Emile Durkheim

Sociologist and Moralist

Stephen Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415094375
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134869015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

International scholarship over the last twenty years has produced a new understanding of Emile Durkheim as a thinker. It has contributed to reassembling what, for Durkheim, was always a whole: a sociological selection on morals and moral activism. This volume presents an overview of Durkheim's thought and is representative of the best of contemporary Durkheim scholarship.

Part I
RELIGION AS FONS ET ORIGO

1
DURKHEIM AND LA CITÉ ANTIQUE

An essay on the origins of Durkheim’s sociology of religion

Robert Alun Jones

Durkheim’s sociology of religion can hardly be considered a ‘neglected area’ in the study of his thought. It is a concern of sections or chapters in every major study of Durkheim’s life and work (LaCapra 1972:245–91; Lukes 1972:237–44, 450–84), a favorite topic in the journalistic literature on the history of the social sciences (Isambert 1976; Jones 1977; 1981; 1986), and a central focus for edited volumes and monographs on Durkheimian sociology (Pickering 1975; 1984). Moreover, while these discussions frequently disagree on the precise nature, origin and/or significance of Durkheim’s ideas on religion, there is virtual unanimity on one specific point—that is, that Durkheim was profoundly influenced by La Cité Antique (1864), the classic work on the religion of Greco- Roman antiquity written by Fustel de Coulanges, under whom Durkheim had studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the early 1880s (Jones 1986: 621; LaCapra 1972:30, 197; Lukes 1972:60–3; Pickering 1984:56–8). The ironic parallel to this unanimity is the relative absence, within the same literature, of any detailed discussion of their intellectual relationship.

This essay is part of an ongoing effort to redress this imbalance between assertion and evidence. As such, it begins with a brief account of Fustel’s life and the social context of his work, and proceeds to a more detailed analysis of the ideas contained in La Cité Antique, noting agreements and disagreements with ideas later developed by Durkheim. The third section provides a still more detailed treatment of Fustel’s profound but ambiguous influence on Durkheim’s sociology of religion, particularly as this was revealed in Durkheim’s posthumous Leçons de Sociologie: Physique des Moeurs et du Droit (1950). Finally, the brief conclusion attempts to place this influence within the context of Durkheim’s other concerns, including the comparative method, the growing body of ethnographic evidence about primitive religions, the theories of Robertson Smith and James Frazer about religion, and the social origin of our ideas of civic duty and obligation.

FUSTEL DE COULANGES: BIOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL CONTEXT

Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges (1830–89) was born in Paris in the year of the July Revolution and the Barricades. Like his contemporary Ernest Renan, Fustel was of a Breton family. The early death of his father, a naval officer, left his education to his grandfather, and a family friend provided his support at the Lycée Charlemagne. At age 20, he entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he studied with the historians Duruy, P.A. Chéruel and J.-D. Guigniaut.¹ Appointed sublibrarian, Fustel hid himself in the stacks, reading Montesquieu, Michelet, Tocqueville and Guizot.² But his chief early inspiration came from Descartes: ‘Jules Simon explained Descartes’ Discours sur la mtthode to me thirty years ago,’ Fustel observed late in life, ‘and from that come all my works: for I have applied to history this Cartesian doubt which he introduced to my mind’ (Thompson 1942:363),

The early years of the Second Empire, however, were a period of political repression in the history of the Ecole Normale. The coup d’état of Louis Napoleon on December 2, 1851, was followed by the dismissal and even exile of some of the Ecole’s most distinguished teachers, and the new director attempted to suppress most non-classical studies.³ Like many of his contemporaries, Fustel turned to the study of Latin and Greek, then drifted into the history of classical antiquity. For all his Cartesian spirit, however, Fustel had already embraced the inductive method, writing an essay in praise of Bacon which shocked his fellow students (Thompson 1942:363–4).⁴ In1853, he joined the newly established Ecole française d’Athénes, moving to the Lycée Amiens in 1855, then to the Lycée St Louis in Paris in 1857. In 1860, Fustel was called to the chair of medieval and modern history at the University of Strasbourg, where his ‘vigorous and scholarly lectures’ produced ‘phenomenal success’ throughout the next decade.⁵

During his sojourn in Greece, Fustel collected a number of manuscripts which provided the foundations for his earliest publications, including his Mémoire sur I’île de Chios (1856),⁶ his highly praised French thesis, Polybé ou la Grece Conquise (1858),⁷ and his Latin thesis, Quid Vestae Cultus in Institutis Veterum Privatis Publicisque Valuerit (1858). The Latin thesis in particular anticipates La Cité Antique for, according to Fustel, the goddess Vesta symbolized that domestic, familial religion which became the official cult of the ancient city, and thus the first phase of Aryan civilization.⁸ But Fustel’s masterpiece remains La Cité Antique, written over a six-month period at Strasbourg in 1864, comprising lectures given the two previous years. Initially published at his own expense, the work quickly won Fustel a following at the court of Napoleon III and, by 1890, had seen its thirteenth edition. On the recommendation of Victor Duruy (the Emperor’s Minister of Public Instruction), Fustel was thus called to Paris in February, 1870, to give history lectures at the Ecole Normale, and an invitation to provide a special course to the Empress Eugénie, and her suite followed quickly thereafter.⁹

