Sociology and Philosophy (Routledge Revivals)

Emile Durkheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415557702
• eBook ISBN: 9781135174248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in English in 1953, this volume represents a collection of three essays written by seminal sociologist and philsopher Emile Durkheim in which he puts forward the thesis that society is both a dynamic system and the seat of moral life. Each essay stands alone, but their connecting thread is the dialectic demonstration that a phenomenon, be a sociological or psychological one, is relatively independent of its matrix.

The essays provide a valuable insight into Durkeheimian thought on sociological and philsophical matters and offer an excellent guide to Durkheim for students of both disciplines.

Introduction

BY
J. G. PERISTIANY

THE three papers collected and published together for the first time by Bougie in 1924 under the title Sociologie et Philosophic are discrete in form but integral in subject. Their connecting thread is the dialectic demonstration that a phenomenon, be it a psychological or a sociological one, is relatively independent of its matrix. In this sense they could be styled Essays in Sociological Spiritualism.¹ Durkheim puts forward the thesis that society is a dynamic system and the seat of moral life. It is neither a mechanical robot nor an organism limited by the structure and function of its organs and the possibilities of its environment. Nor is Durkheimian society, as some of his interpreters and traditori would have us believe, a system of organs and functions which tends simply to maintain itself against external causes of destruction, like a living organism whose entire existence would be spent in responding in an appropriate manner to external stimuli² or to utilitarian needs.³

Many of the problems which these papers discuss are present in contemporary thought.⁴ It is, perhaps, the sign of a virile mind that it is able not only to invest with an air of novelty the perennial problems with which it has come to grips, but to mark them in such a way that its impress shows clearly through the outworn conceptual framework. These papers I found invaluable for clarifying Durkheimian thought at a number of Oxford and Cambridge seminars of which Mr. D. F. Pocock was a most active member. His lucid translation has overcome many of the problems which face the translator of Durkheim. Most of Durkheim’s work has now been translated into English. The publication of the present volume coincides with an increasing interest in the sociology of values, and it will be welcomed by those interested in the development of sociological thought.

If I were asked what I believe to be the basic problems of Durkheimian sociology and therefore the true guides to his thought, I would answer: The relation between Average, Normal and Ideal, and his conception of Creative Synthesis. The first delimits the subject matter of sociology, the second provides the main indices to the Durkheimian social system. The two problems are inseparable. They arise from a certain conception of the subject; they are part of the same methodology.

I. AVERAGE, NORMAL AND IDEAL

The question of the relation between Average, Normal and Ideal is implicitly referred to or directly discussed in most of Durkheim’s work.¹ This is not to say that its formulation is clear or its terminology consistent. I shall therefore try to draw the threads together.

The Durkheimian individual is a homo duplex, both I and We. This is a polarity, not an antithesis, which is deeply rooted in his conception of society and of its moving forces.

Since his earliest writings Durkheim, a student of Wundt and Ribot for a time, showed great deference for psychology when it was confined to its own, that is to the individual, field. But when social phenomena were interpreted in psychological terms as a means to crossing the threshold between the two fields Durkheim rejected this device as methodologically unsound. Whatever the theoretical attitude of the sociologist, the fact remains that the individual is the active agent of culture.¹ What, then, should be the sociologist’s attitude towards his behaviour? Should the sociologist study ‘dyadic relations’ and individual attitudes? Should he construct a mean based on the behaviour of the majority of individuals and then evaluate the normality or the desirability of individual conduct with reference to this mean? To transpose the question: Is the ‘social type’ coterminous with the conduct of the majority of individuals, and may values and sanctioned social norms be inferred from them? I believe that an answer to some of these questions would not only further our understanding of the subject matter of Durkheimian sociology and throw light on his conception of collective representations, but might also help us to clarify and define our attitude to these problems.

Here it is necessary to proceed with caution and to clear the ground step by step, since Durkheim’s terminology and approach have given rise to many misunderstandings concerning his hypostatization of social phenomena.

In his study of suicide Durkheim criticizes Quetelet for explaining the regularity of certain modes of behaviour associated with each society by postulating an ‘average man’, that is, a personality type characteristic of each society and reproduced by the majority of its individual members. Knowledge of this type is gained by a reversal of the process to which is attributed the regularity of the forms of individual behaviour. The personality type is reflected in the mean. Mean and prototype are one.

What, then, is Durkheim’s own attitude to the question of social uniformity and of the individual’s role in its formation?

