The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim

By Gregor Fitzi

The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim intends to offer different practical attempts to build on Durkheim’s legacy and investigate the issues and controversies that characterise contemporary societies and thus contribute to develop further this path of critical enquiry into ‘classical sociology’.

The contributions to this volume provide new insights into Durkheim’s classical texts and juxtapose them with the reconstruction of his lectures and lesser known writings to offer a wider understanding of his oeuvre. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839981210

Book preview

The Anthem Companion to

Émile Durkheim

Anthem Companions to Sociology

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA /

Australian Catholic University, Australia /

University of Potsdam, Germany

Titles in the Series

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Karl Marx

The Anthem Companion to Maurice Halbwachs

The Anthem Companion to Max Weber

The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu

The Anthem Companion to Raymond Aron

The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

The Anthem Companion to Robert K. Merton

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

Praise for the Series

The Anthem Companions to Sociology offers wide ranging and masterly overviews of the works of major sociologists. The volumes in the series provide authoritative and critical appraisals of key figures in modern social thought. These books, written and edited by leading figures, are essential additional reading on the history of sociology.

— Gerard Delanty, Professor of Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton

This ambitious series provides an intellectually thoughtful introduction to the featured social theorists and offers a comprehensive assessment of their legacy. Each edited collection synthesizes the many dimensions of the respective theorist’s contributions and sympathetically ponders the various nuances in and the broader societal context for their body of work. The series will be appreciated by seasoned scholars and students alike.

— Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of New Hampshire

The orchestration and emergence of the Anthem Companions to Sociology represent a formidable and invaluable achievement. Each companion explores the scope, ingenuity, and conceptual subtleties of the works of a theorist indispensable to the sociological project. The editors and contributors for each volume are the very best in their fields, and they guide us towards the richest, most creative seams in the writings of their thinker. The results, strikingly consistent from one volume to the next, brush away the years, reanimate what might have been lost, and bring numerous rays of illumination to the most pressing challenges of the present.

— Rob Stones, Professor of Sociology, Western Sydney University, Australia

The Anthem Companions, those that have appeared already and those that are to come, will give every sociologist a handy and authoritative guide to all the giants of their discipline.

— Stephen Mennell, Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin

Each volume of the Anthem Companions to Sociology examines comprehensively not only a theorist’s distinct approach and unique contributions, but also situates each in reference to the major parameters of mainstream theoretical schools and traditions. This remarkable Series in addition throws into high relief the singular features of modern societies. It promises to set the standard for discussions of Sociology’s long-term development and belongs on the shelves of every social scientist.

— Stephen Kalberg, Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Boston University

This valuable series covers both familiar figures in the history of sociology (such as Max Weber and, prospectively, Marx and Durkheim) and less often treated ones such as Arendt and Troeltsch who are also highly relevant to sociology, broadly conceived. In these books, leading scholars explore important but often neglected aspects of their subjects’ work.

— William Outhwaite, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Newcastle University, UK

The Anthem Companion to

Émile Durkheim

Edited by

Gregor Fitzi and Nicola Marcucci

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2022 Gregor Fitzi and Nicola Marcucci editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953531

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-119-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-119-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an ebook.

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Explorations with the New Durkheim

Gregor Fitzi and Nicola Marcucci

Part 1 Intellectual Contexts and Epistemological Issues

Chapter 1.Back to the Future: Durkheim and the Aporia of Sociological Theory

Susan Stedman Jones

Chapter 2.On the Autonomy of Social and Mental Entities: A Paraphrased Translation of ‘Individual and Collective Representations’

R. Keith Sawyer

Part 2 Education, Moral Regulation and Religion

Chapter 3.Education, Social Link and Social Change: A Survey of Durkheim’s Pedagogical Works

Giovanni Paoletti

Chapter 4.Moral Sociology: The Actuality of a Research Programme

Gregor Fitzi

Chapter 5.Affinities, Antipathies and the Buddhadharma: The Genesis of Durkheim’s Concept of Religion

Ivan Strenski

Part 3 Law and Politics

Chapter 6.Law and Justice in Durkheim’s Sociology

Roger Cotterrell

Chapter 7.Justice as Institution Solidarity and the Obligation of Modern Societies According to Durkheim

Nicola Marcucci

Chapter 8.Towards a Sociological Socialism: Durkheim’s Political Perspective in Retrospect

Francesco Callegaro

Part 4 Social and Political Controversies

Chapter 9.Durkheim’s Theory of the Modern Family: Freedom, the State, and Sociology

Stefania Ferrando

Chapter 10.Durkheim and the Industrial Remaking of the World Autonomy with and against Nature

