looking more to his normative reception, or to the detailed history of Durkheim interpretation, or to his impact on social philosophy. Those are tasks that are left for another author with another skill set. And I hope someone picks them up.
Finally I disclose that I cite myself in this text more than a little. I trained initially in social anthropology in the UK as an undergraduate, and later in sociology in the USA for the doctorate. I currently work in the United States and I am a visible member of the Strong Program that is described in the final chapter. This information may assist interpretation of the narrative that is provided as well as account for the scope of this work in terms of inclusions and omissions. I admit to being somewhat uncomfortable that American cultural sociology emerges as a kind of savior toward the end of the book. My intention has been to provide a truthful account and not a Whig history. I am calling it the way I see it.
Over the years many Durkheim experts have been sounding boards for the thoughts that have gone into this volume. This group includes Jeffrey Alexander, Randall Collins, Marcel Fournier, Alexander Riley, and Ken Thompson. Various scholars have been helpful in email exchanges during the course of writing where I sought advice on particular themes, issues, or national traditions: Perri 6, Aynur Erdogan, Nicole Holzhauser, Dmitry Kurakin, Jason Mast, Stephan Moebius, Anne Rawls, and Helmut Staubmann. I was a visitor at Nuffield College, Oxford University, during the writing of this book. I thank Nuffield for their hospitality and for providing a quiet intellectual space to get the job done. Nadine Amalfi at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology assisted with manuscript formatting issues. Fiona Sewell was a remarkably perceptive and detailed copy-editor. At Polity Press George Owers and Julia Davies provided editorial and production support and were receptive to my suggestion that a book such as this would be more useful than “yet another” one on Durkheim.
Chapter 1Durkheim’s Life and the Four Major Books
Situating Durkheim – early life and training – The Division of Labor – The Rules of Sociological Method – Suicide – the middle career phase – L’Année sociologique – The Elementary Forms of Religious Life – death
Almost every biographer or intellectual historian runs up against the same frustration. The goal of their labors becomes more elusive and complex the further they travel. Even if we look away from the psyche of Émile Durkheim, for which there is not so much information, to focus on the written work, for which we have plenty to go on, we still find this pattern of regress repeated. The more we read, the more we study, the more the hope that we will come to any final understanding and arrive at our destination evaporates. We seem to be pumping a handcar down railroad lines that converge at infinity.
Look at the ink on the page. Without trying particularly hard or even knowing much about him we can see that Durkheim is associated with many styles of social thought, with multiple vocabularies and authorial postures. These have contributed to debate, to a proliferation of interpretations (Jones 1999; Lukes 1973), and they have been considered by scholars at some times as complementary and at others as contradictory. For example, Durkheim was an advocate of the social fact, positivism, social statistics, and the possibility of a rigorous and objective study of society. But he also spoke about intangibles such as normative integration, morality, and anomie, and suggested that society cohered due to a collective conscience – each of these being somewhat ineffable. A less pretentious word would be “fuzzy.” So was he a scientist or a humanist? Later in his career Durkheim brought in elements of a new vocabulary that further complicate the picture. He insisted on ritual, on classification, and on notions of the sacred and profane as the keys to understanding social process. This move brings in a further topic for debate as well as a third set of tools. Some say Durkheim had an epistemological break and that as his career progressed he became a radically different “cultural” theorist. Others insist that there are just shifts in emphasis and point out that the same concepts, problems, and vocabularies can be found – more or less – throughout his work. What is clear is that he remained committed to empirical inquiry. Sociology needed to observe regularities and patterns in the world rather than being a merely theoretical discipline. Yet by the same token Durkheim hated empiricism. The sociologist had to go beyond just describing things. We need to dig beneath the surface to uncover hidden laws, to theorize connections and discover general principles of social organization.
Durkheim can, of course, be positioned as heir to more specific intellectual legacies as well as in terms of axiomatic generalities. While all commentators admit there are multiple influences, many cannot resist boiling these down to just one or two that are, in their reading, truly essential. Candidates include earlier scholars like Comte, Saint-Simon, Rousseau, Kant, Renouvier; or historically embedded intellectual traditions such as French reactionary Catholicism and German Romanticism. The ancestor or lineage that is picked very much depends on whether Durkheim is read as a positivist, an idealist, a critical realist, or a realist, as religious or secular, as a moralist or as a scientist. It also varies according to which book is taken to capture his essence.
We can also attempt to define Durkheim in ways less closely related to the world of pure ideas and the ivory tower sociological enterprise. Here too there are multiple positions to be taken. Consider the case of his politics. For many critical theorists Durkheim is a conservative whose work failed to come to terms with power and injustice. As we will see, this is a complaint that has continued to dog his tradition to this day. However, Durkheim can also be identified as a person who wrote on socialism, who objected to the social impacts of inherited wealth, who saw that contracts could be unfair when there were inequalities between the participants, and who argued that state power needed to be subordinated to the social will. He advocated roles for occupational groups and centralized bargaining in an effort to head off the worst excesses of capitalism. His was a vision of something rather like the Swedish system that was taken as a model of best practice by many critical sociologists with a normative commitment to social democracy.
