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Why Durkheim? Religion and marginality: • background – sensitive to prejudice, discrimination, anti-Semitism. The rise of national socialism – and early signs of fascism • Like Marx born into a rabbinical Jewish family – father, grandfather and great grandfather. Tradition, custom, marginality. • Durkheim at 12 - home town occupied by German troops during the Franco Prussian war. Anti-Semitism. Stephen Lukes - lasting impact.
Why Durkheim? Religion and marginality: ‘[anti-semitism] had already been seen in the regions of the East at the time of the war of 1870; being myself of Jewish origin, I was then able to observe it at close hand. The Jews were blamed for defeats’ (1899).
Why Durkheim? Religion and marginality: • France defeated in Franco-Prussian war - a resurgence in nationalism, and anti-semitism. Durkheim in Jewish minority. • Dreyfus affair (1894) - Jewish Captain in the French army wrongfully convicted of treason – passing military secrets to the Germans. Scapegoat. Promptly bundled off to Devil’s Island. • Durkheim and left wing intellectuals see deep-seated anti-semitism in French Politics and institutions. campaigned vigorously release.
Why Durkheim? Religion and marginality: • Parallels with Guantanamo - extraordinary rendition where terror suspects are secretly incarcerated. • The right accused Durkheim of putting individual above the state/institutions. Dreyfus should be sacrificed to protect France’s institutions. The right heavily criticised the perceived individualism of left wing intellectuals – socialists with no respect for nationhood. • Prompts Durkheim write of the relationship between the state, society and the individual – an attack on the individual is an attack on society and moral order itself.
Why Durkheim? Religion and marginality: ‘… whoever makes an attempt on a man’s life, on a man’s liberty, on a man’s honour, inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned’. There is ‘no reason of State which can excuse an outrage against the person… ’.
Why Durkheim? Religion and marginality: • Individualism is ‘not egoism but sympathy for all that is human, a wider pity for all sufferings, for all human miseries, a more ardent desire to combat and alleviate them, a greater thirst for justice’ (DoL) • ‘We wouldn't get far in promoting a civilising culture of respect for rights amongst and between citizens if we set about undermining fair trials in the simple pursuit of greater numbers of inevitably less safe convictions’ (UK DPP - Ken McDonald) • Eventually Dreyfus is released into army – fights in WWI.
Why Durkheim? • WWI - tragic loss of only son. He’s heartbroken. Personal loss / loss of his vision. Pessimistic about nationalism and militarism: ‘I do not have to tell you of the anguish in which I am living. It is an obsession that fills every moment and is even worse than I supposed. Still, I have been preparing for this blow for a long time’ (1916). • He dies only 59 in 1917. • Durkheim (like Spencer) - war as a primitive barbarism – not part of a progressive, civilised development of society. WWI finishes the idea of Europe as the measure of progressive modernity – of mutual and peaceful interdependence between peoples and nations. Iraq / Afghanistan / Syria / Palestine, etc.
Why Durkheim? • Inherited Wealth: he’s completely opposed to the idea that some could strive for years and not achieve or earn what others would inherit without doing anything. Major distortion of the DoL. ‘…today among the most cultivated peoples, there are careers which are either totally closed or very difficult to be entered into by those who are bereft of fortune’ (Durkheim) • He’s accused of being incredibly conservative, anti-revolutionary. But he’s also extremely radical – against inherited wealth, fundamentally opposed to prejudice, discrimination and military conflict. • Frank Pearce (2001) The Radical Durkheim
Division of Labour Today: Introducing The Division of Labour The Division of Labour in Society (1893) Rules of Sociological Method (1895) On the Normality of Crime (1895) Suicide (1897) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912)
Division of Labour On individualism in psychology and economics • Sociology - individual psychologies don’t make up the social – it’s interaction – wider moral social culture: ‘…every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false’ (1901). • Sociology more than economics. Spencer argued economies work through contracts. Too simplistic. Contracts only work because a social, cultural and moral system makes them work. Society is always prior to and precedes contracts: ‘Social life would not be possible unless there were interests that were superior to the interests of individuals’ (Durkheim, Individualism and Intellectuals).
Division of Labour • Society sui generis - social ‘comes first’ - more than the sum of its parts… sui generis – ‘of its own kind’ or genus. • DoL: reconcile a central contradiction/paradox – as modernity advances we see more difference, autonomy and differentiation – but greater mutuality. • Counter-intuitively: differentiation should lead to greater solidarity: ‘… why do individuals, while becoming more autonomous, depend more upon society? How can they be at once more individual and solidary’ (Durkheim – The DoL)
Division of Labour ‘As to the question which gave rise to this work, it is that of the relations between the individual personality and social solidarity. What explains the fact that, while becoming more autonomous, the individual becomes more closely dependent on society? (Durkheim – The DoL). • Like his predecessors and contemporaries – he’s an evolutionist. Societies hierarchically arranged in their sophistication. The basis of social solidarity is different for ‘advanced’ and ‘primitive’ orders.
Division of Labour ‘Whereas the previous type implies that individuals resemble each other, this type [organic] presumes their difference. The first is possible only in so far as the individual personality is absorbed into the collective personality, the second is possible only if each has a sphere of action which is peculiar to him; that is; a personality’ (Durkheim, DoL). • Almost Jungian - individuation – individuality emerges through our difference to others – but also through shared collective representations – rituals, culture, customs.