Pierre Charbonnier

Index

Contributors

Francesco Callegaro PhD of political philosophy at CESPRA (EHESS) is currently a professor of philosophy, sociology and conceptual history at the UNSAM, Buenos Aires (Argentina). His research project aims to renew political philosophy in contact with the human and social sciences, especially psychoanalysis and sociology, by explaining their conceptual and normative implications, as a condition for a better understanding and critique of modernity. He has published several articles on the history of political philosophy and sociology, the epistemology of the social sciences, social theory and contemporary pragmatism. He is the author of a study on Durkheim’s sociology: La science politique des modernes. Durkheim, la sociologie et le projet d’autonomie (2015) and the co-editor of Le social à l’esprit. Dialogues avec Vincent Descombes (2020).

Pierre Charbonnier is a philosopher, researcher at CNRS and member of LIER-FYT (EHESS, Paris). He is the author of La fin d’un grand partage (2015), and his research concerns an enviornamental history of political ideas.

Roger Cotterrell, educated as a lawyer and as a sociologist, is Anniversary Professor of Legal Theory at Queen Mary University of London and a fellow of both the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. He has written extensively on sociology of law, legal theory and social theory. Among his books are Sociological Jurisprudence: Juristic Thought and Social Inquiry (2018), Emile Durkheim: Justice, Morality and Politics (2010), Living Law: Studies in Legal and Social Theory (2008), Law, Culture and Society: Legal Ideas in the Mirror of Social Theory (2006) and Emile Durkheim: Law in a Moral Domain (1999).

Stefania Ferrando is a post-doctoral researcher at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (projet ANR Remous) in Paris. She has taught political philosophy and political science at the Institut d’études politiques in Strasbourg and at the Universities of Besançon. She works on the relationship between feminism, socialism and sociological tradition. Her post-doctoral research is devoted to the relationship between social movements and monotheistic religions. She has published a book on Michel Foucault and is about to publish one on the French feminist movement in the nineteenth century. She has also published several papers on sociology and feminism.

Gregor Fitzi is an associate researcher at the Centre Georg Simmel, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. After his PhD in sociology at the University of Bielefeld, he was an assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Heidelberg; interim full professor of Sociological Theory at the University of Bielefeld; and co-director of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity, at the University of Potsdam. Among his recent publications are the following: The Challenge of Modernity: Simmel’s Sociological Theory (2019); and with Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber’s Politics as a Profession. Special issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology, 4/2019.

Nicola Marcucci is a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Sociology in the New School for Social Research, New York City, and a member of the LIER at EHESS in Paris. He has published widely in modern moral and political philosophy, sociology and critical theory. Among his recent publications on Durkheim, the following can be mentioned: ‘Durkheim in Germany: The Performance of a Classic’, with G. Fitzi, special issue, Journal of Classical Sociology (2017); Europe as a Political Society and Emile Durkheim, the Federalist Principle and the Ideal of Cosmopolitan Justice, with F. Callegaro (2018). His research investigates the sociological transformations of philosophical thought and modern critique. He is currently editing a book on Durkheim and critical theory and completing a monograph on philosophical enlightenment and the rise of classical sociology.

Giovanni Paoletti is a full professor of history of philosophy at the University of Pisa. His research concerns the history of modern philosophy, political thought at the time of French Revolution and the relations between sociology and philosophy in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. He is the author of several publications about Durkheim, including the book Durkheim et la philosophie: Représentation, réalité et lien social (2012).

Keith Sawyer is the Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies group creativity, symbolic interaction and social emergence. He has written over eighty journal articles and is the author or editor of 17 books, including Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems (2005), Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation (2003) and The Creative Classroom: Innovative Teaching for 21st-Century Learners (2019). His theory of collaborative emergence brings together sociological theory, ethnomethodology and philosophy to help explain the relations between individuals, groups and societies.

Susan Stedman Jones had her first degree in philosophy, and she then studied postgraduate anthropology, both at University College, London. She completed a PhD in philosophy ‘From Kant to Durkheim’. She was appointed to teach ethics and social philosophy at Goldsmiths College University of London, where she was the convenor of the philosophy of social science course. She received a British Academy research award. She now pursues independent research and divides her time between London and Paris and is a member of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, University of Oxford. She is on the editorial board of Durkheimian Studies/Etudes Durkheimiennes. She is the author of Durkheim Reconsidered (2001). And she has contributed to Durkheim and Representations, edited by W. S. F. Pickering (2000). Her articles include ‘From varieties to elementary forms, William James and Émile Durkheim on religious life’, Journal of Classical Sociology (2003); ‘Truth and social relations, Durkheim and the critique of pragmatism’, Durkheimian Studies/Etudes Durkheimiennes (2004); ‘Action and the question of the categories – a critique of Rawls’, Durkheimian Studies/Etudes Durkheimiennes (2006); ‘Functionalism of mind and functionalism of society; the concept of conscience and Durkheim’s Division of Social Labour’, Durkheimian Studies/Etudes Durkheimiennes (2007); ‘Durkheim, the question of violence and the Paris Commune of 1871’, International Social Science Journal (2009); and ‘Forms of thought and forms of society, Durkheim and the question of the categories in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse L’Année sociologique’ (2012).

