(\lectures\durkheim)

LECTURE SIX: INDIVIDUALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM: 1880 1910

The debunking of evolutionism

In his 1927 textbook Primitive Society Lowie savages the evolutionists:

Concerning the evolution of family patterns which Morgan and Maclennan and Maine and others had tried to place into necessary sequences of Patrilineal Matrilineal Cognatic etc.he wrote 'I can imagine the Andaman Islanders, a sibless people without any noticeable partiality for either side of the family, arising by successive borrowings to any stage of civilization without necessarily developing into either father sib or mother sib.' On the supposed evolution of property systems, from communal to private property (as in Marx), the 'dogma of a universal primitive communism' is a 'manifest absurdity ' and indeed empirical research in India, showing changes in the other direction, 'show that in all probability this region has witnesses an evolution of real estate law diametrically opposite to that rashly assumed by speculative anthropologists.' As for the placing of various peoples of the world on various rungs of the evolutionary ladder, Lowie remarks concerning the Polynesians that when Morgan assigned to this settled, politically organized and marvelously aesthetic race the lowest status among surviving divisions of mankind, he attained the high water level of absurdity, which accounts of Oceanic exploration accessible even in his day would have sufficed to expose.'

Any theories of a necessary social evolution through stages seemed doomed: 'An attempt to embody the exuberant variety of phenomena in a single chronological sequence seems hopeless.'

He ends with a piece which relates the evolutionary framework very much to the needs and political context within which it was developed. 'The belief in social progress was a natural accompaniment of the belief in historical laws, especially when tinged with the evolutionary optimism of the "seventies of the nineteenth century" (i.e. Spencer, Marx, Tylor, Maine, Morgan, McLennan et al). If inherent necessity urges all societies along a fixed path, metaphysicians may still dispute whether the underlying force be divine or diabolic, but there can at least be no doubt as to which community is retarded and which accelerated in its movement towards the appointed goal. But no such necessity or design appears from the study of culture history. Cultures develop mainly through the borrowings due to chance context. Our own civilization is even more largely than the rest a complex of borrowed traits.'

The importance of this is that we cannot provide a model for other societies. 'The singular order of events by which it has come into being provides no schedule for the itinerary of alien cultures. Hence such a stage in our history before attaining this or that destination can no longer be sustained. The student who has mastered Maitland's argument will recognise the historical and ethnologic absurdities of this solemn nonsense.'

What then has changed? There has been a loss of confidence, of certainty, and belief in progress. Evans Pritchard writes, 'We are less certain today about the values they accepted. In part, at any rate, the turning away from the construction of stages of development which so occupied them, and the turning towards inductive functional studies of primitive societies, must be attributed to the growth of scepticism whether many of the changes taking place in the nineteenth century can be wholly regarded as improvement...'

It is easy to see how this fits in with the shock of the First World War and the retreat from Empire, the shock of the long term implications of Darwinism and the loss of Christian faith etc.

In such a situation where the faith that gave moral meaning to the world anthropology and sociology as Gellner (and K. Thomas) point out replacing religion as a kind of secularized religion was undermined, anthropologists turned in weariness from the universal to the specific. Let us start again, not with grand designs, but looking at the small blocks and building upwards. Let us doubt all until it is 'proved'. In a world where the centre (Europe) cannot hold and the justification of life and domination is gone, the bleak inter war years, let us be interested, as Evans Pritchard puts it, 'in what makes for integration and equilibrium in society' rather than fruitlessly go on 'in plotting scales and stages of progress.'

One final account of the switch in paradigms, also by Evans Pritchard may be quoted. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, 'Their thought was dominated by the notion of progress, of improvement of manners and customs from rudeness to civility, from savagery to civilisation and the method of investigation they elaborated, the comparative method, was chiefly employed by them for the purpose of reconstructing the hypothetical course of this development...' But now all is changed:

'Just as earlier the genetic approach was dominant in all fields of learning, so now we find everywhere a functional orientation. There were functional biology, functional psychology, functional law, functional economics, and so forth, as well as functional anthropology.'
A few of the reasons for the change.

The shock of new information/experience first hand experience.

For various accidental and other reasons, professionals were beginning to look at the evidence. Weber on Protestants and Catholics in Germany, Durkheim on suicide, Pitt Rivers digging on his own estates, Boas.

Boas and the attack on evolutionism.

Boas' ideas had been simmering for ten years when in 1896 he urged rununciation of the 'barren...comparative method...(and its) vain endeavour to construct a uniform systematic history of the evolution of culture.' To correct evolutionary fallacies Boas substituted the historical method of controlled investigation of the dynamics of culture growth. From the outset Boas worked tirelessly and systematically to destroy evolutionary anthropology...In part Boas was inspired to challenge the Developmentalist position by his own field experience, first among the Eskimo (1883 1884) and later among Northwest Coast Indians.

Radcliffe Brown among Andamans
Haddon expedition
Malinowski

But while this was important, it was as much a consequence as a cause of the new orientation. The 'arm chair' anthropologists and others felt it unnecessary to combine data collection and data analysis why?

