Durkheim, Morals And Modernity

Willie Watts Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135366674
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Theory

Thorough and wide-ranging examination of the science of morals, reviving and defending the tradition of a scientific approach to ethics. Engages with recent debates on modernism and morality, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of Durkheim's ideas. This book is intended for social and political theory, philosophy of science and Durkheimian studies within sociology, philosophy and politics.

Part I

“America”

Chapter One

Developing a moral science

Durkheim's early work is of considerable interest. Apart from his two theses, it consists of reviews, articles and lectures, including his inaugural lecture of 1887 in a new appointment in social science at the university of Bordeaux. The best place to start is with his preoccupation with "real" man.

Real versus abstract man

Durkheim again and again describes the "real" man, usually in an attack on "abstract" man. In his inaugural lecture he says:

The real man, whom we know and whom we are, is more complex; he is of a time and place, he has a family, a city, a country, a religious and political faith, and all these and many other concerns come together, combine in a thousand ways, cross and crisscross in their influence so that it is not at first sight possible to tell where one begins and another ends. ([1888a] 1970a: 85)

It is an argument about our social situatedness that connects with a number of other arguments, about solidariness, morality's roots in the real, and identity.

Solidariness is "the condition of social life" ([1886a] 1970a: 207), and "the very source of morality" (1893b: 10; t.415). Indeed, as attachment to one another and society as ends, it is morality, and only real man can be moral man.

"The ideal has no basis unless it keeps its roots in reality" ([1893b] 1902b: xxxix; t.34). Ethics cannot guide and perfect morals without a knowledge of reality: "The ideal constructed by it would otherwise just be a work of poetic fantasy, a purely subjective conception with no possibility of actualization in the world of facts, since with no relationship with them" (1888c: 274). The reality Durkheim has in mind clearly has to do with real man's social situation and situatedness. But it is also of interest to note his talk of "poetic fantasy" versus the "world of facts". It is the first expression of the theme of what we can imagine versus what we can will. Moreover, in an important article on German moral science, Durkheim was already beginning to define "facts" — including moral sentiments and aspirations—as things resistant to change at will (1887c: 44-5; t.72-3), a view articulated in the Latin thesis (1892a: 20; tf.41; 1.12), and again in The rules ([1895a] 1901c: 29; t.71).

This ties up with the argument about identity, since our identity is something basic that we cannot just change at will. The identity argument is itself very much tied up with attachment to one another as ends and our social situatedness, for it is all about ends that are constitutive of the self and part and parcel of who we are. It is a longstanding argument, going back to Durkheim's first publication: "The real man, the man truly man, is integrally part of a society which he wills as himself, since he cannot withdraw from it without degeneration and collapse" (1885a: 95). It is repeated in various forms thereafter, including in the discussion paper on moral facts: "To will a morality other than that implied by the nature of society is to deny the latter and, in consequence, oneself" ([1906b] 1924a: 54; t.38).

The identity argument is an important Durkheimian route, via real man, from "is" to "ought", and we shall have to return to it. Let us pursue, at this point, another question. Who or what is abstract man?

There are three Durkheimian candidates, and one of them might come as a surprise, since it is an oversocialized conception of man. Durkheim's long-running campaign for a sui generis social science certainly opposes attempts at biological or psychological reduction. But he is as much as anything against these because they are one-dimensional. He criticizes Gumplowicz for a similarly onedimensional account of the world of society, sealing it off from "the world of life" (1885c: 634). All along and from the outset, Durkheim is interested in how, in "life", the social, psychic and physical aspects of our existence interact, or even conflict. Indeed, a reason for talking, here, of the organic self is its resonance with this interest in the embodied self and the different facets of "life".

Durkheim is also against the invention of a single, world-historical man, as in stories of an unfolding World Spirit, In the German moral science article he attacks Wundt's belief in "one moral ideal which develops in all actual moralities; one humanity of which particular societies are merely the provisional and symbolic embodiments" {1887c: 141; t.121). He repeats the attack, only without mentioning Wundt, in The division of labour ([1893b] 1902b: xxxviii; t.33).

However, the main target of his campaign against abstract man is undoubtedly the idea of an unchanging, socially decontextualized, essential man. Sometimes he condemns particular theorists working with this conception. Sometimes he condemns them en bloc — "the philosophers", with their timeless ideal of "the person", or "the economists", with their belief in "the individual" as a natural, thoroughgoing egoist. What is his case against such model characters?