In Règles Durkheim suggests that a sociological phenomenon may, with regard to its generality, assume two forms.¹ Some are ‘general’ in the whole extent of the species; they are found, if not in all, at least among the majority of ‘individuals’. Variations are confined between two proximate terms.² The others are exceptional.³ Into the composition of the caverage type’ enter the characteristics the most frequent in the species under their most frequent form. It should, then, be possible to say that ‘the normal type is at one with the average type’, and that ‘any deviation from this standard of health is morbid’.⁴ Here frequency’ of a certain form of behaviour is equated with normality of this type of behaviour, and what is frequent appears to be not only a standard of normality, but also a standard of health. The statesman himself is advised not to plan for a better—an ‘ideal⁵—future society, but to maintain what is, if this is the general=average=normal=healthy state of society.⁶ This is the clinical approach of the physician who, in his diagnosis of the state of the organism he is treating, compares the condition of this particular organism to that of the average organism of the same age and sex, using the degree of frequency of that state as his standard of normality and health.

It is at first difficult to distinguish between Durkheim’s own method of constructing a standard of normality and the methods at which he levels such virulent criticism,¹ as both seem to use frequency of individual behaviour as their common standard of measurement. The concept with an ambiguous frame of reference is that of ‘general’. It may refer either to a single society or to a social type. When Durkheim refers to the characteristics of a social type the units of that type are societies and not persons. If the behaviour of the average individual had been the standard of generality and of social health, then crimes, suicides and acts of self-sacrifice would have been classified together, with respect to their frequency of occurrence, as exceptional and, with respect to ‘normality’, as morbid and undesirable. But crimes and suicides occur regularly in response to social forces acting within a social system. These qualities of constraint and regularity are among the main characteristics of social facts. They are as characteristic of ‘frequent’ as of ‘sporadic’ social phenomena. There is thus no doubt that crimes and suicides are social facts. These social facts are said to be normal and general for a social type when they occur in the average society of that type (considered at a corresponding stage of its evolution). Thus crimes and suicides, phenomena of rare occurrence in relation to the expectation of behaviour of the average individual within a certain society, are considered as general and normal for the social type to which this society belongs. The characteristic of generality refers to the occurrence of a phenomenon within the average society of a certain type, however small the numerical proportion of individuals performing this action within each society of this type. The rate of occurrence is also measured in each society of the type within which the phenomenon occurs, and a certain rate is said to be characteristic of each society of this type, the average rate for societies of this type being normal for this social type. When the term ‘general’ refers to the relation between a certain phenomenon and a certain society it concerns the frequency of the form, of the character, that the phenomenon assumes in this society. Thus the form of a certain phenomenon may be ‘general’ for a certain society if that is the form it most frequently assumes within it. The phenomenon itself, in relation to the behaviour of the majority of individuals, may be of relatively infrequent occurrence. A consideration of the characteristics of a number of societies serves to construct a comparative social type. At this, the comparative, level ‘general’ and ‘normal’ refer to ‘the occurrence of the phenomenon in the average of the societies of this species’. Thus the character of frequency attached to generality refers, at the comparative level, to the number of societies within which the phenomenon occurs, and at the level of a single society to the most frequent form which the phenomenon assumes within that society. I am underlining this point only because it may help us to understand Durkheim’s use of terms. For more practical purposes Durkheim’s assessment of normality¹ and desirability serves as a link between the two types of frequency.

It remains to be seen why ‘general’ and ‘normal’, in their comparative context, have come to be equated with ‘desirable’. A phenomenon which is general within a social type is characteristic of the unit within which it is observed. This constant association, this generality, is a manifestation of the regularity with which certain social forces operate within these societies.¹ This judgment (desirability) refers to the relation between a certain phenomenon and the conditions of existence of the social system within which it takes place, and not necessarily to the conformity of an action to a social norm. This existential judgment becomes a utilitarian value judgment when it marks the sociologist’s predilection for what is—which includes also the potentialities of what, ‘normally’, is to be—in preference to the politician’s blue-print, when this blue-print originates not in the study of social reality and of the trends inherent in it but in ethical considerations of what, a priori, ought to be. If a social phenomenon is general and normal for a social type, one cannot wish for the phenomenon to be other than it is without accepting the responsibility for altering the social system² and its conditions of existence. At this level of analysis desirability has a utilitarian connotation.

We may now pass to a more normative and less causal level of analysis, the relation between Mores and Ideals.³ Durkheim’s genetic and functional approach to this problem and his conception of the contingency of the higher forms of reality temper considerably his analysis of the deterministic relation between statistical sign and social forces.

If one could collect together ‘in a kind of abstract individuality the most frequent characters in a species under their most frequent form’,¹ one could say that this abstraction constitutes the normal type, and that this normal type is the object of the sociologist’s study.

I have assumed in my interpretation that ‘most frequent’ and ‘general’ refer, at the comparative level, to the occurrence of a phenomenon in the average society of a certain type, and that the form most frequently assumed by this phenomenon in a particular society of this type is general and characteristic of that society and a sign of the forces which operate within it.

The question, nevertheless, remains whether at a normative rather than at a causal level the student of a particular society woul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Half Title
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Translator’s Note
• Preface to the Original Edition
• I Individual and Collective Representations
• II The Determination of Moral Facts
• III Replies to Objections:
• IV Value Judgments and Judgments of Reality