It is equally significant that Durkheim came out in public support of Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), a military officer from a Jewish background who was unfairly convicted of treason in 1895 and condemned to life imprisonment. The Dreyfus Affair split France and was a crucial litmus test of social attitudes at the time. Progressives and liberals pressed vigorously for a pardon and exoneration. On the other side there was a concerted establishment effort to keep Dreyfus in jail, to save face and to cover up of the identity of the real perpetrator. A wider debate attached to the Dreyfus specifics. This concerned the extent to which France was an essentially Catholic nation or one founded upon ideas regarding equal citizenship and human rights. At some risk to his career Durkheim stood up for justice and universalism.
In thinking about Durkheim’s multiplicity and complexity we might also refer to a variability of intellectual style, a dimension that has autonomy from the content of the ideas themselves. He can be seen as a deep thinker with a great propensity for abstraction and a consequent extended deployment of image and metaphor. For example, at times he writes somewhat metaphysically and inspira-tionally, and in a mode not unlike that of his rival the philosopher Henri Bergson, when he speaks of solidarity or the role of currents in the collective conscience. Yet there is also a scholar who can move pedantically and at a painfully slow speed, a kind of high-powered, brute-force chess automaton who tries to arrive at a precise definition or to refute opponents step by step. Another iteration of his authorial persona was that of a punchy, no-nonsense intellectual. For example, there is a Durkheim who thought statistics could resolve things or cut through the chatter: we should follow the trail of social facts. Then there is the polemicist who stands up for sociology against psychology, and the anxious neat-freak social engineer who wants to order and organize society before it is too late. As we will see, the “real Durkheim” is in a sense all of these. It depends a little on where you look and quite a bit upon which interpretative lens you reach for.
About this Chapter, About this Book
Where to start? This chapter is about the big highlights. Here is a slightly facetious analogy. When people go on safari they like to see the “big five” – elephant, buffalo, rhino, lion, and leopard, or some such combination of charismatic megafauna. The search for these is a priority that structures a wider experience in which the tourist might encounter other animals – warthogs, antelope, anteaters, and the like. If they chance upon these it is a bonus, but it is the “big five” that gets them onto that long-haul flight. In this book we follow a similar logic and put first things first. At the end of the day Durkheim is best known to most people as the author of four monographs that changed the path of social science. The full titles for each are The Division of Labor in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. However these books are so well known they are almost universally referred to in scholarship by abbreviated titles as follows: Division of Labor, Rules, Suicide, and Elementary Forms.
And so our very long initial chapter starts with these, but with a substantial cautionary note. As we will see later in detail, Durkheim wrote a number of lesser but still highly significant and somewhat lengthy works. Even if his “big four” had never been written, these mid-size contributions and extended essays would have made Durkheim at the very least a significant, highly creative mid-weight player in the history of social theory. This often forgotten output covers a bewildering variety of topics: education, professions, and punishment, to name but three. The plurality does not stop with these books and assembled lectures. He wrote a large number of reviews and introductions in his team’s journal, the Année sociologique, as well as letters and reports. Intellectual significance does not always covary with length. Sometimes a very short item will provide a major clue to his creative thinking on a big topic – be it totemism or socialism or individualism, or some other “ism,” or for that matter “ology.”
Because this scattered output is so interesting, dense, and creative, it needs to be understood, also. Shortcuts are risky. It can be more than a little frustrating to try to become a Durkheim scholar because there are just so many such references that need to be read – and our lives being the way they are, these can easily become so many things we should have read but never found time for. It is especially perilous to see the long tail as insignificant for the main game, as it contains fresh ideas and intellectual moves that cast Durkheim’s “big four” in a new light. For example, his writings on property have been generally neglected but, when examined, are a way to connect The Division of Labor to The Elementary Forms. Thankfully a minor industry of expert Durkheim scholarship has existed for quite a while, engaged in just such a task of information retrieval and intellectual reconstruction that pays attention to small details in quiet corners. It has helped generate not only a fuller picture of the man and thinker, but also a sense of dynamic activity and prodigious intellectual engagement.