Labour • Mechanical societies: simple, similar tasks, minimal differentiation, apart from gender, etc. • Organic societies: complex division of labour, occupational differentiation, complementary reciprocity. Differences don’t fragment but create cohesion. Not just economic efficiencies – but greater moral, cultural integration. • Problems: we do specialised things to earn money – do we have a sense of contribution to some greater moral cohesion? • We see ourselves as specialised - functionaries - without feeling morally bound – vocationally motivated. ‘abnormal form’?
Place • Mechanical: isolated small communities – ‘segmented societies’: ‘… homogeneous segments that are similar to one another’. • Organic society is tied into urbanisation – not everyone can do the same thing in high density – there isn’t the space for everyone (to grow food, have herds, generate energy). Contact is distantiated. • Society resembles: ‘… a great city which contains the entire population within its walls… individuals grouped no longer according to lineage, but according to the particular nature of the social activity to which they devote themselves. Their natural and necessary environment is no longer the place of birth but the place of work’.
Law • Mechanical solidarity is repressive. Breach of beliefs seen as extreme violations of the whole community, or clan. Being the same gives rise to highly cruel tyrannical justice (beatings, beheadings, torture). Repressive law eliminates diversity. • Organic solidarity / difference – requires offenders to repay or repair the harm they’ve done. Once they’ve made their reparation justice is seen to have been done. Contract law. Courts mediate. • Questionable distinction. Durkheim admits that there’s usually a mixture of repressive and restitutive law.
Law • Execution of Sadham – a repressive act? ‘The West’ ‘out-sourcing’ its repressive justice – hanging in this case? Water-boarding? Drone attacks? Torture? Guantanamo? Extraordinary rendition? Exceptional measures – probably quite illegal – certainly not restitutive – what do they say of the societies behind them? Are they products of organic or mechanical forms of solidarity? • Durkheim doesn’t demonstrate argument empirically. Lots of ‘traditional’ cultures have restitutive forms of justice… . ‘Durkheim nowhere sought to verify the empirical assumptions underpinning his theory of punishment, or to indicate what would count as such a verification’ (Lukes 163).
Affiliation • Kinship no longer the basis of social organisation. Relations (relatives) are too distributedfor kinship to have the same kind of power. • He believes a complex division of labour is capable of producing social solidarity – a liking between people – because of their mutual dependence on one another. • Problematic: We’re often more instrumental than sentimental about our jobs – (and each other?).
Culture • Conscience collective: ‘… the set of beliefs and sentiments … [which] forms a determinate system that has its own life… diffused throughout the whole society, but it none the less has specific features which make it a distinct reality’ (DoL). • Mechanical: extensive conscience collective - intensive and strong - ‘the individual conscience is scarcely distinguishable from the conscience collective’. Highly religious too. • Organic: loser, more diverse, flexible, or less resilient. Worth, dignity and ‘cult’ of individuals. Collective representations leave room for increasing individual differences. More secular.
Abnormal forms • Abnormal forms: features of society that look like organic society – but which are pathological. • Inspired by the social as biological – not identical to the biological – but comparable. The social is prone to disease, maladies, pathologies. • Abnormal forms are deviations from the normal course of things. Normally, the DoL spontaneously leads to well-being. But not always.
Anomie • Anomie: erosion of social solidarity. Individuals fail to see the way they’re connected to the larger moral and social system. Anomie – ‘normlessness’ – the absence of rules. Summer riots 2011. • Scale: when society becomes so large, distributed over vast spaces –becoming impossible for individuals to envision how they fit in: ‘The division of labour presupposes that the worker, far from remaining bent over his job, does not lose sight of his collaborators and interacts with them’. Foxconn – 120k employees
Anomie • Pace: some of these changes are too rapid: Large scale industry transforms… ‘[breakdown in]…relations between employers and workers. A greater fatigue of the nervous system, combined with the contagious influence of large agglomerations of men... Machines replace men; manufacturing replaces small workshops. The worker is regimented, separated from his family throughout the day; his life is even more separate from that of his employer, etc’ (DoL)
Anomie • Absence of regulative functions: Humans have insatiable, sometimes limitless desires – leading to incredible dissatisfaction. Our ambitions and aspirations need some controls, restraints: Anomie as infantilism: ‘A need, a desire, freed of all restraints, and all rule, no longer geared to some determinate objective, and through this some connection, limited and contained, can be nothing but a source of constant anguish… What gratification indeed can such a desire yield, since by definition it is incapable of being satisfied’ (DoL).
Forced division of labour • DoL dominated by ruling class. Owners force their own construction of the DoL on labourers. Production is extractive - serves elite interests rather than social solidarity. • Opposed to inherited wealth. Meritocracy. ‘If one class of society is obliged, in order to live, to take any price for its services, while another can abstain from such action thanks to resources at its disposal, which however, are not necessarily due to any social superiority, the second has an unjust advantage over the first… ’ (Durkheim, DoL)
Problems and criticisms • D steps back from this suggestion of society developing successively, progressively, sequentially through these kinds of stages. ‘He soon discarded the rather naïve evolutionary optimism that allowed him to believe that in due course organic solidarity would become self-regulating, that in time the division of labour would ‘give rise to rules which ensure the peaceful and regular co-operation of divided functions’’ (Lukes 167). • Cohesion isn’t necessarily a natural result of organic solidarity – it has to be fostered. Abnormal forms are possibly normal forms?
Problems and criticisms • The organic metaphor: DoL is probably more influenced by biology than in his later work (organic, remedies, social pathologies, illness and disease, evolution). • He steps back from the ‘natural’ • He actually rarely if ever refers to the Division of Labour again throughout much of the rest of his career.