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Franco-Prussian War significantly altered the course of Fustel’s career, turning his interest from antiquity to what he perceived as his country’s national interest. In an open letter, he protested against the ‘religion of hate’ preached by the German pastors, and in a pamphlet written in reply to Theodor Mommsen,¹⁰ he defended the French character of Alsace on the principle of selfdetermination (Thompson 1942:367). More generally, in ‘La maniére d’écrire 1’histoire en France et en Allemagne’ (1872), Fustel sharply contrasted the historiography of the two countries. In Germany, Fustel observed, science is ‘a means to an end, and that end is the glorification of the fatherland,’ but in France, royalists disparage the Revolution and its consequences while republicans despise the ancien régime. ‘True patriotism,’ Fustel insisted, ‘is not love of one’s native soil, it is love of the past, respect for the generations who have gone before us’ (cited in Momigliano, [1970] 1982:329; see also Gooch, 1913:212–13). In short, Fustel called for a renewed respect for the prerevolutionary ancien régime as the foundation for French unity after the humiliations of 1870–1. ¹¹

As a direct extension of these nationalist concerns, in 1872 Fustel launched what G.P. Gooch called a ‘thunderbolt’ in the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes (1913:209). For more than a century, the central question for European social history had been the institutional origins of feudalism. Arising in Germany, the debate soon spread to France and gradually resolved into two fiercely defended alternatives, the first insisting that the origins of feudalism lay in Roman civilization, the second equally insistent that its origins were Germanic (Thompson 1942:360–2). By 1870, these two schools of interpretation, fuelled by the patriotic sentiments of their respective supporters, confronted one another in a precariously balanced opposition; and in ‘L’invasion germanique au Ve siècle, son caractére et ses effets’ (1872), Fustel ‘set himself to the task of demolishing the whole fabric of early medieval history created by the German School’ (Thompson 1942:362). The much-discussed Germanic invasions of the fifth century had ‘no direct influence on the history, religion, customs, government, or structure of [French] society. The barbarians brought with them nothing but confusion,’ as Gooch summarizes Fustel’s argument, ‘and their arrival simply favoured the development of the feudalism already existing in germ’ (Gooch 1913: 209),

The article created a sensation, and by 1874 had been expanded into a complete volume. Fustel hoped to follow this with a second volume on feudalism, a third on royalty and the States-General, and a fourth on absolute monarchy, bringing the narrative down to recent times. But the storm of criticism which greeted this first installment, and particularly the charge that it was more the product of Sedan than science,¹² led Fustel to abandon his original plan. Admittedly, like La Cité Antique, the first volume had presented Fustel’s conclusions rather than the detailed historical research on which these were based. Returning to the 1874 volume, Thompson observes, Fustel now ‘took the reader into his workshop’, not sparing him

page after page of criticism and exposition of individual texts; he lugged all his apparatus criticus out into the open. Each chapter grew to the dimensions of a volume, each page bristled with references and was sown with the marks of erudition…He convinced himself that his generation needed a lesson in historical method… By example and by precept he set himself up as the teacher and critic of the historiography of his time.

(Thompson 1942:368–9; see also Gooch 1913:209–10)

The result, which occupied Fustel for the rest of his life and was completed only after his death, was the classic Histoire des Institutions Politiques de I’Ancienne France (6 vols, 1873–93).¹³

The Histoire des Institutions Politiques is important for two related reasons. First, it was the project which literally consumed Fustel during the period in which Durkheim was his student at the Ecole Normale.¹⁴ Second, an essential element in the project was the detailed articulation of the method he had followed in writing La Cité Antique (1864), the same method employed by Montesquieu in L’Esprit des Lois (1734), and the method Durkheim would follow in De la Division du Travail Social (1893) as well. Essentially, as Fustel wrote to an admiring critic in 1865, this method relied less on the detailed accumulation of facts (something for which Fustel had no more patience than had Durkheim) in on rigorous comparisons (of the Rig-Veda with Euripides, of the laws of Manu with the Twelve Tables or Isaeus and Lysias) until he had arrived at the conception of a community of beliefs and institutions among Indian, Greek and Italic peoples.¹⁵ To these comparisons Fustel added a deeply Cartesian skepticism regarding secondary sources,¹⁶ a commitment to the careful examination of primary texts,¹⁷ an abhorrence of anachronistic analogies,¹⁸ and an utter indifference to the role of the individual personality in the historical process.¹⁹ The result was a work which deeply inspired the young Durkheim, and has an ineliminable place in any account of the development of his thought.