DIFFUSIONISM see hand out, a few words on

* * *

DURKHEIM

The Life of Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim was born on 15 April 1858 in Lorraine. His father had been a Chief Rabbi and we are told that he 'grew up within the confines of a close knit, orthodox and traditional Jewish family, part of the long established Jewish community of Alsace Lorraine... he was destined for the rabbinate and his early education was directed to that end: he studied for a time at a rabbinical school.'(L.39)

The fact that he also started in a very religious setting and upbringing, but it was later decided that he would not follow the family tradition and he dropped his orthodox Jewish identity help to explain his central obsession with what held groups together and particularly religion in a secular society. He both escaped from, and longed for that early warmth. He later wrote of the typical Jewish community as 'a small society, compact and cohe¬sive, with a very keen self consciousness and sense of unity' and of Judaism as consisting 'like all early religions... of a body of practices minutely governing all the details of life and leaving little freedom for individual judgment'.(quoted in L.40) This shows both his attraction and ambivalence. His life's quest seems to have been how to create a cosy, moral community which would not have the draw back of stifling the individual.

Several features of his personality and personal background stand out. Like many important intellectuals he was a marginal figure, standing on the edge of various traditions, at an angle to both secular rationalist and Christian conservative tradi¬tions. (E.28) He was basically a prophet, concerned to set up a new secular morality which would replace that of his ancestors which could no longer survive in an industrial age. Thus, he is in the tradition of the great, vehement, moralistic secular rabbis such as Marx. That he was basically a moralist (L.320), can be seen not only in the content of his ideas, but in his intense preaching style in public and even his appearance. A contemporary described him as follows: '... he appeared, thin and pale, in his grey jacket, with an immense head and sombre eyes, on the platform of the amphitheatre... He took up his lecture at the point where he had stopped...His grave manner never bright¬ened; nonetheless, his speech, always somewhat subdued at the most significant moments, was not without charm; and one felt it turning into a sort of incantation.' (quoted in L.369)

In all of this he reminds me, as I said above, very much of Karl Marx, another Old Testament, Jewish Rabbi prophet. But there are differences. One fundamental one was their attitude towards how one brought in the new golden age. For Marx it was the path of revolution, but Durkheim was a reformist and revisionist who opposed all revolutionary transformations. (L.323) Another dif¬ference was that Marx was basically an optimist, believing in the inevitable triumph of communism. Durkheim, more like Tocqueville and Weber was a pessimist. He saw the weaknesses of democracy, of modern capitalism and industrialism and so on, but saw no real way out into a better system. There was no going back and no easy Utopia lying in the future. He was in many ways an alienated and frustrated thinker, full of anxiety and pessimism. (see eg. E.98, 101, N.267).

Ultimately he was an ardent, obsessively hard working, over serious, wracked intellectual. Like Weber he overworked and had a number of mental breakdowns probably brought on by over work. (L.100) He died at that age of 59 in November 1916, probably of a combination of over work and grief at the death of his only son in the War. (L.559) The reputation of his work has grown ever since and he is now conventionally placed as part of the great triumvirate, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, as the seminal thinkers of modern sociology. How far is this justified?

Durkheim's problem and answers
Durkheim's central problem was that of order: 'the recurring theme in all of Durkheim's writings is the problem of order', for society is fragile and always on the edge of collapse. Sociology as a disci¬pline was the tool which would help one to solve this fundamental question; what is it that unites people in the modern, industrial, world? As he wrote to a colleague, 'the object of sociology as a whole is to deter¬mine the conditions for the conservation of societies'. If traditional societies had been held together by various institutions such as the family, religion, communities, what holds industrial societies together? Basically Durkheim's work is part of the great effort by a number of thinkers from Tocqueville onwards to come to terms with the political revolution in France in 1789, and the industri¬al revolution in Britain starting around the same date.

Durkheim started in his characteristic way by eliminating alternative ways to create social order. One of these was the family. The loss of unity created by the family in earlier agrarian civilizations was the result of the change in mode of production to industrial, factory, urban civilization. Mixed units which combined religion and the family, such as the Indian castes, were also all collapsing. The family could no longer be relied on to tie humans together, to organize or give meaning to their lives.

Another collapsed source of authority and integration was religion. Durkheim put forward a straightfor¬ward evolutionary scheme here. He wrote that 'if there is one truth that history teaches us beyond doubt, it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life. Originally, it pervades everything; everything social is religious... Then, little by little, political, economic, scientific func¬tions free themselves from the religious function... God, who was at first present in all human relations, progressively withdraws from them; he abandons the world to men and their disputes.' Thus religion, like the family and education cannot help to overcome modern atomization. The total result is that contemporary civilization is in constant crisis, unstable, volatile and composed of egotistic individuals.

In many ways Durkheim's ideas could be aligned with those of earlier thinkers such as Tonnies, Maine and Morgan; from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft (Community to Association), from status to contract, from sacred to profane (secularization and disenchantment), social atomization. In particular, his thinking on the cumulative effects of all of this on the central problem of egotistical individualism is almost identical to the insights of Tocqueville. Thus he describes the erosive effects of hyper individualism on any form of social association or community. Like Tocque¬ville, or like Benjamin Constant who believed that 'when all are isolated by egoism, there is nothing but dust, and at the advent of a storm, nothing but mire', he thought society without anything except individuals would be a monstrosity.

Durkheim's original contribution to all of this fairly standard exposition is to apply the theory, in depth, to one example. His work on Suicide is thus the documentation of the dimensions and nature of the malaise. He believed that suicide was the individualistic opposite of social solidarity. His central thesis was that the crucial variable in differential suicide rates was the degree of integration of individ¬uals into society. Where there was high integration, through family, religion or some other means, suicide rates were low. Lukes summarizes his theory as follows: 'that under adverse social conditions, when men's social context fails to provide them with the requisite sources of attachment and/or regulation, at the appropriate level of intensity, then their psychological or moral health is impaired, and a certain number of vulnerable, suicide prone individuals respond by committing suicide.'

