Durkheim Reconsidered

Susan Stedman Jones

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745616162, 9780745616155
• eBook ISBN: 9780745668628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Durkheim is one of the founding fathers of modern sociology and a key figure in the development of social theory. And yet today his work is often misunderstood, since it is commonly viewed through the lens of later authors who used his writings to illustrate certain tendencies in social thought.

Durkheim Reconsidered challenges the common views of Durkheim and offers a fresh and much-needed reappraisal of his ideas. Stedman Jones dismantles the interpretations of Durkheim that remain widespread in Anglo-American sociology and then examines afresh his major works, placing them in their historical and political context. She emphasizes Durkheim's debt to the socialist and republican thought of his contemporaries - and especially to Renouvier who, she argues, had a profound influence on Durkheim's approach.

This book will be recognised as a major reinterpretation of the work of one of the most important figures in the history of sociology and social thought. It will be of great interest to scholars and students in sociology, anthropology and related disciplines.

1

Questions of Interpretation: Sociology contra Durkheim

Durkheim, who died in Paris in 1917, was a republican philosopher, a self-proclaimed rationalist and socialist; yet he is taken as the apostle of conservative thought as well as the most unphilosophical scientism, empiricism and positivism in the social sciences. Of the triumvirate of thinkers who are regarded as the founding fathers of sociology, neither Marx nor Weber has received more opprobrium than Durkheim. He has, it would appear, committed every sociological sin: he is concerned with consensus, and has no theory of conflict or of power; he has a static view of society, with no theory of social change; he has no theory of agency and no conception of the problems of meaning and interpretation; he has little or no conception of the individual and individual consciousness; and, as the architect of sociological positivism, he is the principal author of what has been characterized as a crisis of irrationalism in the human sciences. The name ‘Durkheim’ now evokes all that must be avoided in sociology, and has become like a billboard which is so pelted with missiles that the original message is obscured. The attempt to uncover this is my task in this book.

Sociology has its own oral tradition, and it is in this that Durkheim’s name has been particularly blackened. The process is fed by pre-university courses and by introductory texts. An example of this is Bilton et al. (1981), where Durkheim is presented as an ‘organicist positivist’ whose view of science, which is ‘crudely positivistic’, comes from Comte (Bilton et al. 1981: 691, 702). Organicism, based on an analogy with a living organism, is held to be tied to functionalist explanation, where the elements are explained by the role they play in the functioning of the whole (ibid. 704). Functionalist explanations alway require equilibrium mechanisms; in this way Durkheim, like other functionalists, avoids historical explanations and stresses order and integration (ibid. 713–15). So organicism leads directly to social order, for conflict cannot be allowed between component parts, and a high degree of integration and coordination is regarded as ‘normal’. The primacy of value consensus ‘cannot be overemphasized’ for, like other organicists, Durkheim considers society as primarily a ‘moral order’, that is constituted by institutionalized norms and values (ibid. 701).

In another textbook, the external and constraining nature of social facts for Durkheim is held to confirm his organicism and holism; his concept of constraint is said to be central to his functionalism, and is opposed to conflict theory. His view of structure is viewed as opposed to action, meaning and, for Giddens, agency (1989: 720–3). This continues a longstanding criticism that Durkheim’s objectivism – seen in the externality of social facts – rejects the subjectivity of the individual (Tosti 1898).

It is not only textbooks which express such views; we find them also in recent commentaries. Lehmann’s Deconstructing Durkheim sees him as a conservative patriarch whose conservatism is tied to his positivism and whose ‘uncompromising’ organicism (1993: 8) is central to his social ontology and entails his determinism (ibid. 45). His view of constraint is evidence of holistic determinism (ibid. 55), as are his concepts of externality, force and thing. In maintaining that for Durkheim the individual is ‘impotent’ in face of society as a ‘natural entity’, Lehmann continues the critiques that have stemmed from Gehlke (1915) and continued through ethnomethodology that he ignored the role of the individual as an active cause of social phenomena. His most distinguished commentator claims that Durkheim has ‘an absolutist conception of knowledge’ which misses the ‘essentially meaningful character of social interaction’ (Lukes and Scull 1984: 23). Further, in books focusing on other topics, asides are thrown at Durkheim which are equally condemnatory: ‘Durkheim modelled his sociology on the natural sciences, thus violating hermeneutics’ (Meadwell 1995: 189).

