Emile Durkheim

Prof Kenneth Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134495351
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

This book examines Durkheim's considerable achievements and situates them in their social and intellectual contexts, with a concise account of the major elements of Durkheim's sociology. The book includes a critical commentary on the four main studies which exemplify Durkheim's contribution to sociology: The Division of Labour in Society; Suicide; The Rules of Sociological Method and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

1
Introduction

1.1 INTRODUCTION

There are many versions of the history of sociology, but most concur in placing its birth in nineteenth century France. Claude Lévi-Strauss, writing in exile in America at the end of the Second World War, may have been exaggerating only slightly when he said that modem sociology was born for the purpose of rebuilding French society after the destruction wrought by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Prussian War of 1870–71. The two Frenchmen who did most to create the discipline were Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in the aftermath of the Revolution, and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) after the Franco-Prussian War. Comte gave the subject its name and an ambitious prospectus; Durkheim gave it academic credibility and influence.

Despite its early birth, or because of it, sociology in France took a long time before it grew to anything remotely resembling the stature Comte predicted for it. Indeed, just as the British economy is said to have suffered from being the first to industrialize, so too French sociology was reckoned to have paid the price for its early birth. As Lévi-Strauss said, it suffered from the gap which existed, at the time of its birth, between the boldness of its theoretical premonitions and the lack of concrete data: “Comte’s sociology remained in suspense between its overwhelming ambitions and the frailty of its positive basis” [1].

One reason why Comte’s sociology remained in suspense until Durkheim’s time was that it awaited the outcome of the see-sawing balance of political forces in France that was not stabilized until late in the nineteenth century. For the hundred years that followed the Revolution of 1789 the society seemed to be in constant danger of swinging violently from revolution to dictatorship and back again. It was an external stimulus that precipitated a resolution of that uncertainty—France’s disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. After that experience there was a steady rise to ascendancy of the forces in France that advocated “modernization” based on science and secular republican principles. Only on that basis, it was thought, could France be strenghtened and unified to compete with Germany.

Durkheim was better placed than most to have learned that lesson and to profit from it. He was born in Epinal, near the German border, and his town was occupied by German troops during the war when he was twelve. He was also Jewish, and the defeat led to an outbreak of scapegoatmg antisemitism. Later, in the 1890s, when there was another outbreak of antisemitism surrounding the Dreyfus affair, Durkheim wrote recollecting his experience at close quarters of the way in which Jews had been blamed for defeats [2]. In view of those experiences it is not surprising that he should have put his faith in social science as the best means of combating irrational prejudices, reactionary privileges and customs, and as a source of national and rational unity.

The circumstances and character of Durkheim’s own education also fitted him to execute his mission of giving substance to the claims that Comte had made for sociology. Teachers such as Foustel de Coulanges and Émile Boutroux at the École Normale Supérieure introduced him to systematic empirical research and the comparative method, and taught him a philosophy of science that made sense of Comte’s assertion that sociology could have a legitimate subject-matter of its own. The liberal republicans who eventually rose to power in the Third Republic after the Prussian War, many of whom were ex- Normaliens, encouraged Durkheim in his mission. One such was Louis Liard, the Director of Higher Education, who sent Durkheim to Germany in 1885–86, with the special mission of reporting on the social sciences in Germany and of making recommendations that could be acted on in reforming and expanding French education [3]. Within a few years Durkheim and Durkheimian sociology were powers in the land, from the Sorbonne in Paris to the lycées of the most distant provinces. The village school-master, himself schooled in Durkheim’s sociological method, was to be found propagating sociology as an alternative to the preaching of the Catholic priest. Comte’s dream seemed to have been fulfilled. It was somewhat clouded by the First World War, in which many of Durkheim’s young collaborators, including his son, were killed. Durkheim never recovered from that setback and died shortly afterwards; there was a terrible irony in the fact that French sociology, which had been brought to maturity by the German challenge, should in turn be decimated by it. A full recovery did not take place until after the Second World War, but its survival was helped by the fact that Durkheim’s influence had spread to other disciplines, such as History, and to sociology abroad.

Another way of explaining the success of Durkheim’s sociology is to analyse it as a class phenomenon, along Marxist lines. It would be something of an exaggeration to say that sociology grew up in a “debate with Marx’s ghost”, in view of the fact that Durkheim did not regard Marxism as a scientific competitor for sociology, but rather as a symptom of the troubled state of society [4]. Durkheim was certainly not engaged in an ideological conflict with intellectual Marxism. And his engagement with socialism, as we will see later, was com- plex and sympathetic. There is more truth in the observation that educational patronage and ideological affinity and usefulness to the ascendent political and class faction helped to establish Durkheimian sociology in France. Even so, it would be cynical and inaccurate to elevate political opportuneness to the rank of main causal factor in explaining Durkheim’s success. Two other sorts of factors were at least as important. The first sort might be loosely termed “organizational” factors. They relate to Durkheim’s abilities as leader of an intellectual school, particularly his achievement in founding a superb scholarly journal, recruiting and knitting together a group of talented contributors, and drawing up programmatic statements that shaped the development of sociology in France and abroad. Secondly, and perhaps the most important factor in his success, there was the effectiveness of his own works in demonstating that he had developed an adaptable analytical method capable of being used in a wide variety of subject-areas.