Durkheim died in 1917. This may seem a long time ago. But think of it this way. The year of his death is only twenty-eight years before the first use of the atomic bomb and less than fifty years before The Beatles were at their zenith. We are now more than 50 years from Sgt. Pepper and moving away fast, but many people still feel the album belongs in our epoch, not in some distant age. This kind of timeline reminds us that Durkheim can be thought of as “recent.” In this regard he has had the luck to have two excellent biographers in Steven Lukes (1973) and Marcel Fournier (2013). They have fixed much of the phenomenological experience of immediacy and proximity. Their books combined give us around 1,500 pages of vivid information. Recent decades have also seen the emergence of a cluster of Durkheim scholars, many of them publishing detailed essays in the journal they founded in the 1990s: Durkheimian Studies/Études Durkheimiennes. Figures such as W. S. F. Pickering, William Watts Miller, Robert Alun Jones, Philippe Besnard, Massimo Borlandi, Mike Gane, Kenneth Thompson, Alexander Gofman, and Alexander Riley, among many others, have made it their task to engage in detailed reconstruction of Durkheim’s thinking, the recovery of lost or forgotten letters and archives, the editing and translation of nearly forgotten texts, the retranslation of well-known ones, and the elaboration of detailed chronologies (see chapter 5 for information on this group). The result of this activity has been a far more comprehensive and three-dimensional account than we had in the initial decades after Durkheim’s death. It has put in the foreground several insights that should be remembered in this chapter and the next. Collectively they temper the impression we can easily form of an isolated genius working by candlelight, cut off from the world and obsessed with his four major books to the point where they define who he was. This kind of recent scholarship has demonstrated the following:
Durkheim was at the center of a team. He taught, encouraged, commissioned, edited, and organized at the expense of his own personal research time. Team members mostly underperformed after his death and without his leadership. However, the group helped him develop his thinking, especially on religion, and the research network or paradigm was for a while an effective way to leverage his influence.
It is now clearer than ever that Durkheim’s work amounted to much more than just four major monographs. We alluded to this above. Specialist Durkheim scholars have pointed to his lectures as major accomplishments, to his multiple book reviews as a substantial intellectual achievement, and to the breadth and diversity of his scholarship (for example, his thoughts on pragmatism, socialism, or education). Much of this is not readily apparent to an undergraduate on a survey course or to a fast, strategic reader.
Durkheim’s major book projects had long gestation periods. We can trace the evolution of his ideas for each of these with a detailed intra-corpus reading. Work on what would become the
Division of Labor
(published 1893) started in 1884;
Suicide
(1897) in a course taught in 1889–90; the
Elementary Forms
(1912) in a course from 1894–5, another from 1900–1, yet another in 1906–7, and in various essays in the
Année sociologique
. This commitment to long-term labor militates against the vision of Durkheim as an opportunist publishing willy-nilly in a quest for visibility and prestige, or as a person struck by inspiration and hence jumping into new topics by whim.
Many of Durkheim’s ideas evolved via real or virtual engagement with other thinkers of his time on the major contemporary topics, such as Tarde on imitation and suicide, or Frazer, Tylor, van Gennep, and Marett on totemism and religion, or James on pragmatism. Many of these debates are now historical footnotes. Yet Durkheim never became bogged down in the task of refutation to the point where his work was only of its time. Rather these figures offered a resource for thinking through to a more timeless general position.
Durkheim was burdened with administrative responsibilities. As he became more intellectually influential he became more institutionally central. This helps explain a general decline in productivity (by his incredible standards) after 1900. During this later period Durkheim mostly wrote reviews and extended essays, lectures, revisions, and so forth. The gap between
Suicide
(1897) and the
Elementary Forms
(1912) is explained by this bureaucratic leadership role, by work on the
Année sociologique
and, of course, by Durkheim’s need to read and think deeply about religion.
So much has been accomplished by the specialist Durkheim scholars. Having said this, it is important to remember that their work is generally about understanding Durkheim, his works, his life, and his time. The priority is on intellectual history and on getting the story as accurate and as comprehensive as possible. For these specialists, knowledge about Durkheim is an object of interest sui generis. Why did he write this text at this time? What does he mean by this word in this book and by the same word in that book? How did he revise this footnote? Why did he make such and such an editorial decision? The next two chapters have a different task. They offer a quick survey and do not need the level of detail that looks at various drafts of the same work. We do not delve into private archives or take much interest in letters. Nor do we need to speculate on the relationship of biography to scholarship. We can get by with generalities because our primary interest is neither in getting Durkheim “right,” nor in finding origins, nor in evaluating between contending, narrowly differing interpretations of certain ideas. We are also not particularly interested in the philosophical, abstract aspects of Durkheim’s legacy. The emphasis here is on what he had to offer for a century or more of empirical inquiry and generalizable social theory concerning the operation of the social world. That said, I try to offer an efficient snapshot of Durkheim’s life and his social and intellectual contexts so that the basics are in place – but quickly so.
Early Life
David Émile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858, in Épinal, Lorraine. Although a small town of around 10,000 people it was also the capital of its département, so not a true backwater. This area of France has historically been a border zone with German-speaking lands to the north and east. The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) and their invasion of France when he was twelve years old would have been very much the major political event of Durkheim’s childhood. Much has been made of Durkheim’s Jewish background and the influence of this on his thinking. He was the son of a rabbi who was himself the descendant of a very long line of rabbis. It has been speculated that being part of a close-knit and excluded minority shaped Durkheim’s later views on the pivotal role of solidarity, morality, and belonging. As Fournier (2005: 45) puts it: “To be Jewish in Épinal was to experience the life of a small, cohesive, marginal group.” It has also been suggested that specific as well as general elements in Durkheim’s thought are derived from this background. For example, Tiryakian (1979) suggests that memories of the Épinal Jewish community and images of the Ancient Hebrews were reflected in Durkheim’s later representation of Aboriginal society.