He accepts that abstraction has a role, but not that it licenses just anything. It must be based on observation and experiment ([1890a] 1970a: 220; t.38). It "consists in isolating part of reality, not in making it disappear"(l887c: 39; t.66). A possible response is that homo economicus, say, has such a basis. But this is to agree with Durkheim that an abstraction's value depends on its realistic credentials. A more radical response is that abstractions not at all claiming to be realistic can still have value if they generate successful predictions. Durkheim would have been unimpressed. His concern is with science as an understanding and explanation of the world, not as a magical, who-knows-why, predictive technique. He certainly objects to abstract man as part of an anti-sociohistorical, essentially deductive approach: the theorist does not stir from the study to investigate and discover how things are, but simply announces some axioms, then reasons from these how things must be ([1888a] 1970a: 84-5). Again, either it is conceded that models of man should pass an empirical, realistic test, or it is necessary to give a more radical and more problematic defence of not bothering with such tests at all.

Indeed, "rational reconstructions" deducing social life from the abstract individual are incoherent. The point is developed in The division of labour, and especially in the argument that all in the contract is not contractual. But the point had already been made in an early review. A contract does not arise in a void and create something wholly new. It assumes and is itself created and regulated by an already existing society. It is "a spontaneous adaptation of two or more individuals to each other, in conditions determined by the social and physical milieu in which they find themselves placed"(1886b: 662). It can be added, if it needs to be added, that, just as the contract is made as a convention of a real, historical, already existing society, so the contracting individuals are themselves already real, flesh and blood, highly social characters. "Rational reconstructions" are incoherent because the contracts between abstract individuals from which they attempt to derive social life already smuggle in and presuppose it.

In sum, Durkheim builds up a powerful case against abstract man. But there are also problems with real man, and let us now examine them.

One shows up in The rules. Durkheim criticizes the "nominalism" of historians and, somewhat confusingly, the "extreme realism" of philosophers ([1895a] 1.901c: 76-7; t.108-9). What is going on? The trouble with emphasizing real people and their very different social situations is that it might rule out the very idea of a comparative social science. This must steer clear of the abstract sands of philosophers, concerned only with the general and universal. It must do so without heading straight for the concrete rocks of historians, concerned only with the detailed and particular. Durkheim sees and seeks to avoid the difficulty long before The rules, in his inaugural lecture.

He tackles the view, common amongst historians, that the circumstances of social life are so complex, variable and diverse that they "resist all generalization" and "do not lend themselves to comparison" ([1888a] 1970a: 81). He sees history and sociology not as rival but as distinct and complementary disciplines. Sociologists need to draw on detailed evidence, while historians need a more general view to sift through it and to ask "the questions which limit and guide their researches" (ibid.: 108). In suggesting what this more general view might be, Durkheim accuses Comte of working with an abstract idea of society, as if, at bottom, there is only a "single social type" (ibid.: 88-9). He praises Spencer for his interest in "distinguishing different social types" (ibid.: 93). Durkheim himself always insists on a comparative social science that seeks to understand particular societies through important characteristics that they share and that differentiate them, as a type, from others. The idea of the normal is bound up with this, and it is unDurkheirnian to define the normal in terms of a particular, individual society. He makes clear in The division of labour that a whole society can be in some way deviant compared with others of the same type (1893b: 34; t.432), and in a famous footnote sees England as in certain respects abnormal compared with Europe ([1893b] 1902b: 266, n.4; t.282, n.30). Perhaps, in other respects, it is a pathological case today.

It is consistent with all this that he still recognizes and indeed looks for things that are very general or even universal, such as "the formation of the conscience collective, the principle of the division of labour", etc. ([1886a] 1970a: 214). Or as he says in the Latin thesis: "just as all societies, however different, have something in common, so there are certain laws found in every society" (1892a; 29; tf.53; t.22). But the point is made in a context emphasizing how much laws, morals and so on vary between social types. The same is true when he says in The division of labour: "it is a fundamental duty everywhere to ensure the existence of one's country." This comes in the middle of a long argument driving home sociohistorical variation, and is to contrast earlier societies with our own. They could not have survived if they had had "the respect for individual dignity which we profess today" (1893b: 21; t.423).

It is misleading to take the claim about duty to one's country out of context, to claim that the "early" Durkheim is a universalist rather than a relativist in his ethical theory (Wallwork 1972: 164). Durkheim — "early" or "late" — is both, always recognizing moral universal while always emphasizing every social type's own morality. The most important statement of his ethical theory, the course on moral education, analyzes duty and the good as moral universals while emphasizing autonomy as an aspiration of the modern human ideal.