So what was his solution to the problem of how one could create social solidarity in an industrial civilization? The first thing to do was to eliminate unsatisfactory alternatives, to leave the way clear for his own solution. He eliminated the family, religion and educations as solutions. He also rejected Rous¬seau's totalitarian solution of the State as representing the General Will. So what was left?

The major contender in the field was contract. The particular target for Durkheim was the set of nine¬teenth century economists and thinkers who believed that individualism could be tamed by contract, especial¬ly Herbert Spencer. Of Spencer and others he wrote that 'They suppose original, isolated, and independent individuals who, consequently, enter into relationship only to cooperate, for they have no other reason to clear the space separating them and to associate. But this theory, so widely held, postulates a veritable creatio ex nihilo. It consists indeed in deducing society from the individual.' Durkheim's basic point was that dyadic contracts are too unstable to hold a society together. He writes that where 'interest is the only ruling force each individual finds himself in a state of war with every other since nothing comes to mollify the egos, and any truce would not be of long duration. There is nothing less constant than interest. Today, it unites me to you; tomorrow, it will make me your enemy. Such a cause can only give rise to tran¬sient relations and passing associations.'

In fact the paradox of the fact that modern society seemed to be based more and more on contract, yet more and more unified, was because contract was not what it seemed. 'In effect, the contract is, par excel¬lence, the juridical expression of co operation'. There is a an underpinning which is necessary, but invisible. 'In sum, a contract is not sufficient unto itself, but is possible only thanks to a regula¬tion of the contract which is originally social.' Contract, in fact, 'forces us to assume obligations that we have not contracted for, in the exact sense of the word, since we have not deliberated upon them... Of course, the initial act is always contractual, but there are consequences, sometimes immedi¬ate, which run over the limits of the contract. We co operate because we wish to, but our voluntary co operation creates duties for us that we did not desire.'

In a broad way, Durkheim is right. Contracts are indeed only the surface and cannot easily work without a State, without a shared morality, judicial system and so on.

Durkheim's first major attempt to solve the problem of how to achieve social solidarity in modern civi¬lizations was put forward in The Division of Labour in Society. His answer is encapsulated in his well known distinction between the two forms of solidarity, mechanical and organic. Traditional, pre industrial, socie¬ties were held together by mechanical solidarity. 'If we try to construct intellectually the ideal type of a society whose cohesion was exclusively the result of resemblances, we should have to conceive it as an absolutely homogeneous mass whose parts were not distinguished from one another.' These are 'seg¬mental societies with a clan base', so called 'in order to indicate their formation by the repetition of like aggregates in them, analogous to the rings of an earthworm...' In contrast to this is the form of solidarity in modern societies, organic solidarity, like the 'organs' of a body which are functionally integrated. These are constituted 'by a system of different organs each of which has a special role, and which are themselves formed of differentiated parts.'

Thus what binds people together is their interdependence. The 'mechanical' word was used because of 'the cohesion which unites the elements of an inanimate body, as opposed to that which makes a unity out of the elements of a living body.' The paradox was that modern society, as it advanced, became more and more integrated: 'the unity of the organism increases as this individuation of the parts is more marked'. Thus the division of labour produces solidarity, 'not only because it makes each individual an exchangist, as the economists say', but, at a deeper level. It is the division of labour which itself holds people together, just as an arm and a leg and a head are functionally interdependent and need each other.

Now there are some fundamental flaws in this idea. One is that it assumes that the division of labour is spontaneous and voluntary. Durkheim admits that 'the division of labour produces solidarity only if it is spontaneous and in proportion as it is spontaneous.' Of course, in practice, workers and others are forced against their will into such a division of labour. Another weakness is Durkheim's unconvincing answer to the question of why people who work in a sphere where there is a high division of labour, for example in a factory conveyor belt production unit in the post Fordian world, or as a check out worker in a supermarket, should feel a moral involvement with each other. His solution is that alienation will disappear if the management explain to the workers their important role and place in the total process. Parkin quotes Durkheim to the effect that the worker is 'not therefore a machine who repeats movements the sense of which he does not perceive, but he knows that they are tending in a certain direction, towards a goal that he can conceive of more or less distinctly. He feels that he is of some use' and that 'his actions have a goal beyond them¬selves.' It is fairly clear that this is very unrealistic.

The goal which comforts the workers is the creation of social solidarity. This is related to Durkheim's argument that integration, rather than economic efficiency, is the true function (i.e. goal) of the division of labour. The 'economic services' which the division of labour provides, are small when 'compared to the moral effect that it produces, and its true function is to create in two or more persons a feeling of solidarity'. It is clear that Durkheim is not talking about manifest and latent function, but goal, for he goes on that 'In whatever manner the result is obtained, its aim is to cause coherence among friends and to stamp them with its seal.' It is not self evident that the owner of a supermarket has social solidarity as his foremost consideration when he places twenty girls in a row at the check out tills and twenty others filling the shelves. Adam Smith and Tocqueville, who lamented the terrible effects of the division of labour, were much closer to the actual effects.

