Durkheim and National Identity in Ireland

Applying the Sociology of Knowledge and Religion

J. Dingley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137442581
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137408426
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the development of opposed Nationalist and Unionists identities as products of different economies, symbolically represented in religious differences, that impelled conflicting cultures and ideals of best interest that were fundamentally incompatible within a single identity.

Chapter 1

Durkheim as a French Nationalist

Durkheim’s (French) nationalism is vital to understanding his sociology, especially his commitment to the Third Republic, desperately trying to rebuild France after her shattering defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870), the Paris Commune (1871), and the resultant turmoil and humiliation of defeat: “His experience of the French defeat may have contributed to a strong (though in no way militant) patriotism, a defensive sense of national decadence and a consequent desire to contribute to the regeneration of France” (Lukes, 1975, p. 41).

However, for Durkheim it was even more complicated: He came from Alsace-Lorraine, lost to Germany in 1870, making him a refugee. He was also a Jew, attacked by the right, particularly the Catholic Church, because “Jews were blamed for defeats” (Lukes, 1975, p. 41). France had been taken to war by Napoleon III whose regime had extended full citizenship to Jews. Not surprisingly, reactionary forces of the ancien régime, such as traditional Monarchists and Roman Catholicism, were quick to blame France’s defeat on her revolutionary tradition, equality and liberalism, and the abandonment of traditional ancien values (traditional religion, established order and hierarchy).

Thus Durkheim perceived a need to rebuild France while also protecting the progressive trends that emancipated someone from his religious and social background, an outsider to the old elites. This implied supporting modern liberal ideas of individualism, civic inclusiveness, objectivity, and tolerance that integrated everyone equally as individual citizens and broke down the old hierarchical orders, ethnic divisions, and religious exclusiveness that he regarded as causing France’s defeat. Thus his sympathies “lay strongly with republicanism and progressive social reform, in the face of the reactionary sentiments of the monarchists and the catholic right” (Giddens, 1978, pp. 12–13).

Hence Durkheim advocated the revolutionary ideals of liberal republicanism against the mystic ideas of social elitism, Catholicism, monarchy, and ethnicity, with a corresponding concern for social and national solidarity. This impelled him to the importance of scientific values and objectivity in both sociology and politics, seeking civic (national) values to replace the old elite ones; rationality not mysticism. France needed rebuilding on scientific, rational, and objective criteria that alone were capable of including all of its citizens equally, as individuals, to avoid past divisions and defeats. And the strongest, bitterest, and best-organized opposition to such ideas came from the Roman Catholic Church, a bulwark of reaction, which saw science, equality, civic identity, individualism, and toleration as bitter enemies to their traditional socio-political domination as a pillar of the ancien régime (Burleigh, 2005; Chadwick, 1998; Remond, 1999):

In fact it would be no distortion to view Durkheim’s entire sociological career as an intransigent and relentless battle fought on two major fronts: against the dark, unfathomable forces of mysticism and despair on the one hand and against the unsubstantial ethereal forces of the dilettantic cult of superficiality on the other. (Alpert, 1961, p. 18)

Modernizers also wished to emulate Germany, whose educational, industrial, material, and scientific development, shared linguistic culture, and recent successful wars (1860s) and unification (1870–71) made her an object lesson.

Durkheim wanted a new France where all non-Catholics could participate as equals, and also one based on intellectual (scientific) rigor and objectivity: concerns with real implications for Ireland, with its intellectual and religious divisions, symbolized in the revisionism debate (objective, scientific analysis versus mystic, emotional romanticism).

Durkheim was therefore deeply committed to the Third Republic (1870–1940) attempting to rebuild France according to modern scientific principles and help to establish its authority, legitimacy, and a socio-political order that rejected Catholicism and monarchy, who bitterly opposed it. Only the previously excluded, such as Jews, Protestants, scientists, the newly educated middle classes, and the property-less, would benefit from its progress. Consequently the Third Republic sponsored such people through higher education, and they in turn actively supported it:

Many of these became teachers in state institutions, and constituted for many observers the core of active support for the Third Republic. The national education system thus selected a meritocracy which in many respects became a new “establishment,” based not on titles, land or industry, but on examinations. (Clark, 1973, p. 172)

Durkheim fell into this category of educated, committed individuals with their interest in education, especially scientific—the bedrock for their advancement. This in turn implied new, non-religious social and civic ideals, with scientific moral values to replace the traditional mystic and highly divisive religious ones that had excluded all non-Catholics. Consequently, civic values became official French policy specifically to aid social integration and cohesion and overcome religious divisions.