Ivan Strenski is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside. He has authored 18 books – one translated into Arabic and another into both Chinese and Korean. His 120 articles engage theoretical issues with Talal Asad, Mircea Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, Malinowski, Salomon Reinach, Alfred Loisy, Albert and Jean Réville, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss. Recurrent themes in his books and articles are political myth and sacrifice, gift, ritual and key methodological themes in the study of religion. His Durkheimian studies seek to locate issues like gift theory, neo-hegelian philosophy, concepts of religion and sacrifice in the historical contexts of Durkheim’s France.

Introduction

EXPLORATIONS WITH THE NEW DURKHEIM

Gregor Fitzi and Nicola Marcucci

No one would deny Émile Durkheim an essential and inaugural place in the history of the social sciences. No reconstruction of classical sociology can overlook the relevance of his legacy for anthropology and sociology. At the same time, specialists acknowledge that Durkheim has long been diminished by a reception that underestimates the emancipatory relevance of his sociology, compromises its historical and critical contents, and misinterprets its political relevance. Not to mention a general forgetting that Durkheim led a group of researchers who aimed to systematically reorganize the division of intellectual labour in the field of social sciences and to rethink their relation to philosophy and critique. The patrimony and meaning of this collective enterprise has been forgotten because of the absence of institutional continuity and the intellectual dispersion that the Durkheim school experienced in the aftermath of the First World War. Later, the legacy of the French sociological and anthropological school found ‘protection’ and intellectual shelter under the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, which helped to silence its originality – especially its political and historical contents ‒ by integrating Durkheim’s and Mauss’s systematic theories into a de-historicized conception of human rationality. Add in the fact that Parsons made Durkheim one of the four pillars of the sociological canon, simplifying his complex thought in the process, and it is easy to see why so many have a stereotyped idea of Durkheim’s sociology.

For some decades now, researchers have begun confronting and revising the traditional image of a sociologist who has a strong epistemological continuity with positivism, who is ideologically conservative and whose abstract functionalism often lacks a proper historical understanding of political institutions. Starting in the 1970s, the collective work of revision and rediscovery of a ‘new Durkheim’ has begun unveiling the richness of Durkheim’s sociology, freeing his legacy from the limits of previous interpretations. This pars destruens of the older reception of Durkheim – or, better, this pars restitutens of its original value – has been fundamental in the rediscovery of the thematic pluralism and conceptual complexity of Durkheim’s thinking.

The general reappraisal of his intellectual enterprise (Lukes 1972; Alun Jones 1999; Smith and Alexander 2005; Strenski 2006; Joas and Pettenkofer 2020) includes many different aspects of Durkheim’s oeuvre: his theory of gender and family relations (Roth 1989; Shope 1994; Pedersen 2001); his idea of collective mental life and the social constitution of the categories of thinking (Rawls 2005; Schmaus 2004); his innovative conception of modern political institutions and political sociology (Lacroix 1981; Cladis 1992; Gane 1992; Müller 1983; Callegaro 2015); his sociology of morality (Watts Miller 1996); his sociology of religion and its relevance for the history of Judaism (Strensky 1997; Karsenti 2017); his reflection on education and pedagogy (Filloux 1994; Walford and Pickering 1998; Cladis 2001); his confrontation with the modern philosophical tradition (Stedman Jones 2001; Gross and Alun Jones 2004; Paoletti 2012); the relevance of his reflection on law and punishment (Garland 1990; Cotterrell 1999); the importance and originality of his account of the pragmatist tradition (Joas 1993; Karsenti 2012; Lemieux 2012); the systemic ambition of his economical sociology (Steiner 2011); his contribution to the philosophy of social sciences (Descombes 2000; Karsenti 2015); the philosophical and psychological innovation of his theory of collective effervescence and social emergence (Joas 2001; Sawyer 2002); and last but not least the significance of his canonization in a variety of national sociological traditions beyond Parsons’s canon (Fitzi and Marcucci 2017; Terrier 2017) and his contemporary relevance in rethinking critical theory (Marcucci 2021).