Durkheim failed in his first attempt to solve the question of what holds modern societies together is widely recognized by later critics. Its failure was clearly recognized by Durkheim himself who never referred with any seriousness to the theory of organic solidarity again in his later works. He presumably dropped it because it did not work.
Another indication of his failure is in Durkheim's main supportive evidence for the supposed cohesive nature of modern societies. This he found in the contrast between two types of legal system. He argued that 'In lower societies, law... is almost exclusively penal; it is likewise almost exclusively very stationary.' Law in modern societies, on the contrary, is restitutive rather than repressive. As Parkin summa¬rizes the contrast, 'Repressive laws are those which punish the offender by inflicting injury upon him or causing him to suffer some loss or disadvantage.' He quotes Durkheim to the effect that 'Their purpose is to harm to him through his fortune, his honour, his life, his liberty, or to deprive him of some object whose possession he enjoys.' 'Restitutive laws, by contrast, do not bring down suffering on the head of the offender. Instead, they aim at "restoring the previous state of affairs"' In fact, as almost every anthropologist since Durkheim has pointed out, this is back to front. Many of the simpler societies have a mainly restitutive system, while most modern societies use penal and repressive measures.

Having failed in his first attempt he moved onto a new projected work on occupational groups, which, in fact, was never written. The subject was first raised in a lecture in 1892 and his last major publication on the subject took place in 1902. What Durkheim intended to do in the book on the subject which he never wrote can be reconstructed from various sources. In various parts of Suicide he laid out the need for moral and political integration through new forms of grouping. In the preface to the second edition of The Division of Labour he dealt with this particular problem in relation to a new form of grouping. And in the lectures, originally delivered between 1890 and 1900, and published as Professional Ethics, he gave his most detailed outline of what needed to be done. As Nisbet points out, this is not just a wayward side issue in his work but rather 'in these proposals lies the origin and the very essence of his theoretical approach to the problem of authority and power, not merely in modern European society, but in ancient as well as medieval groups, Eastern as well as Western.' Let us therefore consider his second theory.

Durkheim's work was a response to what were considered to be the two great revolutions of modern times and their consequences the political revolution (the French Revolution and democracy) and the industrial revolution (the division of labour, factories, mass society, the loss of community). We can see that these were the two major areas where Durkheim thought his new organizational forms would solve the problem.

In relation to the political revolution, there seem to be two strands to Durkheim's argument. Firstly, in almost identical terms to Montesquieu and Tocqueville, Durkheim realized that in order to prevent the State from becoming over powerful and despotic, it needed to be balanced by what Montesquieu had called 'intermediary institutions'. His idea of pluralism and countervailing secondary groups were just like those of Tocqueville. 'It is the nature of every form of association to become despotic unless it is restrained by external forces through their competing claims upon individual allegiance.' 'Every society is despotic, at least if nothing from without supervenes to restrain its despotism'.

In a number of places Durkheim writes about the necessity for there being co operative and corporate groups between the state and the citizen. 'A society composed of an infinite number of unorganised individu¬als, that a hypertrophied State is forced to oppress and contain, constitutes a veritable sociological mon¬strosity... A nation can be maintained only if, between the State and the individual, there is intercalated a whole series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag them, in this way, into the general torrent of social life.' One needs a multipli¬cation of centres. 'What liberates the individual is not the elimination of a controlling centre, but rather the multiplication of such centres, provided that they are co ordinated and subordinated one to another.' Although the state was essential for liberating individuals in the first place, it also needed to be checked. Unlike Rousseau, Durkheim believed that 'it is out of this conflict of social forces that individual liberties are born.'

His second theme was that of moral integration. The State could not provide this for it is too far removed from the citizen. Since the state 'is far from them, it can exert only a distant, discontinuous influence over them; which is why this feeling has neither the necessary constancy nor strength... Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. ... While the state becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.'

Durkheim's great fear was of social disintegration, of egotistical and anomic behaviour culminating in such pathological forms as suicide. He believed the new forms he would recommend would check this. These groups would create warmth and break down narrow egotism. An individual 'must feel himself more solidary with a collective existence which precedes him in time, which survives him, and which encompasses him at all points. If this occurs, he will no longer find the only aim of his conduct in himself and, understanding that he is the instrument of a purpose greater than himself, he will see that he is not without significance. Life will resume meaning in his eyes, because it will recover its natural aim and orientation.' Thus he argued that 'What we especially see in the occupational group is a moral power capable of containing individual egos...'

In very early societies, he believed, this integration had been provided by the family, but the new groups would take over from this. 'Up to now, it was the family which, either through collective property or descendence, assured the continuity of economic life, by the possession and exploitation of goods held intact...But if domestic society cannot play this role any longer, there must be another social organ to replace its exercise of this necessary function... a group, perpetual as the family, must possess goods and exploit them itself...' In the medieval period 'the occupational guild was the basis of social solidarity', creating genuine moral communities. His new forms would provide the same function, but in a modern, industrial, society. But what, exactly, was to be set up? If the family, religion, education and the State could not provide a model, what could? And what could one learn from previous civilizations about how such entities work?

Durkheim provides a potted history of occupational associations and their history in France. This is a narrow account, for he does not deal with all the other important earlier corporations, in particular towns and cities, universities, religious orders and so on. This weakens the argument. He describes the rise of the medieval occupational guilds in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and their quasi religious character. He then notes their destruction, which he mainly dates to the eighteenth century and the French revolution. This is again a distortion, since, as Montesquieu and Tocqueville had shown, the process had started much earlier. He notes Rousseau's hatred of all intermediary institutions and sides with him in that context. 'Since the eighteenth century rightfully suppressed the old corporations...' , there has been nothing to replace them. His studies showed the French Revolution levelling all the intermediary institutions. The effects of modernity 'is to have swept away cleanly all the older forms of social organization. One after another they have disappeared either through the slow erosion of time or through great disturbances.' 'Only one collective form sur-vived the tempest: the State.' Indeed such was the force of the Revolution that it was only in 1901, after much of Durkheim's work on the subject was formulated, that the Law of Congregations allowed freedom of association for all secular purposes in France.