Nineteenth-century France had been bitterly divided religiously and ethnically, with 50 percent of its population not even speaking French (German, Basque, Breton, Flemish, Italian, and Occident formed clear ethno-­linguistic communities within France) nor did they identify with France, to the extent that policies of internal colonization were espoused to ensure everyone became French (Weber, 1976, chapter 29; Tombs, 1996, chapter 16). This helped initiate the search for a new moral code (a civic, national religion) to help integrate and bind everyone as French speaking citizens and develop a new sense of shared, national community:

The net result was that Republican France was eagerly concerned with philosophy, with morality, and with moral education—not from intellectual disinterestedness but from practical considerations of finding a substitute for traditional Christian teachings, so as to legitimate itself and win the broader support of new generations of schoolchildren, wrestling them away from the moral authority of the Catholic church. (Tiryakin, in Bottomore and Nisbet, 1979, p. 195)

And Durkheim was at the forefront of this, reflected in his interests in ­education, morality, and civil ethics, especially ones grounded in objective and rational principles. This accorded with modern Enlightenment values in an age of science and industry, with proven ability (in scientific and industrial terms and the German example) that would provide a concrete platform for a lasting, real unity—hence, Durkheim’s dislike of mysticism and dilettantism.

The entire country needed recasting along modern scientific lines; to accord with the objective needs of modern industrial society became Durkheim’s focus. This was both ethically correct (for equality) and functionally necessary (for industry) in the modern world: A scientific age required scientific, not religious or mystical, morals, whose inculcation should be part of the state’s socializing (secular education) role, developed by sociology to provide the relevant knowledge. And in 1904 France officially cut its educational ties to religion and made state education secular, which contrasts strongly with Ireland where denominational education still reigns supreme.

In effect Durkheim argued that there are objective, determining criteria behind socio-political cohesion and integration which lie in an objective moral system that treats all citizens objectively as individuals, which in turn provides an objective reality to the nation/society. This in turn implies objective criteria for state policies to ensure national cohesion and integration, which responds to the objective reality of their milieu. This is made explicit in Durkheim’s social realism, whereby he insisted on the reality of society in itself:

The nation can be seen to have acted as the main reference for the social reality which Durkheim used to critique doctrines which reduced explanations of social phenomena to the level of individual psychology or which inflated society to the level of all humanity. Durkheim’s sociological model seemed more realistic because it dealt with the confluence of social forces within a bounded society. (Thompson, 1982, p. 38)

Social realism implied society as a fact, composed of other subsidiary facts, and opposed to the facts of other societies, making a factual reality of nations, which could not simply be willed against the facts, only constructed around and upon them with objectively scientific policies.

French nationalism and its milieu were the dominant facts of Durkheim’s life and sociology, from which he now sought the facts pertinent to France’s humiliation in 1870 and what would most aid her recovery. To this end he was sponsored by the Third Republic to study in Germany and learn from its success (Lukes, 1975, pp. 86–95). In this way he could help establish the, “necessary political reforms following the shattering effects of the . . . Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1.” (Giddens, 1996, p. 11).

Simultaneously Durkheim wanted to protect the liberal individualism and freedoms the Republican and Enlightenment traditions had bequeathed, grounded in scientific ideas of objectivity and individualism, which he also saw threatened by revolutionary socialism and its own brand of social (class) divisions. Additionally he rejected revolutionary socialism’s vague ideas of universalism and English utilitarianism and classical economic universalism, which he regarded as ignoring social realities (Giddens, 1995, pp. 116–35; Jones, 2001, p. 111–31). What he sought to promote was a genuinely inclusive and objective nationalism that could then lead to international cooperation.

This gave Durkheim’s sociology a specific trajectory, to create a liberal, inclusive, and cohesive France able to resist German domination and emulate its economic and cultural success, and that of other modern industrial societies, which he implicitly equated with nation: “For all practical purposes Durkheim used the terms “people,” “nation,” “state,” “la patrie,” and “society,” synonymously, to denote a collective being with a personality distinct from and superior to that of its individual members” (Hamilton, 1990, p. 118).

