His major works

His major works

The Division of Social Labour (1893) is addressed to his life-long problematic—that of solidarity. It concerns the social and historical nature of solidarity; he argues that in the transformation from pre-industrial to industrial societies solidarity is not left behind, but is transformed by the division of labour. Whilst the pre-industrial world was bonded through common ideas and feelings, the industrial world was united in a different way— by the specialization of function and the dependence that this entailed. For Durkheim, the paradox of modern society is that while we are more autonomous, we are also more dependent on society; this shows a complex interweaving between personal individuation (the mark of the modern) and social dependency. This, in contrast to the mechanical solidarity that characterized the old world, Durkheim called ‘organic solidarity’. He opposed AUGUSTE COMTE, who argued that a strong state is required to offset the dispersive effects of the division of labour. Equally he opposed HERBERT SPENCER, who argued that the free play of economic interests in exchange is enough to establish society. Just as he replied to the latter that social bonding does and must transcend the fleeting nature of exchange relationships, so he argued against the former that a strong state is incompatible with the democratic and individualistic aspirations of modern society.

However, all is not well with modern society for Durkheim: in Book III he identifies inegalitarianism as the block to the development of organic solidarity, and the fundamental source of social pathology. The ‘constraining’ division of labour is characterized by injustice and inequality seen in class war.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 180 ‘Anomie’ characterizes the other aspect of modern social pathology and this indicates

where the true forms of functional integration have not been generated in work relations. Anomie does not mean ‘disorder’, but lack of solidarity—shown in the conflict between labour and capital (Besnard 1987).

The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) remains one of Durkheim’s most controversial books. During the recent anti-scientific movements in the social sciences it was vilified for its stress on the scientific and its apparent opposition to interpretative/hermeneutic approaches to social phenomena. The method he used acknowledged the objective reality of social facts. The specificity and reality of the social is seen not just in the interaction of agents, but also in the reality of the social milieu. He insists not only on human action, but also on the facts of social morphology that are found through analysis of the ‘volume’ and ‘density’ of society; the former is the number of social units, and the latter ‘the degree of concentration’ of the ‘mass’ of social phenomena. The concepts of the normal and the pathological Durkheim argued are crucial to the examination of the health of society. He insisted on the comparative method, which involves the examination of social types, and held that adequate explanation in the social sciences, in addition to functional analysis, must finally involve causality. ‘The method of concomitant variation is the instrument, par excellence, of sociological research’ (1895:131).

Suicide (1897) was an occasion to prove the principles of The Rules. The phenomenon of suicide proved the existence of social reality—shown in the suicide rate; both its ‘permanence’ and its ‘variability’ reflect the ‘rhythm of social life’. Suicide rates, which are discovered statistically, vary as a function of different social concomitants—which represent different social milieu; the sociological explanation of suicide lies in social forces generated here. Suicide is the negative side of solidarity, for it shows where these bonds have broken down. The degree of social integration is the crucial factor: egoistic suicide results from ‘excessive individuation’, altruistic suicide from ‘insufficient individuation’ and anomic suicide from the breakdown of an established moral framework, that is, the scale that regulates our needs and desires. This is seen in both crises of poverty and sudden wealth. So rejecting physiological or psychological explanations, he postulates a correlation between the will to live and society, and in so doing addresses the question of European social malaise.

Although it was in 1895 that Durkheim was aware of the essential role of religion in social life, it was not until 1912 that he completed his masterpiece on religious life, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life . Acknowledging a debt to Robertson Smith’s ideas of clan totemism as the most primitive form of religion and of the communal function of religion, he also took up William James’s idea of the truth of religion. Durkheim argued that religion is not an illusion, but its truth concerns the underlying reality of society. In contrast to MAX WEBER and William James, he argued that the essential features of religion are most clearly displayed in the simplest and the most primitive: Australian totemism is the test case for a general theory about religion. Through the analysis of this material (contested, as was his hypothesis), he offers a sociological explanation of religion. God and the soul are born of society and are symbolical representations of it: dependency on the sacred beings that are believed in and worshipped in ritual action being a derivative of our dependence on society. Sacred beings are created out of collective thought—in particular collective representations and

Entries A-Z 181

forces, and he stressed the moments of collective effervescence as the birthplace of religious ideas and indeed of moments of social change. The sacred/profane dichotomy was also fundamental to his explanatory apparatus.

Together with his 1901 work with Mass, Primitive Classification, Elementary Forms is also an exercise in the sociology of knowledge—shown in Durkheim’s Kantian stress on categories of knowledge; unlike KANT he, of course, offers a sociological account of knowledge, that is of the social determination of knowledge by stressing the social origin of both the necessity and forms of classification central to knowledge, together with social and historical diversity of these.