Durkheim’s programme for sociology began to emerge in his very first publications, which were book reviews in the Revue philosophique, in 1885. Once again it is clear that the German challenge and example provided a major spur. In a review of Ludwig Gumplowicz’s Grundriss der Soziologie (Outline of Sociology) Durkheim lamented “how regrettable” it was that sociology, though French in origin, “should be so little known and so little followed in France”, and that it was becoming “more and more a German science” [5]. In his first publication, a review of A.Schäffle, Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers (Structure and Life of the Social Organism) [6], he praised those points that agreed with his own conception of sociology: the use of empirical methods to study social phenomena; sensitivity to the infinite complexity of the facts; the epistemological independence of sociology from biology; and an insistence on the specific reality of society as more than the sum of its parts, as a “real thing”, analogous to an organism. Where he disagreed with Schäffle, and with a predecessor like Herbert Spencer and his successors in American sociology, was over the relationship between the individual and society. Schäffle appealed to individual reason as the basis for social consensus and social cohesion. For Durkheim, as a social realist, any emphasis on individual reason and will was unsociological and unrealistic. Sociology, by his definition, was about social structuring and structural determinism. It was in this structuring, as for example in language, that Durkheim found the social facts that constituted the real subject- matter of sociology. As he put it in the review of Schäffle:

“There exists a social consciousness of which individual consciousnesses are, at least in part, only an emanation. How many ideas or sentiments are there which we obtain completely on our own? Very few. Each of us speaks a language which he has not himself created: we find it readymade” [7].

But it was not true, as some critics alleged, that Durkheim’s social realism and structuralism entailed a notion of a metaphysical “group mind”. He was talking about an interpenetration of individual consciousnesses by an exchange of symbols:

“But how are we to conceive of this social consciousness? Is it a simple and transcendent being, soaring above society? The meta-physician is free to imagine such an indivisible essence deep within all things! It is certain that experience shows us nothing of the sort. The collective mind (l’esprit collectif ) is only a composite of individual minds. But the latter are not mechanically juxtaposed and closed off from another. They are in perpetual interaction through the exchange of symbols; they interpenetrate one another. They group themselves according to their natural affinities; they co-ordinate and systematize themselves” [8].

This conception of consciousness structured by symbolic exchanges was elaborated at length with regard to phenomena such as religion and kinship in the later work of Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss, and it formed the basis of the structuralist method made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss. From an early stage Durkheim had this idea of developing a structuralist method which would penetrate and interrelate successive layers of the total social phenomenon. He envisaged a multi-layered model in which the most accessible surface layers of structure constituted a social substratum made up of material and organizational factors, such as geography, population, communication and transport facilities, architecture, group distribution and organization. But in being scientific, sociology would not stop at these surface layers, but go beneath them to disclose their relations with a deeper layer of social forces—“impersonal norms of thought and action that preeminently constitute the sociological phenomenon” [9]. It was a method that had been used unconsciously by some historians, said Durkheim, but it was the task of sociology to develop it and re-apply it in historical research:

“Instead of stopping at the exclusive consideration of events that lie at the surface of social life, there has arisen the need for studying the less obvious points at the base of it—internal causes and impersonal, hidden forces that move individuals and collectivities. A tendency to this sort of study has already been manifested by some historians; but it is up to sociology to increase consciousness of it, to illuminate and develop it” [10].

As a result of his closer acquaintance with German social thought, gained during his visit there in 1886, Durkheim was able to clarify his view of the basic articulation of these structured layers. In some respects it was similar to Marx’s structuralism, although Durkheim explicitly rejected contemporary charges that his sociology was little different from the “materialism” and “economic determinism” of Marx. He did admit that he had been introduced to Marx’s thought during his stay in Germany, but he said that he had already formed his main conceptions before this point [12]. However, on certain matters, and when he thought the evidence warranted it, Durkheim’s analysis was similar to that of Marx. For example, a core dynamic in Durkheim’s theory on a topic like that treated in The Division of Labour in Society, involved the crystallization of patterns of social relations under pressure from the environment, and the succeeding crystallization of moral and cognitive categories and norms from these patterned social relationships. The causal flow was from material substratum (for example, population density and density of interaction) via group structure (for example, increased division of labour) to beliefs and norms (for example, the cult of the individual and contractual law). However, in addition to differing on many specifics, such as the importance of class conflict, Durkheim was much more insistent that causal connections ran in both directions between material substratum and mental phenomena. His objection to what he saw as Marx’s economic determinism was that it was unscientific in assuming that certain factors had causal pre-eminence when that could only be a hypothesis. Causal relationships between different layers of social phenomena could only be established by empirical investigation in each specific case [13].

Durkheim’s ideas did not develop in association with political activity. He had little taste for what he called “la cuisine politique”, the world of day to day politics. He was concerned about politics in the sense of long-term social trends and the moral bases of social action. But he believed such matters should not be left to political dogma and trials of strength. The vocation of sociology was to subject these matters to empirical investigation. That activity could best be carried on in institutions devoted to scholarship and the results disseminated through scholarly publications. In addition to establishing sociology as a university discipline, he secured wider influence for it through the journal he founded, L’Année sociologique. In fact, it was more than just a means of disseminating ideas. It functioned as Durkheim’s version of the research institutes he had seen and admired in his investigation of German social sciences. From its first appearance in 1898, the journal was used as ...