Durkheim clearly felt that the medieval corporations were rightly brushed away. Not only were they selfish, with their conservative mysteries and craft traditions, but they were not adapted to modern indus¬trial conditions. His animus against the medieval guild was the same as his dismissal of the trade unions. They were retrograde, putting their member's interests above the common good. So what was to be set up? For 'it remains to study the form the corporative bodies should have if they are to be in harmony with present day conditions of our collective existence.... The problem is not an easy one.'

Basically the new entities, like the medieval guilds, would be based on the professions. They were to be the craft and artisan guilds restored in a new way. What Durkheim 'wished for was a type of guild that had a natural compatibility with modern industrialism.' But what precisely would they do? One of the most detailed descriptions was as follows. 'To them, therefore, falls the duty of presiding over companies of insurance, benevolent aid and pensions...' They would also allocate rewards to their members. 'Whenever excited appetites tended to exceed all limits, the corporations would have to decide the share that should equitably revert to each of the cooperative parts. Standing above its own members, it would have all necessary authority to demand indispensable sacrifices and concessions and impose order upon them.' They would be property owning, perpetual, corporations. Thus they would act as a kind of surrogate family, village community and caste group rolled into one.

They would also bridge the gap between the individual citizen and the State by 'becoming the elementary division of the State, the fundamental political unity'. Thus 'Society, instead of remaining what it is today, an aggregate of juxtaposed territorial districts, would become a vast system of national corpora¬tions.' These associations 'will be units of society recognized equally by the state, its members and their families.' They would become 'the true electoral unit'.
This is what they would do, but how exactly? Here all is obscure. As Parkin comments, 'Durkheim is char¬acteristically vague when it comes to the organizational structure of the guilds.' A thousand ques¬tions crowd into one's mind. Why should the State allow these rivals to political allegiance to emerge at all? Why should they be more altruistic than the medieval guilds or trades unions? Indeed, what is the structural difference? What would the role of women, and especially women working in the home, be in these new guilds? What of the many people who had professions which were highly mobile (sailors, travelling salesmen), low status (rubbish collectors), semi legal (prostitutes), scattered (lighthouse keepers), part time (shelf fillers) and so on. What about other corporations; universities,clubs,sects and so on. How would they fit in?

There are innumerable problems with his ideas and it is not surprising that he never got beyond a very blue print. What is more surprising is that Durkheim never paid any attention (unlike Montesquieu and Tocqueville) to the very extensive associational and corporative groups which would have provided him with working models of what he hoped to set up, and which were flourishing in America and had flourished for many centuries in England. Yet there is an even graver problem than the fact that the solution he proposes is so unformed and so filled with practical difficulties. This lies in the very nature of what he proposed, namely State dependent corporations.

Durkheim was frightened of the power of secondary groups and approved of their destruction in the eight¬eenth century. He tells us that in a properly constituted political state 'there must be no forming of any secondary groups that enjoy enough autonomy to allow of each becoming in a way a small society within the greater.' This explains why he basically saw the professional groups as extensions of the State, holding delegated powers, on licence or by charter. The State must control all the sub groups: it 'must even permeate all those secondary groups of family, trade and professional association, Church, re¬gional areas and so on... which tend, as we have seen, to absorb the personality of their members. It must do this, in order to prevent this absorption and free these individuals, and so as to remind these partial societies that they are not alone... The State must therefore enter into their lives, it must supervise and keep a check on the way they operate and to do this it must spread its roots in all directions.'

Indeed the State needed to think on their behalf. As Parkin summarizes his view, 'civil society needs the state to think on its behalf because the common consciousness is not up to the job.' Indeed, in an echo of so many totalitarian thinkers from Hobbes onwards. Parkin suggests that he believed that the 'state saves civil society from itself'. This is because the State has a higher intelligence. Thus the growth of the State automatically expands the individual, for 'liberty is the fruit of regulation'.

It is in this context that we can understand why he foresaw no conflict between the State and Civil Society. The State allows Civil Society to exist, and indeed, at a deeper level, there is really no civil society in the full sense. What happens is that the State sets up sub units, corporations, which it can manipulate, close, alter at will. It thinks for them, and permeates them. It can save them from themselves. And we can also understand the extraordinary footnote in which Durkheim said it did not really matter wheth¬er corporations were set up by the State or not. 'All we say of the situation of the corporations entirely leaves aside the controversial question as to whether, originally, the State intervened in their formation. Even if they had been under State control from the very beginning (which does not appear likely) it still is true that they did not affect the political structure. That is what is important for us.' As Maitland brilliantly showed, corporations are always set up by the State, that is their essence. They can have no other source of authority. Durkheim does not seem to have grasped this most elementary point, nor its consequences, so well spelt out by Maitland, that is to say the totalitarian tendency which he only vaguely glimpses.

