David Martin on a major study of Durkheim
Steven Lukes's study of Durkheim* is a model of exposition: clear, sequential and beautifully structured. It is also a model of scholarship in its range of reference, its evocation of the intellectual atmosphere in which Durkheim worked and in the collation and organisation of the criticisms which have been and can be made of his work. The framework of the book is intellectual biography, and since Durkhelm's biography was largely in his writings and in polemics about those writings •there is no special problem of integrating an intimate and personal aspect to a scholarly and public one. What Mr Lukes has provided is a carefully worked out chart of his subject's development, in which scholar or general reader can easily lay his finger on the exact location of whatever may be his particular concern. Up to now many students of Durkheim have received him filtered through various other writers, Talcott Parsons, Harry Alpert, Radcliffe-Brown, and Robert Nisbet, who were in part mining in Durkheim for their own purposes. Mr. Lukes gives a complete map of the mine.
The Durkheimian mine contains certain logical traps, particularly the trick of assuming precisely what is to be proved, certain misleading explosions of rhetoric and scientistic language, some exciting perspectives which lead one round in a large but tautologous circle, and broad simple tunnels which suddenly branch into innumerable and interconnecting subdivisions. Mr Lukes points out that the central communication link through all the Durkheimian workings is the distinction between social and individual, which simultaneously englobes the distinctions between moral rules and sensual appetites, concepts and sensations, sacred and secular, leaving only a relatively isolated and confused distinction between normal and pathological. But he has only to touch this central communication link with his neat analytic hammer for it to fragment in a multiplicity of distinct meanings. Mr Lukes is very good with his philosopher's hammer, here as in his previous writings. For example, he shows how social and individual includes the distinction between socially determined and biologically given, socially specific factors and general human nature, the behaviour and experi ence of associated individuals and of isolated individuals, altruistic and egocentric behaviour, thoughts and actions directed towards social and public objects as compared with those which are personal and private, factors coming from ' outside' the individual and those generated within his own consciousness. And beyond that, Durkheim's ' individual ' was variously the biological organism, an abstract notion such as economic man, a human being isolated from association, and the actual concrete person. One, two, three goes Mr Lukes's little hammer, and we have our Durkheim sorted. out.
But why should the concrete individual reading The Spectator care about Durkheim? He should care because Durkheim speaks to us about cooperation, isolation and self-destruction, about crime and punishment, about the myths and images that obscurely carry the burden and shape of our social forms, about the ties and rites that establish our communal identities and the conditions, stabilities and rules which are important for our personal identities. What he has to say is full of paradox .He believed that society was the fount and origin of religion and yet the religion of the future to which society was moving would take the individual as its prime sacred object. That moreover was his own religion. He didn't allow his dislike of individualistic interpretations of society to contaminate his respect for the individual. He further believed that society was the source of the compelling authority a: felt to reside in religious images and moral 0 rules, yet he described the primary rite of si his personal religion as freedom of 0 thought. He believed in science and in a sociology as the science of society and in the sociologist's role as distinct from the politician's role, yet Mr Lukes is able to describe him as above all a moralist. For all his advocacy of science (and because of it) he was a trenchant critic of rationalistic cc Ui at oi rn tic understandings of society. Durkheim was a t genius, who was influential in the Third 0 Republic and in founding a school, yet the v tenor of 'his thought is against any high d estimate of the role of genius in the processes of society. He cherished freedom and found its realisation in a proper respect for limits and stabilities. And he provided a sociologism to be placed alongside Marx's economism. The crucial r argument in Marx about man's work and economic activity shaping, limiting and t even determining his consciousness is E. paralleled in Durkheim. He wrote (turning Fustel ije Coulanges on his head) "it is social arrangements that explain the power and nature of the religious idea." It was a view he later modified in favour of greater autonomy for the religious (factor.