Cutting against the small-town Jewish trope is the fact that Durkheim’s family was in many ways secular and modern for its day. As Fournier (2005: 45) points out, photographs are marked by the absence of beards and the use of modern dress. We see something of this in an image of Durkheim and his schoolmates (see figure 1). The family was progressive in terms of gender roles, with women involved in business activity. They spoke French, not Yiddish or Hebrew, around the house. Of course here again we find early clues that can be connected to later beliefs, this time to Durkheim’s advocacy of laïcité – a term referring to the need for an actively secular state, and to forms of public interaction and civic institutions devoid of religious influences. If Durkheim came out publicly in support of the Jewish Dreyfus (we mentioned this above), this probably says more about his belief in the ideals of law, democracy, and justice than in primal religious solidarity. Finally we note the most important thing about his family background. Almost certainly the biggest “Jewish” influence was a strong community emphasis on literacy and a disciplined and dedicated orientation toward education more generally. Like many of the Jewish faith at the time around Europe, his was a household that valued learning and application and made these a priority. So Durkheim knuckled down and became a very serious person at a very young age. Although not depressive by nature he seemed to struggle to enjoy himself. Lukes (1973: 40) draws on first-hand accounts from Durkheim’s students Georges Davy and Célestin Bouglé when he comments that Durkheim had “an exacting sense of duty and a serious, indeed austere view of life; he could never experience pleasure without a sense of remorse.” As we will see he was later said to have a stern or monk-like demeanor. Earnest, driven, intellectual, Durkheim was throughout his career a workaholic. None of his much younger students could match him when it came to putting in long hours or meeting exacting deadlines.
Durkheim was a standout school student who was admitted to the École normale supérieure (ENS) in 1879. Far more prestigious than the best-known French universities, the so-called grandes écoles are the breeding ground for the intellectual, political, and administrative elites of France’s centralized and technocratic society. The ENS itself has long remained the destination of choice for those intending to become thinkers or professors (other grandes écoles focus specifically on those destined for different leadership roles – say in politics, public administration, or engineering). Entrance takes place through fiercely competitive exams (indeed Durkheim was not admitted at his first attempt) that reward precocity and élan. The best students will typically do things like argue the examiner is asking the wrong question, engage in virtuoso answers that twist the concepts in the question around each other to reveal an unseen paradox, or expose contradiction and false choice between alternatives. We find echoes of this approach in the mature written works of more recent graduates like Derrida, Foucault, and Bourdieu, as they refuse the conventional terms of debate and establish new ones of their own choosing. Durkheim’s later writings show he was a master of such techniques as he wrong-footed readers and challenged their common sense.
Figure 1 Durkheim and his schoolmates, Épinal, c.1874. Durkheim is standing second from the right with his left arm casually resting on a friend’s shoulder.
Perhaps not surprisingly given his serious nature, the young Durkheim was impressed by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), the German atheist philosopher who took a grim view of life as a realm of pointless suffering. This may have inclined Durkheim toward later studies of suicide and anomie. Yet whereas Schopenhauer suggested a temporary consolation for this-worldly misery could be found in the aesthetic realm, Durkheim much later located a solution to meaningless existence in social ties and collective belonging. During his time at the ENS Durkheim was considered by his peers as serious and stern, as intellectually brilliant, and as a good debater by virtue of both reason and passion. His cohort was, however, very strong and Durkheim although above average was by no means the most promising student at this young age. We get a sense of this earnest young man and the intense interactions he would have had with his peers in an ENS class portrait (see figure 2).
Commentators agree that an important proximate influence at the ENS was the director, historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–89). Fustel de Coulanges’s most famous book The Ancient City, published in 1864, was considered to display a great mastery of French prose style. It explored the interplay of religion, morality, and law in Ancient Rome and showed how these were interlinked and had evolved in parallel. There are clear intimations here of the functionalist view of connected institutions that Durkheim would later espouse. Moreover the mode of analysis was detailed, empirical, almost ethnographic, and hence marked the “dividing point” between the “systematic comparative study of primitive institutions” that would follow in the twentieth century and approaches characterized by “speculative and dogmatic treatises” from the likes of earlier social philosophers “Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon and Comte” (Evans-Pritchard 1960: 11). Themes of The Ancient City were to become core to the work of Durkheim and it is no accident that the Division of Labor (discussed below) had extensive discussions specifically on Roman law. Durkheim, like Fustel de Coulanges, also argued for the religious origins of social institutions.
Figure 2 Durkheim and the class that entered the ENS in 1879. There is some uncertainty as to the exact year this image was taken. Durkheim is standing on the right of the group. It is telling that even at this age he seems serious and formal when compared to his peers
When it came to normative issues, Fustel de Coulanges insisted on the separation of scholarly work from politics and on the need for intellectual production to be autonomous from immediate contemporary necessities even if there were points of intersection. This model was in many ways similar to that more famously advocated much later by Max Weber in his vision of science as a vocation. True enough, Durkheim was to address his works toward the problems of France in his day, but with the exception of his pamphlets during World War I, this policy orientation was very indirect. When it came to “real-world” issues he was less interested in advocacy and detail than in pointing to general problems in modernity that needed to be addressed. He would also suggest a direction of travel with solutions recommended on the basis of his scholarly inquiries.