These criticisms circulate widely, and form the basis of a thinking about Durkheim that can be called ‘vulgar Durkheimianism’, which is the distillation or worst-case analysis of what has been said about him in the history of sociology. It combines the concepts of system, order, morality, holism, functionalism and science. With this conglomeration of unreconstructed concepts, the main accusations against Durkheim have been made: he is a thinker who adapted the methods of the natural sciences to the study of society; he is a conservative in his concern for social order and moral integration in society; and his functionalism confirms his scientism and conservatism, just as his view of society is taken to deny the individual.

Is there anything wrong with these views? Are they not a fair distillation of his failures, and an accurate final judgement on the founder of the subject? Whilst I will show in the next two chapters how various views that have been ascribed to Durkheim are contradicted by his own statements, and in the subsequent chapters offer new light on Durkheim’s theoretical positions, here I will just indicate some of the problems with these views. Accusations centring on his organicism ignore his rejection of biological explanations in sociology: to call society an ‘organism’ is ‘an aphorism’ which alone does not establish a science (Durkheim 1885a: 1.373). And why should an unreconstructed organicist argue that, with society, the organism ‘spiritualises’ itself (1893b: 338/284)? If society is really a ‘natural entity’ which renders us impotent, why is it ‘irreducible’ and how can Durkheim argue that through social forces ‘we rise above things’ to deprive them of their ‘fortuitous, absurd and amoral character’ (ibid. 381/321)? If his holism is really incompatible with freedom, agency and the individual, why does he reject those views which overemphasize cohesion to the exclusion of liberty (1892a: 14), argue that the individual is the only active element of society (1898b: 43n./29), and hold that ‘freedom of thought is the first of freedoms’ (1898c: 269/49)?

If his view of externality really is incompatible with the subjective nature of social reality, why does he hold that externality ‘is only apparent’, and argue for internality (le dedans) (1895a: 28/70)? If social facts really are ‘hard data’ which exist without reference to meaning, why does he hold that social life is made ‘entirely of representations’ and that this indicates the role of mind (ibid. xi/34)? If constraint is central to a functionalism which denies conflict, why does he characterize the constraining division of labour by the ‘war of the classes’?¹ And if his functionalism ignores the historical and change, why does he deal with ‘historical development’ (ibid. 94/123) and talk of the ‘free currents’ of social life (ibid. 14/58)? And if he really ignores all questions of hermeneutics, why does he argue that interpretation is possible and associate it with type and ‘species’ (espèces) (ibid. 89/119)?

Interpretations are complex, they consist not only of what has been said, but also of what has not been said. Lukes in his magisterial intellectual biography has done much to set the record straight. And other commentators (Giddens, La Capra, Tiryakian and Pickering, amongst others) have demonstrated the rich complexity of his thought, and have insisted on the centrality of the conscience collective and of collective representation to his thought. But however much the sociological reading of Durkheim has improved, there are certain theoretical lacunae in these accounts which leave certain fundamental critiques unchallenged, and this remains the case despite new and interesting readings of Durkheim (by Gane, Pearce, Schmaus and Meštrović).

The continuing accusations show that there is still a deep confusion about his theoretical language, particularly over ‘force’, ‘thing’ and ‘ex-ternality’. This is one of the reasons why vulgar Durkheimianism remains theoretically, if not sociologically, fundamentally unchallenged. This is composed of the concepts of holism, positivism and scientism, functionalism, and determinism. The interrelation and apparent mutual implication of these is aided and abetted by the neglect of other concepts which affect their interpretation. This allows the development of a mythology wherein Durkheim has become a kind of monster who rules over a dead world of facts and things, the point of whose thought is to nail persons to social structure, to found a science on untransformable fact, and to endorse any order as morally right and authoritative. But, like Frankenstein’s monster, this Durkheim is constructed out of parts which come from diverse sources.