Indeed, the contrast Durkheim himself wants to make, between traditional demands of duty towards one's society and the modern demand of "respect for individual dignity", takes us to another problem for real versus abstract man. It concerns the content of the modern conscience collective, which, as Durkheim announces in The division of labour, is this ethic of respect for individual dignity. It is an ethic, as he repeatedly says, of the individual in general, in the abstract and as man. Yet he repeatedly criticizes abstract man. So how can he defend and attack the selfsame thing?

It is again unpromising to divide Durkheim up into "early" and "late", or in this case the "very early" and "not so late". The main ideas of The division of labour were in place many years before its publication, as we know both from 1Durkheim's own lectures and from the testimony of his student and nephew, Marcel Mauss (introduction to [1928a] 1971d: 27; t.32). Part of the answer is to distinguish support for the human ideal's version of abstract man from attacks on the moral cripple, homo economicus. The fundamental answer is that Durkheim defends moral individualism on methodologically holist, sociohistorical grounds, and attacks its deduction from man as a methodological axiom-cum-atom. As he says in The division of labour, the ethic of the individual draws all its force from society ([1893b] 1902b: 147; t.172), and in a later article: "individualism is itself a social product, like all moralities and all religions" ([1898c] 1970a: 275, n.l; t.70, n.4).

There is a snag, to do with the arguments about situatedness and identity and how they are connected. In an article of 1887, a statement of one argument leads on, in the same page, to a statement of the other:

The real and concrete man changes along with the physical and social milieu which envelops him, and morality, completely naturally, changes with men . . .

The individual is integrally part of the society into which he is born; this penetrates him from all sides; to withdraw and isolate himself from it is to diminish himself. (1887a: 337)

The two arguments more or less merge in a review of Alfred Fouillée:

the milieu in which [the individual] acts, the atmosphere which he breathes, the society which surrounds him, all this reaches into him, stamps, shapes and fashions him, without his seeing it, without his feeling it and above all without his complaining about it; for it is also that which constitutes the best part of himself. ([1885b] 1970a: 172-3)

This is Durkheim in full collectivist throttle. It can happen throughout his work, and the snag is that we cannot just assume that his identity argument can as readily accommodate "liberal" as other socially situated selves, or as readily attach us to a "liberal" as to any other social world. He does not at all come across, from the argument, as someone out to champion individual freedom. Yet this is what he is out to champion. The ethic of our place and time — stamping, shaping, fashioning, penetrating us from all sides, and to deny which is to deny the nature of our society and in consequence to deny ourselves — is an ethic of freedom. Just as the Revolution combined ideals of liberty and fraternity, the thesis of The division of labour is that the dynamic of the modern world makes for autonomy and solidarity ([1893b] 1902b: xliii-xliv; t.37-8). How does the thesis develop in Durkheim's early work, and how can a sociology of real man ground an ethic of abstract man?

Particular connexions, enlarged society and modern man

The inaugural lecture criticizes Spencer for just emphasizing modern freedom:

Individual freedom is always and everywhere limited by social constraint, in the form of customs, mores, laws, regulations. And, since in proportion to the growth in volume of societies the sphere of action of society increases at the same time as that of the individual, a legitimate complaint against M. Spencer is for having seen only one side of reality, and perhaps the less important. ([1888a] 1970a: 96)

The German moral science article criticizes Ihering for just emphasizing modern regulation:

With progress, the human person more and more emerges from the surrounding physical or social milieu and assumes a sense of a distinct identity; the freedom which is enjoyed increases at the same time as social obligations. Here is an obscure phenomenon, contradictory in appearance, and which, to our knowledge, has not yet been explained. Social progress has two sides which seem to exclude each other; therefore most of the time there is seen only one. (1887c: 54; t.84)

Take the passages together, and we have the thesis of The division of labour. Moreover, its underlying ideas must have been taught in Durkheim's first lecture course at Bordeaux, given his summary of that course in the opening lecture of the following year. Two very different types of society had been analyzed, involving two very different types of solidarity. "Mechanical" solidarity, as he had called it, is "due to the similarity of consciences, to the community of ideas and sentiments". "Organic" solidarity, as he had called it, is "a product of the differentiation of functions and of the division of labour". Strictly speaking, it can be said that the two types of solidarity have never existed without each other. But mechanical solidarity dominates life in primitive societies, where tradition and custom govern people's activities down to the last detail. In contrast, organic solidarity very much characterizes modern society. This "allows its members their independenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Durkheim's project
• Part I “America”
• Part II The kingdom and the republic
• Notes
• References
• Index