Now a number of writers on Durkheim have pointed to his unrealistic view of the benevolence of States and state bureaucracies. But this is really only a very small part of the problem. The whole point of civil society is that it arises spontaneously outside the State. Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Maitland had all realized this and documented it. Durkheim does not seem to have understood this basic fact or, in his fear of disorder, had ignored it. Siding with the destroyers of intermediate institutions in the eighteenth century, and showing a very impoverished idea of what medieval corporations had been, he was not well placed to develop a robust theory of civil society. The greater threat, he believed, were the insubordinate associ¬ations. The State should think for them, regulate them and crush them 'for the greater good' when it deemed it was necessary.

Durkheim's assumption undermines his whole endeavour. The professional associations, if they had ever been set up along lines sketched out by Durkheim, would never have worked as a protection for the individu¬al. Nor would it have led to the affective warmth and moral integration he hoped to produce if the profes¬sional associations were merely cells of the central Party. His weaknesses also reflects a deeper lack of perception.
Unlike Tocqueville or Maitland, Durkheim paid no attention, as we have seen, to the rich history of civil society in the West. He did not show any interest in the development of those numerous associational mecha¬nism which had developed alongside the trade guilds. Nor did he show any interest in examining how they worked in other parts of Europe (e.g. Germany or England) or the world (e.g. America) in his day. If he had done so he might have begun to understand the very curious blend of status and contract which gave them their special character. He might have seen how they generated emotion, long term commitment, loyalty and trust. He might have seen how they really solved exactly his problem, combining the flexibility needed in modern society, with the warmth needed in human relations. It would not have been easy for him to under¬stand. As Maitland explains, the greatest of German thinkers, like Gierke, who had devoted their whole lives to the subject, coming from a corporative tradition based on Roman Law, found it almost impossible to understand it. But Montesquieu and Tocqueville had gone a long way. Durkheim hardly made a start. Despite this being his largest question solidarity in an industrial age and despite feeling that groups of some kind were the answer, his answer is unsatisfactory.

His second effort had failed. He may have sensed this also, since he lost interest in this topic as well. He turned away and turned to the study of what he considered to be the origins and function of reli¬gion in the simplest societies in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. He never returned to a sus¬tained discussion of the unsolved problem of cohesion in a modern society.

The diversion: how mechanical solidarity works, the function of religion.

It is generally agreed that Durkheim's most interesting work was his late and largest book, The Elementary Forms of the Reli¬gious Life. This was really a sidetrack from his earlier work. He had failed in his major project of discovering how modern socie¬ties should be held together, so he seems to have decided to start again by examining the simplest case he could find in order (using the genetic method)to see what holds societies together. If he could understand the simplest case, then perhaps he could later work back to the more complicated. It was a long detour and he never got back to the complicated case. But his work, though deeply flawed once again as we shall see, has generated through its errors as much as its achievements, some notable work in anthropology.

What he did was to look at what he thought was the very simplest case, some central Australian aboriginal tribes as described recently by Spencer and Gillen, and to apply to them the ideas from other anthropologists, particularly Robertson Smith's major ideas on the nature and importance of sacrifice in ancient Semitic cultures. From this he generated a number of theories which largely boil down to the famous proposition that religion is a projection of society. This is, in fact, a circular process whereby society is 'reflected' in its religion, which then re enforces society. Let us expand this a little by looking at some of his organizing ideas.

Let us start by noting his definition of religion. It is 'a system of ideas by means of which people represent to themselves the society of which they are members and the opaque but intimate relations they have with it. This is its essential function.' (quoted in P.47) Religion's importance is that it provides us with our categories of thought. He claimed to have shown that 'the most essential notions of the human mind, notions of time, of space, of genus and species, of force and causality, of per¬sonality, those, in a word, which the philosophers have labelled categories and which dominate the whole of logical thought, have been elaborated in the very womb of religion. It is from religion that science has taken them.' (quoted in L.445) Religion also reflects and organizes the 'conscience collective a difficult concept to translate into English, which Durkheim defines as 'the set of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a single society [which] forms a determinate system that has its own life'. (quoted in L.4) Thus our very categories and thought are shaped by religion.

It will be noticed that he sees a direct transition from religion to science. In fact he argues strongly that modern science is identical to religion. 'The explanations of contempo¬rary science are surer of being objective because they are more methodical and because they rest on more rigorously controlled observations, but they do not differ in nature from those which satisfy primitive thought. Today, as formerly, to explain is to show how one thing participates in one or several others.' (L.439) Thus he opposed Levy Bruhl his contemporary, who argued that there was a pre logical mentality.

The intriguing twist to the argument is that while religion gives us our categories of thought, religion itself is generated by society. It was not only among the Australian tribes that 'the classification of things reproduces [the] classifications of men'. (quoted in L.441) He believed that the categories them¬selves were 'made in the image of social phenomena'. 'Cosmic space was primitively constructed on the model of social space, that is, on the territory occupied by society and as society conceives it; time expresses the rhythm of collective life; the notion of class was at first no more than another aspect of the human group...' and so on. (quoted in L.442., and see fn.39) Thus he makes the claim, among others, that 'there are structural correspondences between symbolic classifications and social organization'.(L.449) As Lukes points out, this has been very influential. (L.449)