A fundamental source of misinterpretation is a tendency to read him through different and later theories. So the over-identification with Comte leaves Durkheim sharing his anti-individualism, authoritarianism and positivism. His overwhelming concern for order and moral consensus comes from reading him through Parsons. (Bilton et al. show the consequences of reading Durkheim through both Comte and Parsons.) The overly scientistic view of structure and function comes from equating Durkheim with Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. And of course there has been an enthusiastic structuralist reading of Durkheim which may entail as many pitfalls as a Parsonian reading. So in general we can say that Durkheim is judged by the company he is said to keep; in the history of the subject he founded, the great patriarch of the social sciences has found (like many a young girl) that it is easy to acquire a reputation, and very hard to lose it.

This dismal picture is reinforced by the particular location of Durkheim within what are seen as the antitheses of sociological thought: consensus versus conflict, holism versus individualism, structure versus agency, causal versus meaning-type accounts, and those based on transformative historical interest versus static functionalist accounts. In some cases these actually falsify Durkheim’s position; in others they obliterate the originality or complexity of his position. As a result of this, every retrogressive movement in sociology seems to claim Durkheim as its own, whilst every progressive movement claims him as its enemy.

However, these views can be directly contradicted by Durkheim’s own statements. An examination of these is the basis of the ‘critique of critiques’ which forms the kernel of these first two chapters. The way in which I propose to unravel the problems of interpretation is, first, to examine Durkheim’s location in types of sociological theory. This will not only call into question the established forms of classification of Durkheim’s thought, together with the dangers of reading him through later theories, but will also reveal those concepts which require examination together with certain problems in translation. Secondly, in chapter 2, I will pursue this question of interpretation by examining the concepts of order and of science which seem to sum up the ‘vulgar’ Durkheim.

The division of types of theory within the present conscience collective of sociology and its teaching practices is inimical to a proper understanding of Durkheim: he is identified with theories with which he has significant differences, and he is contrasted with those with which he has more similarity than is apparent.

The theories Durkheim is compared with: the differences

Structural functionalism

It is important to remember that Durkheim wrote before Parsons; but from the way Durkheim is viewed in sociology’s oral tradition, we have to conclude that although formally it is recognized that he died in France in 1917, he suffered a veritable rebirth in America! Paradoxically for a French thinker, this has become the dominant culture in the interpretation of Durkheim. Here he becomes a born-again conservative, not only by the perceived identification of him with the concerns of a particular form of structural functionalism, but also by the characterization of him imposed by significant thinkers within this movement.

Lukes has warned us that the sociologists’ Durkheim is strongly coloured by Parsons; consequently, for many sociologists the success or failure of Durkheim’s thought is judged in terms of that of Parsons and American functionalism. For this to be fair, there would have to be an identity between the central concepts of the two systems that I suggest is fundamentally lacking. Just as Parsons has no theory of conscience, conscience collective or collective representation, so Durkheim lacks the Parsonian conception of the functional prerequisites of a system, a concern with latency, equilibrium and the problem of social control, and the study of actors in terms of deviance and conformity – yet Parsons associates these terms with Durkheim (Parsons 1937: 376). Is Durkheim’s view of constraint and sanction the same as social control? To identify them is to presuppose the meaning of sanction, to gloss over the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate constraint, and to ignore the possibility of a dialectical tension between structure and agency in Durkheim’s conception of sanction.

Durkheim might well agree with Parsons that society is ‘essentially a network of interactive relationships’ (Parsons 1951: 51). However, whatever his intentions were, Parsons’s stress on ‘the system’ makes it sound like an invisible fish tank in whose transcendent interests the fish swim. In so doing, he has bypassed what for Durkheim is the crucial logical access to society – representation. The conformity with role expectations and the integration of a common value system is the dynamic of a social system for Parsons (ibid. 42), whilst the search for justice and the need to make a morality are central to the dynamic of modern society for Durkheim (1893b: 406/340). But, according to Gouldner (1970), morality means integration and conformity for Parsons, a view he also ascribes to Durkheim.