On exit the students of the ENS are ranked. Durkheim graduated seventh in philosophy (frequently mentioned) but second from bottom in the class (less often noted) of 1882. Illness had interfered with his preparation. However, the ENS had performed its leader-training function well in Durkheim’s case. It reinforced his patriotic commitment to France and the need for reforms that would generate a truly modern nation with a priority given, as Fournier (2005: 49) puts it, to “democracy, secularism and science.” There was no sign of Schopenhauer’s fatalistic nihilism. The future intellectual giant had emerged as a young man dedicated in a positive way to centering the Third Republic (1870–1940) on a moral commitment to core civic values. Although not an active political figure, throughout his adult life Durkheim believed strongly in these Republican ideals, in the need for national unity and a collective moral compass. His writings on professional ethics (see next chapter), for example, drive home this point time and time again.
During his years at the ENS and immediately after, Durkheim also completed his intellectual formation with extensive philosophical reading. He shifted toward a distinctive concern with society and societal evolution. Of particular interest was Enlightenment thinking on social stages and typologies, and on collective belonging and the social contract. Hence Durkheim’s Latin thesis was on Rousseau and Montesquieu. He also read closely some of the major social thinkers of the nineteenth century who had considered social evolution, such as Saint-Simon, Comte, and Spencer. Such figures clearly primed Durkheim with an awareness of the importance of morality, solidarity, unidirectional change, and complexity in modern social life. However, he was to push back against these luminaries by arguing that their approach was too philosophical and speculative. In mapping out the task he would set for sociology Durkheim repeatedly stressed the need for an empirical discipline that would study the actual social world. All this was to seep through to his concern for social facts and his push for a generalizable body of knowledge and theory.
As in many early careers, there followed a series of teaching appointments here and there that sapped energy and that took the young scholar away from the centers of academic power and creative energy. These positions were not particularly fruitful intellectually as they required Durkheim to teach a standard national curriculum. In France a common model is for major intellectuals to write books and conduct research as part of their teaching. This time-efficient double dipping allows them to put together new material and explore ideas in seminar settings. Durkheim was to enjoy this luxury only later in his career. Initially he was teaching in prestigious high schools. A school inspector commended him in his notes for a serious but organized and clear delivery of material. It was in 1887 that things began to both settle down and look up. Durkheim married Louise Dreyfus. The marriage was to prove stable and companionate. As such it offered the ideal domestic platform for Durkheim’s later productivity. The same year he took up a position in Bordeaux, a major provincial city, teaching “social science and pedagogy” (note: sociology was not in the job description). Although Bordeaux was not Paris, Durkheim did not spend his time whining about not being in the center of things. Rather he took advantage of the adequately salaried post and a geographical location free of distractions to put his head down and push his career forward. Importantly the position had enough stature that he was finally able to develop his own lecture courses on topics of personal interest. In Bordeaux there began a very productive ten-year spell that would establish Durkheim’s reputation as a major intellectual. The year 1893 saw the publication of The Division of Labor in Society, his first truly significant work. We turn to this now and in so doing finally arrive at the years specified in the subtitle of this book. Although Durkheim wrote some items earlier than The Division of Labor that are of interest to specialists, it is with this publication that his mature thought emerged and his contribution to the history of social theory really begins.
The Division of Labor in Society
In The Division of Labor in Society Durkheim traced the evolution of social solidarity and morality. The first of these terms refers to a sense of collective identity, belonging, togetherness, fellow-feeling, and strength. The second refers to beliefs about what is right and wrong, valued, proper, and even sacred. The title notwithstanding, the book is mostly about social complexity and its consequences for culture and social regulation. It provides Durkheim’s clearest statement on the nature of modernity. He has a broadly positive outlook. Not everything was perfect but modernity could be improved and life could get better. His was a non-complacent but appreciative stance that detected growing freedoms and growing chances for self-actualization. As Frank Parkin (1992: 86) put it: “Against Marx’s messianic utopianism, and Weber’s counsel of despair, Durkheim holds out the fair prospect of orderly social change and steady moral progress.”
In The Division of Labor Durkheim surprises readers early on, not once but twice. From the title we are expecting a book about work, the economy, and industrial organization. Yet less than a dozen pages into the first chapter he writes:
We are thus led to consider the division of labor in a new light. In this instance, the economic services that it can render are picayune compared to the moral effect that it produces, and its true function is to create in two or more persons a feeling of solidarity. In whatever manner the result is obtained, its aim is to cause coherence among friends and to stamp them with its seal. (1947: 56)
So the book is about intangible things like emotion, morality, and solidarity. By the end of that first chapter Durkheim has moved on yet again and suggests we should spend a lot of time looking at punishment and the history of legal evolution. This, he argues, is because they make visible the collective morality in which he is interested: “Our method has now been fully outlined. Since law reproduces the principal forms of social solidarity, we have only to classify the different types of law to find therefrom the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it” (1947: 68).