How, in practice, did society influence religion? In order to understand this we need to understand several of his ideas. The first is the famous distinction between the sacred and the pro-fane. Durkheim rejected the normal distinction between natural and supernatural, and instead favoured the sacred and profane distinction which is in line with Robertson Smith's work. What did he mean by this distinction? Sacred things are 'things set apart and forbidden', while profane things are of the 'mundane workaday world' (P.44) This is an absolute division. 'The divi¬sion of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought; the beliefs, myths, dogmas, and legends are either representations or systems of representations which express the nature of sacred things... anything can be sacred.'(quoted in E.80) Or again he wrote of 'a bipartite divi¬sion of the whole universe, known and knowable, into two classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each other. Sacred things are those which the interdictions protect and isolate; profane things, those to which these interdictions are applied and which must remain at a distance from the first. Religious beliefs are the representations which express the nature of sacred things and the relations which they sustain, either with each other or with profane things. Finally, rites are the rules of convict which prescribe how men should behave in relation to sacred things.'(quoted in L.24)

Thus the sacred principle, which pertains to religion, is a projection of this aspect of society, it is society transfigured onto a higher plane. (L.446) A classic example of this, he argues from the Australian evidence, is in totemic beliefs, where the totem becomes the representations of the segment of the society and is set apart.

How, in essence, does the religious feeling occur and get transferred between society and religion. His answer is through ritual and collective activities. His central hypothesis is that through 'collective effervescence' men create a higher world. He argued that it was 'out of this effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born.', that 'after a collective effervescence men believe themselves transported into an entirely different world from the one they have before their eyes'. (quoted in L.463) Such effervescence re creates the central core of society. 'Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individ¬uals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments...' (quoted in L.475) This is the func¬tion of ritual, to create the effervescence, generate and restore social memory, and hence increase moral density. (L.471; P.49)

While there can be no doubt as to the suggestiveness of his work in the field of simple religions, there are innumerable serious criticisms of his theories by almost everyone who has written about Durkheim. One of the most scathing is by Evans Pritchard, who on the surface looks like one of his most devoted followers, but spends a number of pages demolishing almost every aspect of his work. (see E P in XXX) Another was by van Gennep, another distinguished worker in this field, who cast very serious doubt on his data and methods, writing for example 'Within ten years his whole Australian systematization will be completely rejected, and along with it the generalizations he has construct¬ed on the most fragile set of ethnographic data of which I know. The idea he has derived from them of a primitive man... and of 'simple' societies is entirely erroneous...' (quoted in L.525) Some of the numerous anthropological criticisms are summarized by Lukes. (L.477ff, 521ff, 159). Even his sacred/profane distinction has been rejected by subsequent anthropologists such as Stanner. (L.28). His whole functionalist and tautological definition of religion is highly questionable. (P.48)


Durkheim's life's work had been a failure. He had specified the problem, namely what could create soli¬darity and democratic civilization. He had examined the effects of loss of integration in relation to sui¬cide. But as far as providing an understanding of his own times as a remedy for rootlessness, his solutions were hardly helpful.

So why did he fail so miserably? The faulty method.

It might be argued that Durkheim's failure was due to faulty or inadequate data, and this is partly true. It might be argued that it arose from his arrogance and determination to promote sociology in opposition to other disciplines and this is also true. It might be suggested that it was due to the fact that he often failed to follow his own sounder advice on the satisfactory methods for a social science, and that is true also. But I sus¬pect that the deeper reason for his failure is that despite the fame of his supposed advances in methodology in The Rules of Sociological Method, in fact his methodology is deeply flawed. Let us examine this.

Let us start with the good news. He employed (though as far as I know did not explain) the method of elimination, made famous by Sherlock Holmes, whereby unsound theories are eliminated. (L.31, 203). Even here, however, there are dangers, for he tended to assume, with Holmes, that having eliminated whatever was impossible, whatever remained was the only possible solution. Yet he often did not consider all of the options, or apply sufficient scepticism to what remained.

Again, he frequently advocated the comparative method, indeed arguing that it was the only method in social science.(REF XXX) He rightly pointed out that this was not the method used by J.G.Frazer and others which was merely 'butterfly collecting', but what one needed was real comparison (of the kind explained by J.S.Mill and practiced by Tocqueville and Weber). Unfortunately, in practice, he hardly used the method. For instance, he never compared countries systematically, let alone civilizations or time periods. Only in Suicide is there much use of this method in a fruitful way.

Again, he rightly realized the need for models of what would normally happen, against which one could measure what he called the 'pathological'. This applied over time in what one might call the normal tendency. (L.388) This is a very fruitful method, as Adam Smith, Malthus, Tocqueville and others show in their work. Again Durkheim does not explain this in his Rules, but it is there.

Likewise he recognized the dual or double nature of human beings, which puts him in a long line of European thought from Pope and Smith, up through Tocqueville, rather than with the more one sided Rousseau or Marx. (L.432,435)

Yet there is also less good news in the shape of numerous types of methodological weakness. One of these concerns his theory of causation. Basically he did not have one. He hardly pays attention to the subject and there is no sophisticated analysis, as far as I have seen, of levels, types, chains of causation. Instead we get just one really preposterous conten¬tion, namely that sociology cannot deal with 'accidents', with one off events. The 'accidental must be removed', for 'there can be no science of accidents... and the task of a social science is to concentrate on those uniformities and regularities in human behaviour which are plainly not dominated by accident.' (N.49) Furthermore, sociology can only deal with very simple causal links where there is a single cause leading to a single outcome. He explicitly wrote that if there was more than one cause for an event, it would make it too difficult to be sure of an invariable relations between cause and effect, and hence anything more than single cause phenomena should be avoided. (find quote XXX)