For Parsons there is no theory of solidarity in the same sense as there is for Durkheim; his minimal reference to solidarity is subordinate to ‘the collective orientation of roles’ (1951: 96–101). Solidarity for Durkheim is not necessarily the same as value consensus is for Parsons, and rather than integration being his dominant problematic, he is clear that it is only possible through the full realization of solidarity – which is compromised by injustice and inequality. Reading Durkheim through Parsons (or a particular view of him) has had the effect of passing over his concern with questions of individuality, sociality and moral relatedness in historical forms of solidarity, and thereby replacing them with questions of systems, stability and integration. This is to turn what for Durkheim is achievable into the achieved, and the concern for the social and historical possibility of morality and social relations into the concern for normative integration within the present system.

Gouldner (1970) blamed Durkheim for the pall cast over sociology through the concepts of function, system, order and integration, which are central to structural functionalism. Durkheim is the source of its obsession with unitariness, for ‘The parts only take on significance in relation to the whole’ (ibid. 198). On the contrary, for Durkheim, ‘A whole can only be defined in relation to the parts which form it’ (Durkheim 1912a: 49/33). He rejects precisely the kind of holism ascribed to him by Gouldner. There is no ‘objective unity’ to such a ‘heterogeneous whole’ (1903c: 1.132). There is both ‘unity and diversity’ in social life (1912a: 591/417). Unlike Comte, Durkheim insisted that diversity is not pathological, but an essential part of modern society (1928a: 222/237). There is a tension in his thought between individuality and sociality, which is expressed in the relation between different forms of individualized and collectivized consciousness – conscience particulière and conscience collective – both of which are states of mind, but With different roots.

Because of this ‘unitarianism’, Gouldner believes that Durkheim cannot deal with the potency and functional autonomy of the individual: he obliterates the individual (who is a ‘tool’ of the conscience collective) in his concern for social order (1970: 196). This neglects, first, Durkheim’s argument that ‘as societies become more vast ... a psychic life of a new sort appears. Individual diversities become conspicuous ... individuals become a source of spontaneous activity’ (Durkheim 1893b: 339/285). Secondly, it overlooks Durkheim’s logical pluralism, which is central to all wholes: wholes are not suggests. ‘One cannot following idealist and theological metaphysics derive the part from the whole, since the whole is nothing without the parts which form it and cannot draw its vital necessities from the void’ (1898b: 44/29). These considerations make a difference to the type of integration which is ascribed to him, for this implies a conception of unity. Alpert argues that Durkheim’s conception of social integration centres on unity – for Durkheim society is a unity, and ‘not a mere plurality of individuals’ (Alpert 1941: 2.29). But for Durkheim wholes are relational and founded on pluralism. ‘All of social life is constituted by a system of facts which derive from positive and lasting relations established between a plurality of individuals’ (1893b: 329/277).² How can there be a unity which is compatible with logical pluralism? A positive answer to this question means that there can be a real interdependence at the social level which is incompatible neither with the heterogeneity and ‘difference’ of phenomena nor with the autonomy of the agent: thereby integration does not require subordination for Durkheim.

So, thirdly, Gouldner overlooks Durkheim’s insistence on the plural nature of the conscience collective, and that it cannot be ‘hypostatised’ (1895a: 103/145). Durkheim argues that we have two ‘consciences’, and whilst one is collective in type, the other represents our personality (1893b: 74/61). We are not ‘tools’ of the conscience collective – for, as we will see, the latter is compatible with the freedom and individuation of the ‘particular conscience’ (conscience particulière).

This dismal picture of the consequences of Durkheim’s holism is compounded when it is combined with a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Questions of Interpretation: Sociology contra Durkheim
• 2 Durkheim as Theorist of Order and Science
• 3 Understanding Durkheim in his Time: Historical and Political Considerations
• 4 Philosophy and the Republic: The Influence of Renouvier
• 5 Differentiation and the Problems of Modernity
• 6 Individualism and Socialism?
• 7 The Science of Facts and Things: Methodological Considerations
• 8 Society as the ‘Coefficient of Preservation’: The Question of Suicide
• 9 The Thinking State: Power and Democracy
• 10 Practical Reason and Moral Order: Morality and Society
• 11 Belief and the Logic of the Sacred
• 12 Final Reflections: Durkheim contra Sociology
• Appendix: Durkheim and Renouvier
• Glossary
• Biographical Sketches
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Page