Durkheim next observes that crimes are a shock and offend against the collective conscience. The term refers variously to shared morality, solidarity, and a sense of societal identity. Lukes (1973: 4) points out it has been tricky to translate. The French term conscience “is ambiguous, embracing the meanings of the two English words ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’. It fuses moral sensibility and the cognitive apprehension or awareness.” In the preface to his translation of The Division of Labor, the one we are using here for our quotations, George Simpson also notes the difficulty of the term. Explaining why he translates the French conscience as the English “conscience” he helpfully writes “a conscience for Durkheim is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations; it is not the rational organ that the term ‘consciousness’ would imply … Moreover, the moral character of the sentiments and representations in a conscience would seem to render my translation more in the spirit, as well as the letter, of the original” (Simpson in Durkheim 1947: ix). It is customary to agree with this choice while noting that a residuum of “awareness” or “self-awareness” or even “reflexivity” rests somewhere deep inside the term.
To return to the Division of Labor: Durkheim argues that if crime causes damage, then punishment is a way of healing the harm to collective sentiment caused by the criminal act. The social response to crime is emotive and moralistic. Crime “brings together upright consciences and concentrates them” (1947: 102). It results in moods of outrage and indignation and so “punishment consists of a passionate reaction” (1947: 85). In sum, Durkheim argues punishment is only superficially about changing the culprit or enacting deterrence. The real purpose is to unite society and stitch together the damaged moral fabric.
The case is the same with punishment. Although it proceeds from a quite mechanical reaction, from movements which are passionate and in great part non-reflective, it does play a useful role. Only this role is not where we ordinarily look for it. It does not serve, or else only serves quite secondarily, in correcting the culpable or in intimidating possible followers. From this point of view its efficacy is justly doubtful and, in any case, mediocre. Its true function is to maintain social cohesion intact, while maintaining all its vitality in the common conscience. (1947: 108)
Note the use of the word “function” in the last sentence of the quote above. Durkheim’s discussion of punishment is considered a gold-standard illustration of his functionalist theoretical armature. This interprets social life according to the role that parts play in sustaining the whole. We return to this theme below. While Durkheim argues that the root cause of the desire to punish and the social functions of punishment are everywhere the same, he also makes contrasts between simple societies and those in modernity. The former have harsh, spontaneous punishments that are visibly emotive and involve community participation. Vengeance is central to this repressive law. In modern societies the urge to punish is the same, but it is buffered by collective, specialized institutions, is less immediate and less cruel. There we find restitutive law with its focus on rights, on contract, on returning things to normal, and on bringing the individual back into society. Heated emotions still exist but they are somewhat controlled and cooled off. Something fundamental has changed in our culture and society with the movement to modernity.
By this point in Durkheim’s book we seem to have wandered a good distance from the “division of labor” that was in its title. But Durkheim has in fact been working backward from indicator to concept to origin to get to his explanatory target. For Durkheim, laws and punishments were visible markers (indicators) of hidden moral forces, these being a non-material social fact that could only be observed indirectly. If punishment changes then so has morality (the concept). Hence we can draw lessons from the study of law and punishment for understanding wider social, cultural, and moral change. And why did the nature of collective morality itself change? For Durkheim – finally we get there – the explanation (the origin) lay in the complexity that comes with the growing division of labor over history.
Durkheim asserts as the book goes on that in primitive societies people tend to do similar tasks to each other. There is little division of labor. This leads to an intense but undifferentiated sense of collective identity where people tend to think alike, value conformity, and even look alike (all of these now disputed or discredited claims, of course). There are “states of conscience which are common to all the members of the same society” (1947: 109). This is called by him mechanical solidarity. The term has long confused students as they associate modernity, not tribal life, with “machinery.” The meaning, however, is more akin to “automatic” or “direct.” In modern society, by contrast, people perform many functions. There is a greater respect for difference and individuality, as without this value pattern we would not be able to have a complex, mutually interdependent society. Values of tolerance come to the fore. This is a situation of “organic solidarity” (the metaphorical reference here is to differentiated organs in the body with different functions, the heart, lungs, etc.). The balance of repressive and restitutive law in a society lets us see the difference for ourselves.
With this shift from mechanical to organic solidarity there is also an increase in dynamic density. This refers to the number and frequency of interactions in a society, to mental stimulation, and to the size of groups. The emergence of organic solidarity permits a shift to a society with more dynamic density. The concept of dynamic density tends to be forgotten even by Durkheim scholars. It aligns with the materialist and positivistic interpretations of Durkheim more than does the image of a collective conscience, which has a clearer connection to cultural sociology. For example, there seems to be a deterministic undertow when he writes:
From the time that the number of individuals among whom social relations are established begins to increase, they can maintain themselves only by greater specialization, harder work, and intensification of their faculties. From this general stimulation, there inevitably results a much higher degree of culture … [People] move because they must move, and what determines the speed of this march is the more or less strong pressure which they exercise upon one another, according to their number. (1947: 337)
Durkheim eventually claims that the mutual dependency and higher dynamic density of interaction today make society potentially stronger even if it might initially appear more fragmented. This argument allows him to claim in the Division of Labor and elsewhere that expanding individual autonomy under modernity is not incompatible with a growing sense of social belonging, with rights, with a net expansion of the solidaristic collective conscience, and with the rule of contract. Or at least in theory: Durkheim’s vision was in fact of a modern world that has sometimes failed to live up to its potential and that was in crisis. There was too much anomie, poor organization, and dysfunction.