It is these paradoxes that allow one to see' why 'he has been so variously estimated, as positivist and metaphysician, atheist and mystic of the social, and father of conservative consensual sociology. They also allow us •to see how a man of the moderate non-revolutionary left and a Dreyfusard can provide scholarly moulds for use by people as diverse as Mary Douglas and Basil Bernstein. How exactly is his work capable of utilisation within . conservative 'framework? Well, as against the prophets of class warfare he stressed the common elements in culture binding societies together across the fissures of class and status and as against the anarchists he emphasises the propriety o. stable rules and the. necessity of roles. This doesn't mean that he can be useful to every kind of conservative any more than he is palatable to every type of radical. Radicalism and conservatism both have an anarchic wing: on the one hand laissezfaire, capitalistic liberalism and individualism, and on the other hand its contemporary transmutation in the proponents of liberation. The former find a Durkheim who destroys their pre-suppositions about self-made men and the impact of the great man, while the latter find a Durkheim who rejects the rhetoric of liberation, especially when deployed regardless of context, as ultimately selfdefeating. Lukes records how when Durkheim once declared that a man should learn to play on his role as on an organ an 'aesthetic individualist' walked out. They are still walking out. It is easiest to see the combination of political radicalism and cultural conservatism in his views on marriage. Nowadays Victorian views on marriage are often held to be logically, psychologically and historically allied 'to conservative politics. The argument runs: the Victorians were capitalists, hypocrites and authoritarians; they held rigorist views on marriage; therefore all instructed devotees of radical liberation should reject the family. This is backed up for good measure by rather unspecific references to anthropological material about the range of regulation (and lack of it) governing sexual attachments and the care of offspring in other societies. Durkheim was a Victorian, and he both conducted a careful survey of the anthropological material and worked from first sociological principles. He concluded that marriage ought in principle to be indissoluble though there were clearly cases in which divorce would be a proper resort. He thought that once marriage was thought of, entered upon and left lightly and wantonly, it would cease to limit man's desires and be unable to prevent a sequence of constant novelties ending in weariness, disgust and disillusion. Marriage conceived of and socially promulgated as a life-long attachment provided an inner equilibrium of soul more likely to provide the basis of moral health and happiness than alternatives. Most startling to the contemporary mind would be his suggestion that the two participants in a marriage are not at any given time necessarily the best judges of the happiness of their mutual condition. For him marriage was a hard school of ' tolerance, the health of which rested on firm structures of law and opinion as to the nature of familial duty. It was the Kantian imperative resting on the power of society. The family was a moral centre radiating into almost every other sector of social life. As for sexuality his views were equally austere: he did not accept the open sewer theory of public sexual health. Sex for him had a mysterious character not for open display or everyday conversational recourse. Religion embodied this by tr ,ating sex almost as an element in the sacred. "The confessional symbol may imperfectly express the moral reality to which it corresponds, but that is not to say that it is devoid of all reality." And here we come to his theory of religion.
I Just as Durkheim was a socialist suggesting the rationale of cultural conservatism so he was an agnostic Jew demonstrating the fundamental role of religion. His approach was a paraphrase of St. Paul: He whom ye ignorantly worship it I declare unto you.' The ' It ' was society. Morality and religion and even the categories of thought derived their authority from the overarching fact of society. Gods, sacred objects and totems are transmutations of the power of the social and refracting mirrors of the dynamism and forms of sociation. The theory is clearly overstated, but religion does indeed often act as an anchor of social identity and its sacred symbols are coalesced with or placed collaterally to the symbols which define identity and the foci of social power. Rituals reaffirm identity and merely to ironise them is an index of a boundless individualism inimical to society per se. Of course religion is also more than this: it forms and is formed by social conflicts, it flows in an interior life running close to the springs of sexuality and of awe at the natural creation, and it celebrates the personal conscience as well as the 'conscience collective.'
The book Suicide gives one more direct access to his methodology, his basic postulates concerning the nature of the social and his ideas about man's need for limits and social integration. His theory was a form of social psychology locating the factors which impair mental health in social bonds which are either too loose or too all-absorbent. These bonds were objective and exterior to the individual, thus constituting the specific analytical level of sociology. Man needs to be attached to social goals and objectives transcending his own. Psychic health is not rooted in personal vagary; nor for that matter is it found in an all-pervasive collective awareness or regimentation. It lies rather in limits set on desires through integration into families, associations, religious communities. Definition, order, discipline, just authority and social integration were the bases of personal integration.
The Division of Labour Is the third of the trio of books by which he is best known. Here he uses the type and extent of law as an indicator of the basic phases in the development of the division of labour. A minimum division was accompanied by repressive and expiatory laws, many of them legal guardians to the sacred; a maximum division was accom panied by laws which were largely a medium for cooperative interchange and administration. Crime was an offence to the conscience collective and punishment a reaffirmation of it. The social function of punishment was the maintenance of cohesion. Here we shift to Durkheim's pioneering perspective on criminology and to the adumbration of social functionalism for which he, with Spencer, was responsible. Punishment may not deter or reform the criminal but it functions to shore up common standards.
A functional explanation of punishment in general is one thing; a functional explanation of crime another. Durkheim eventually came to see crime as not merely negative but contributing to public health and even sometimes anticipating the morality of the future. Crime could only cease where the conscience collective was so dominant as to prevent all innovation. Obviously there is here a moral problem in describing a socially necessary and useful set of acts as individually reprehensible; and to defend the use of language suggesting moral choice and individual responsibility on quasi-Durkheimian grounds that it too is functionally useful has its difficulties. These elements of structural and cultural determinism in Durkheim are perhaps those which most bother us today.
Durkheim's most pervasive influence has been on sociology rather than on society. He only has one revolution, the Turkish, partly to his credit. His lack of social influence is a major misfortune and the glib contemporary debate about man and morals would gain enormously from a soaking in Durkheim's sociology. Steven Lukes's exemplary volume is a major contribution to the wider dissemination of Durkheim within both sociology and society at large.
Professor Martin is head of the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
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