He insisted on the reality of different societies, of which men were products, thus accounting for national differences, also; that man owed even his individuality to society. Much of the purpose of Durkheim’s Suicide (1970 [1897]) was to establish the reality of society and social forces leading to individual decisions to commit suicide. Rates varied from society to society according to the nature of social relationships (deduced from an analysis of international suicide statistics). Suicide was therefore a social phenomenon, resulting from social relations, and rates varied according to social circumstances—social facts.

The implication is clear, different societies, with different social structures and cultures, result in different patterns of (national) behavior, making social integration and cohesion across them difficult. Man is a social being and society has an autonomous force and being over him, hence a factual status, which in modernity is realized in the nation. Nation is the modern reality, or “social milieu,” that shapes man and takes him beyond his individual being to implant characteristics and identity in him, which binds him to the group that shares this identity and characteristics and separates him from others:

‘Society is not a mere sum of individuals; rather the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics’ and it was ‘in the nature of this individuality, not in that of its component units, that one must seek the immediate and determining causes of the facts appearing there.’ (Durkheim, in Lukes, 1975, p. 19)

This immediately differentiates Durkheim from Spencer and Anglo-­American social theory where society is regarded as merely a sum of individuals and their contracts.

The specific reality of the social and its characteristics were defined via the systems or networks of relations—structure. These alone provided the means, boundaries, and conduits for the creation of social facts: relations made knowledge and vice versa. Relationships that tie and bind us and how they operate are part of a shared social being from which we derive our characteristics and knowledge of self and others. Different structures of relationships, usually derived from a collective’s operating environment, form the external basis for social differentiation between societies while also creating an inner content of different understanding, meaning, and knowledge:

He insisted that the structural method should relate not simply to external forms of association, but also to the material and intellectual content of collectives. Furthermore, although the search for structure presumed a certain degree of stability in social phenomena, it had to be born in mind that structures were dynamic and emerging. (Thompson, 1982, p. 18)

This dynamism of society helped explain its lack of hard definition, and ­nineteenth-century societies were changing radically due to industrialization. However, structures existed and enabled one to identify societies as entities, and boundaries could be identified by looking at relations and their limits; also, finding the most relevant and dynamic relationships influencing a structure as a whole. Thus nations could be identified by seeking out their most pertinent relationships, which gave meaning and purpose to their original structural existence and imposed constraining social forces on individuals. In this way nation, national characteristics, and interests can be identified in behavior functional to the maintenance requirements of a social (national) structure.

And because individual and society are intimately linked, the nation is of fundamental importance as the social fact and milieu for socialization. This links Durkheim to another important aspect of nationalism, the German philosophical tradition (especially Kant), which strongly influenced contemporary France, partly due to unified Germany’s obvious success. Influenced by Renouvier, Durkheim took Kant’s categories of thought, which Kant believed existed autonomously in the mind, and reinterpreted them as the structures of society, so that categories of thought (ways of thinking and relevant knowledge) reflected social structure and relationships:

Renouvier’s view of knowledge and reason (his epistemology) implied that categories of thought such as space, time, substance, cause, etc., could be other than they were. Durkheim developed this into a sociological epistemology which implied that categories ordering thought and experience varied from society to society and were socially determined. (Thompson, 1982, p. 31)

This implies that social reality, at least, is a product of relationships—social structure, which gives man his sense of reality, truth, what is, and ought to be: This became the basis for Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge. Societies (nations) now had an objective basis—structures of relationships. And because structures are dynamic, not fixed, one can identify the variables to be influenced in affecting the development of nations, primarily the nature and quality of relationships—hence, much of Durkheim’s concern with education, religion, and civic morals, since these directly affected the form and quality of relationships; also, Durkheim’s concern in Division of Labour to identify different types of structure and the functional role they played and the prerequisites they required in communal and individual life. This in turn helps explain the relevance of Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge to an understanding of nat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Durkheim as a French Nationalist
• 2 Durkheim’s Sociology of Knowledge
• 3 Nations and Nationalism
• 4 Ireland, the Revisionist Debate
• 5 Science and the Arts in Ireland
• 6 Ireland and Nationalism
• Conclusion: Knowledge, Truth, and the Problem of Useless Knowledge
• Bibliography
• Index