Book 3 of The Division of Labor tries to diagnose all this through a somewhat uneven treatment of “abnormal” forms of the division of labor. The anomic division of labor gets the most attention. This is associated with conflict between capital and labor, with strikes, and with economic failures. Industrial strife is linked to the problem of meaningless tasks for the worker: “Every day he repeats the same movements with monotonous regularity, but without being interested in them, and without understanding them” (1947: 371). For Durkheim a solution was to make individuals more aware of their part in the wider system and have knowledge of their contribution to the social whole. The employee needed to “keep himself in constant relations with neighboring functions, take conscience of their needs, of the changes which they undergo” (1947: 372).
The forced division of labor, the second problematic form he considers, arises when individuals have too little choice and where talents are not matched to tasks. Durkheim writes, “For the division of labor to produce solidarity, it is not sufficient, then, that each have his task; it is still necessary that this task be fitting to him” (1947: 375). What is needed is a system where individuals find a position appropriate to their faculties such that “social inequalities exactly express natural inequalities” (1947: 377) or, put another way, we have a kind of rationally organized occupational meritocracy. This cannot be the case where work is not freely chosen or is contractually unjust due to imbalances in wealth and power. Durkheim sees this as a matter of social justice. The solution to this morass was to do away with constraints such that reasonable ambition and talent could be rewarded and individuals can flourish.
In concluding, Durkheim also mentions “another abnormal form” but mysteriously fails to give it a catchy name. This is essentially one of poor coordination within the social system and often involves individuals not having enough work such that the “activity of each worker is lower than it would normally be” (Durkheim 1947: 392). As “solidarity depends very greatly on functional activity of specialized parts” (1947: 390) a lack of activity can generate a shortfall in solidarity. The image suggested but not quite filled out in the text is of inefficient workplaces and complacent bureaucracies where hands are idle, of phony make-work jobs, and of job descriptions that are too narrowly or poorly specified. An efficient division of labor in modernity involves the kind of continual and connected activity that is appropriate for contemporary forms of complex social organization with high levels of dynamic density. To anchor the point, Durkheim makes the kind of organic analogy that is typical of his functionalist logic as it reasons from the nature of the whole to the activity of the parts. Whereas the frog and the snake are simple animals designed to take long periods of rest, sometimes barely breathing and inert, the mammal is designed such that “its relational functions are ceaselessly necessary to each other, and to the whole organism, to such a degree that none of them can long remain suspended without danger to the others and to general life” (1947: 390–1).
In the original publication of the Division of Labor Durkheim did not give much attention to solving the problems posed by the abnormal forms. He simply made general comments about the need for meritocracy, appropriate coordination of functions, and improved solidarity. However, in the Preface to the Second Edition of the Division of Labor from 1902 (included in Durkheim 1947) he proposed a bold new plan (one that we also see in Suicide and in his writings on Professional Ethics and Civic Morals). Occupational groups were the answer. These were “a moral power capable of containing individual egos, of maintaining a spirited sentiment of common solidarity in the consciousness of all workers, of preventing the law of the strongest from being brutally applied to industrial and commercial relations” (1947: 10). Engaging in some historical sociology he suggests that the guild organizations of the Middle Ages offered an example of what could be achieved. If something like these could be brought back they would provide a secondary group between the individual and the state, and as such be “near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag them … into the general torrent of social life” (1947: 28).
Several themes stand out in the Division of Labor that are worthy of our attention insofar as they were to be trigger points for much critique, repair, and elaboration throughout the tradition. We will see these at several points later in this book.
We find Durkheim laying out his interest in morality and staking his keynote claim that society is integrated through sentiment. This perspective, which he articulated more forcefully than any other scholar before or since, stands in contrast to explanations of social order that foreground power, domination, or rational interests. Punishment, physical force, and compulsion only step up to the plate as a backup once morality has failed – and even this is as an expression of collective morality rather than a tool of brute domination. Put another way, this is an early if somewhat abstract argument for the centrality of “culture” and solidarity in social life. The example was later to be important for cultural sociology, structural functionalism, and systems theory as they attempted to understand how social action and social order could have non-instrumental bases.