Since in most of social life most outcomes are the result of multiple causes and long chains of cause, this rules out almost all social phenomena and certainly all of history. Durkheim's critics seem to have missed this enormous limitation. It is part of his attempt to turn sociology into a science, using the for¬ward moving causal method of Descartes. But Descartes method is not suitable for the social and biological sciences.It is sterile and largely useless. Not that Durkheim is terribly interested in causes of a wider kind. In history, for example, in so far as he speculates on the reasons for change, he is a demographic and technological determinist. (L.169)

Part of his disinterest in history and change lies in his functional method. Although it is also a source of his best insights and very much in the spirit of the age, Durkheim's belief that a thing is explained only if one sees the part it plays, its function in relation to its social ends, is again very limiting. That this was his view cannot be doubted. The function of a social fact 'must always be sought in the relation of the fact to some social end an existing end, not some defunct belief or norm.' (E.31) When describing or explaining 'religious, juridical, moral and economic facts','one must relate them to a particular social milieu, to a definite type of society; and it is in the constitutive characteristics of this type that one must search for the determining causes of the phenomenon under consid¬eration.' (quoted in L.400) As Lukes well characterizes his method, it is one of 'asking functional questions within a broad¬ly evolutionary framework'. (L.277)

Of course function is important, but, as many have observed, such an approach easily becomes conservative, tautological and rules out unintended consequences, other reasons for things happening. It is true he modified it by being interested in origins to a certain extent. (L.180) But basically he saw 'socie¬ty' as a machine or biological mechanism with parts; he reified it and saw it as a 'thing' and this brings all sorts of problems, including the fact, pointed out by his critics, that he failed to have any theories to deal with conflict or with change a seri¬ous defect.

Possibly he felt he had no need for a theory of change be¬cause he accepted (unthinkingly) the basic theory of evolutionary development which had dominated earlier social and biological thought. It is true that he stripped it of the more extreme version of moral progress social Darwinism which had attached itself in the work of people like Lord Avebury.(E.18) Thus he returned it to about the level of Darwin, who believed in random variation and selective retention without any teleology or notion of moral or other 'progress'. But that Durkheim thought in con-ventional, unilinear, evolutionary, terms is not in doubt. This has been noted by later commentators. (e.g. P.31; N.167; E.90 1;95) We can see this not only in relation to his theories on religion as noted above but also in relation to the family. (L.182, 93) and in relation to the history of property. (PE.171) His classic evolutionary scheme of social forms is as follows. 'If we compare tribes devoid of all central authority with cen¬tralized tribes, and the latter to the city, the city to feudal societies, feudal societies to present societies, we follow, step by step, the principal stages of development whose general march we have just traced.' All systems inevitably converge on one system, it is a development which 'progresses in a perfectly continuous way, as societies tend to approach this type.'(DL.222)

This unquestioning, unthinking, evolutionary frame saved him the bother of discussing the really difficult questions. He had lost the sense of amazement of Montesquieu, Smith and Tocqueville, who were close enough to earlier systems to know how unlikely the emergence of modernity had been. He did not have the width of knowledge to know, like Weber, the miracle of what has happened. So he does not even sense the riddle of the modern world. He has, like Spencer and the evolutionists, already lost the question.

Instead, he tried to create a new discipline to study a newly constituted order of things called 'social facts'. These were as concrete and real as the physical or biological entities which the other sciences, which he hoped to emulate, had discovered. Sociology, he argued, used the scientific (Baconian, Cartesian) method, working inductively from real 'facts' up to theories. And here is the last weakness I shall touch on. What are these 'social facts' and how are they to be isolated and recognized like atoms or molecules? Do they really exist, or are they as insubstantial as the entities which another Empire builder, Richard Dawkins, has tried to conjure up, i.e. 'memes'?

Durkheim's definition of a 'social fact' and how one should recognize it is extremely vague. He argued that the whole of his sociology was based on 'our fundamental principle, the objective reality of social facts'. In order for the new discipline to be autonomous 'it must above all have an object all its own', a 'reality which is not in the domain of the other sciences'. (quoted in L.9) He put forward the rule that 'social facts must be studied as things'. Lukes glosses this as follows. 'By "social facts" he should be understood to mean social phenomena or fac¬tors or forces, and by the rule that they should be studied as things he meant that they are to be seen as 'realities external to the individual' and independent of the observer's conceptual apparatus.' (L.9) But what distinguishes a social fact from other things? Durkheim defined a social fact as 'every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising over the individual an exter¬nal constraint' and 'which is general throughout a given society, while existing in its own right, independent of its individual manifestations'. (quoted in L.10 11) This is extremely abstract and one is left with many queries. Is fox hunting a 'social fact' (it is confined to one part of society), is coughing a 'social fact' it seems to fit and so on and so on.

To add to the problem, is the observation that these 'facts', although apparently the things which shape a theory, using a sort of naive inductivist and positivist logic, are not as stable as that. When they interfere with a theory, which in Durkheim's case was pretty often, he would take the view that 'the facts are wrong'. (L.33) In one sense this is encouraging, for it implies a realization of the ridiculousness of reifying facts. But given his agenda of positivistic science, it is a considerable embar¬rassment.

Durkheim, Division of Labour in Society DL
Emile Durkheim, Robert Nisbet, with Essays E
Giddens, Marx, Weber, Durkheim G
Steven Lukes, Emile durkheim L
Nisbet, Sociology of Emile Durkheim N
Parkin, Durkheim P
Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals PE