THE IDEAS OF LA CITÉ ANTIQUE (1864)

Fustel’s central purpose in La Cité Antique was ‘to show upon what principles and by what rules Greek and Roman society was governed’ (Fustel 1864:11). The initial premise underlying this purpose was, as we have seen, that the ancient Greeks and Romans shared a common body of beliefs and institutions which they had inherited from Aryan peoples, indeed, Fustel argued, the Greeks and Romans represented two branches of the same race, spoke two variants of the same language, possessed similar governmental institutions, and passed through a series of similar revolutions. But at least a secondary premise was that these beliefs and institutions were decidedly different from those of nineteenth-century France. Fustel thus attempted ‘to set in clear light the radical and essential differences which at all times distinguished these ancient peoples from modern societies’ (Fustel 1864:11).

This insistence on the radical discontinuity between Greco-Roman and French civilization was a direct extension of Fustel’s effort to restore respect for the ancien régime. French school-children, he complained, learned about the Greeks and Romans from their earliest years, comparing ancient revolutions with their French counterparts, and ancient history with that of nineteenth-century France. Such comparisons not only perpetrated a complete misunderstanding of the past.²⁰ They also created a naive, idealized conception of ancient liberties which the French had then set before themselves as reasonable social and political aspirations, thus impeding the actual progress of modern society.²¹ If, on the contrary, we study the Greeks and Romans ‘without thinking of ourselves, as if they were entirely foreign to us,’ Fustel suggested, then their institutions will be revealed as ‘absolutely inimitable; nothing in modern times resembles them; nothing in the future can resemble them. We shall attempt to show by what rules these societies were regulated’, he proposed, ‘and it will be freely admitted that the same rules can never govern humanity again’ (1864:12).²²

So dramatic a contrast between past and present presupposed an explanation for the transition from one to the other; and for Fustel, as Durkheim later complained (1893:178–9), this explanation was provided by the progress of the human mind. In the present, Fustel argued, ‘[m]an has not…the way of thinking that he had twenty-five centuries ago; and this is why he is no longer governed as he was governed then’.For Fustel, therefore, institutions provided no explanation of their associated beliefs; for when we examine the institutions of the Greeks and Romans, they appear obscure, whimsical and inexplicable. But when we examine the religious ideas of the ancients, these institutional practices become quite transparent. ‘lf, on going back to the first ages of this race,’ Fustel observed,

we observe the idea which it had of human existence, of life, of death, of a second life, of the divine principle, we perceive a close relation between these opinions and the ancient rules of private law; between the rites which spring from these opinions and their political institutions.

(1864:12–13)

La Cité Antique, as Fustel explained in his conclusion, describes the history of a belief. When that belief was established, ‘human society was constituted. It was modified, and society underwent a series of revolutions. It disappeared, and society changed its character. Such was the law of ancient times’ (1864:396).²³

These beliefs held in common by Greeks and Romans would have been inconceivable but for a common source—that is, those IndoEuropean tribes calling themselves ‘Aryá’ (hence ‘Aryans’) that invaded the Indian subcontinent during the middle of the second millennium before Christ, and whose language thus provided the basis for Sanskrit and Persian as well as Latin and Greek.²⁴ It was in this ‘more ancient’ epoch, Fustel suggested, ‘in an antiquity without date’, that the beliefs of the Greeks and Romans were formed, and their institutions ‘either established or prepared’ (1864:13). So remote and undocumented a past, Fustel acknowledged, was inaccessible by traditional historiographical means; but it might at least be reconstructed hypothetically, by analyzing and comparing its ‘survivals’—for example, the Indo-European roots still evident in the Greek and Latin languages, the legends still recounted by the peoples who spoke them, and especially the religious rituals practiced by Greeks and Romans down to the time of Christ: ‘if we examine the rites which [Cicero] observed’, Fustel suggested, ‘or the formulas which he recited, we find the marks of what men believed fifteen or twenty centuries earlier’ (1864:14).

Above all, Fustel’s reconstructive project revealed the belief in a life after death. No matter how far back we go, Fustel insisted, we find no point at which the Indo-European peoples thought that this life was the only life; on the contrary, ‘the most ancient generations, long before there were philosophers, believed in a second existence after the present. They looked upon death not as a dissolution of our being, but simply as a change of life’ (1864:15). In particular, they believed that the soul remained associated w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Religion as Fons Et Origo
• Part II Moral Agents, Social Beings
• Part III The Role of the Sociological Moralist and the Moralist