Themes associated with
functionalism
are on display. This perspective tried to move beyond common sense and folk practitioner views. It insists that society is a “whole” or system with interconnected parts. Things happen to assure the survival or equilibrium of that whole with the needs of that whole pivotal to social process. For example, as we saw, punishment is not really about the offender; it is a ritual related to shared social needs to reproduce moral codes and repair the social fabric. People caught up in any particular situation don’t see this and would wrongly point to proximate rather than systemic origins, reasons, and causes (“He is a criminal. He has to be punished so he does not do it again!”). Such functionalist explanations are now seen as problematic as they not only downplay power, but also marginalize agency and struggle to cope with making sense of change (which is often explained via reference to some exogenous shock to a stable system). Internally to the Durkheimian tradition there has been a feeling among many that the functionalist logic in the
Division of Labor
does not really cut culture loose from social structure, insofar as there are functional homologies between social form, social needs, and collective belief. These problems were not well understood until the later part of the twentieth century. Indeed the functionalist element of Durkheim’s theory was to become central for much mid-twentieth-century thought in social and anthropological theory (see
chapter 3
). This element proved to be a powerful tool for explaining the seemingly inexplicable, such as pervasive witchcraft beliefs in African villages. However, the problems with functionalism were to dog later iterations of “normative functionalism” in the later twentieth century, especially when applied to western industrial societies (see
chapter 4
).
Even in this early work elements of a “cultural” Durkheim can be easily found (Erikson 1966; Garland 1990; Smith 2008a). He speaks of collective emotions and interpretations. Punishment is explicitly said to be a ritual that communicates and heals rather than a narrowly instrumental activity. The law is said to have a sacred force. Humans seem to be energized by solidaristic beliefs and collective emotions. For those wishing to argue that Durkheim’s last major work
The Elementary Forms of Religions Life
(discussed below) represented an epistemological break from a more deterministic and structural theoretical apparatus, these aspects of the
Division of Labor
remain a problem. Close reading and detailed reconstructions are needed, perhaps arguing that Durkheim failed to fully achieve what he set out to do.
In the
Division of Labor
there is a use of comparative methods to gain the analytic leverage that comes from looking to radically different social forms. This has been a hallmark of Durkheimian inquiry ever since, whether the context be civilizational contrasts or detailed case-study work on divergently organized institutions. Durkheim has, of course, been critiqued for simplistic or factually wrong accounts of the condition of mechanical solidarity. We now know that small-scale band societies of hunters and gatherers tend to favor reintegration and non-violent punishments. Indeed criminologists have looked to them for templates for benevolent criminal justice reforms involving shaming or community work. Be that as it may, over the years the use of ethnological materials has proven particularly important for theoretical inspiration in the Durkheimian tradition. Although later scholars (including Durkheim himself) made far greater reference to empirical details, accusations of misunderstanding, misreading, and oversimplification seem to go with the territory of interpreting other cultures at a distance.
The text features some of Durkheim’s most beguiling, intuitively appealing, but also fuzzy concepts such as “collective conscience,” “dynamic density,” “social currents,” and even “solidarity.” He used and defined these terms in many ways in his works. A substantial field of Durkheim scholarship exists in which individuals attempt to pin the concepts down, locate intellectual origins, trace changes in usage, or discuss problems of translation. Similar dense literatures exist in the study of other theorists. We might think, for example, of Marx on “alienation” and “species being” or Weber on his typology of forms of “power” – or should it be “authority”? In this particular book we have a lot of ground to cover and will leave such disambiguation to the expert literature.
Notwithstanding the possibilities for the
Division of Labor
to be read as a deeply cultural text about morality and the collective conscience, there is some instability. Although Durkheim sought to anchor social structure and solidarity in normative subjectivity, the words on the page often stress the rational, coercive, non-negotiable, or functionally and evolutionarily necessary characteristics of social organization in modernity. Moreover social structure seems to shape culture, morality, and belief in a somewhat unidirectional way as complexity builds into social organization (Alexander 2005). For this reason astute critics of the time such as Sorel (1895) saw the book as broadly consistent with Marxism and only lacking a thought-through model of social class dynamics. This impression of a structural thinker with a materialist evolutionary blueprint was reinforced rather than supplanted by Durkheim’s next book.
The Rules of Sociological Method
In 1894 Durkheim published four articles in the Revue philosophique. These were shortly afterwards brought together, corrected, and published with a preface in 1895 as The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim 1964). This has been widely interpreted as a manifesto for sociology as a discipline with its own field of expertise and its own set of conceptual resources. Sociology was to be ring-fenced from rivals philosophy and psychology by Durkheim’s insistence that only sociology could understand social facts, and social facts could only be explained by other social facts. Durkheim was successful didactically insofar as from the 1950s until the 1990s readings from the Rules were a feature of more or less every core course on methods in the undergraduate sociology curriculum. Moreover reference to social facts, such as trends in baby names, suicide rates, ethnic intermarriage shifts, and intergenerational social (im)mobility tables remain to this day a feature of introductory sociology lectures. They give a sense that there are vast collective patterns and forces, and that we individuals are not as sovereign as we may believe or wish ourselves to be. In a way then, the “social fact” was a brilliant meme that has paid off over the generations. But it is more than just a tag. It is also a way of seeing, or methodology. At the heart of the Rules is what Robert Alun Jones (1999: 1) sees as Durkheim’s commitment to “social realism … that social phenomena should be studied