The achievements and effects of this long, collective international work of revision are undeniable: they have created the common ground for a proper understanding of Durkheim today. However, while Durkheim’s sociological oeuvre is now received differently, the way his thinking is used and operationalized still largely accords with previous interpretations. Thousands of introductions to sociology have been written, sociological collections organized, research managed, syllabi designed all following the canonical reception of Durkheim. Likewise, classical contributions to sociology are based on receiving, operationalizing and canonizing some of the misleading aspects of the interpretation of Durkheim. In this regard, our understanding is that the possible uses of a classic deriving from a fallacious legacy are hard to be confronted because they are confirmed and reproduced along years of reception. In other words, the legacy of a classic cannot be challenged and transformed solely by intellectual history: transformation of the canon and the research practices deriving from it are also needed. This task can only come from generations of studies that overcome the sole terrain of intellectual history and pure theory.

A companion that – like all companions – reflects different sensibilities and different ways of understanding the relevance of the subject matter cannot achieve this. That said, what links the contributions in this Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim is a shared conviction of the necessity of moving forward and contributing to a new phase characterized by a new vision of Durkheim’s theories. In order to break with their canonical uses in social sciences, it is necessary to show their relevance in understanding and coping with the social and political issues characterizing our time as well as their ability to transform our research practices by soliciting new forms of sociological imagination. Another way to say this is that – with a few exceptions – what has been lacking is thinkers using Durkheim’s oeuvre innovatively, inaugurating what we can call the pars costruens of his reception. This is the main aim that this Companion intends to contribute.

The contributions to this volume provide new insights into Durkheim’s classical texts and juxtapose them with the reconstruction of his lectures and lesser known writings to offer a wider understanding of his oeuvre. The volume is divided into four parts that expand the focus of research from sociology to its different facets and then to its interaction with other disciplinary domains.

The opening part, ‘Intellectual Contexts and Epistemological Issues’, is dedicated to the reciprocal action of Durkheim’s thought with contemporary intellectual debates and epistemological orientations in social sciences, cultural studies, psychology and the philosophy of the mind. Both studies reconstruct elements of continuity between Durkheim and these orientations while underlining the possibility of reading his positions as a contribution to innovate the theoretical spectrum of contemporary debates. Susan Stedman Jones’s ‘Back to the Future: Durkheim and the Aporia of Sociological Theory’ analyses post-structuralist and phenomenological sociology’s critique of Durkheim’s alleged positivist scientism. The chapter shows that Durkheim has acknowledged issues that constitute central features of post-positivist sociologies. Yet, unlike them, Durkheim’s work is found able to address the complexity of high differentiated societies, because it develops a theoretical apparatus equal to the challenge. Thus, it offers a way out of post-modernist aporetical thought, by drawing analytically on the interconnectedness of the social world.

To highlight how Durkheim contributes to the ongoing debate on neurobiological reductionism in philosophy of mind, Keith Sawyer asks the question of the ‘autonomy of mental and social entities’. The chapter is a paraphrased new translation of Durkheim’s article ‘Individual and Collective Representations’ that shows how Durkheim’s argument prefigures many of the non-reductionist theories of philosophers of mind that have been prominent from the 1980s on. Durkheim makes a today current psychological argument in rejecting the reductionist and materialist epistemologies of mind. Furthermore, he argues that although the mind is based in the biological brain, it is not reducible to it. Accordingly, social laws and properties are not reducible to properties of individual behaviour. Sawyer’s translation makes clear the parallels that the terminology used by previous translators and the difference in the intellectual context in Durkheim’s time and today’s debates have obscured.

The second part, ‘Education, Moral Regulation and Religion’, takes up the long undervalued importance of Durkheim’s theory of pedagogy and education, the specificity of his reflection on the sociological analysis of normative societal structuration and the originality of his sociology of religion. Recent research has shown that there is more interconnection between different aspects of Durkheim’s oeuvre than traditional reception has admitted. Exploring the reciprocal engagements between his theory building on educational, moral and religious social structuration makes it possible to see innovative contributions that relate to current societal issues. Giovanni Paoletti’s ‘Education, Social Link and Social Change: A Survey of Durkheim’s Pedagogical Works’ addresses Durkheim’s ambivalent relation to this aspect of his professional life. Durkheim’s pedagogical work is often classed as minor, but this judgement obscures a crucial link with his sociological work that the chapter reconstructs. Durkheim’s works on education (some published posthumously) shine light on one of the main axes of his sociological analysis, that of socialization and social bounds. Further, Durkheim’s Lectures on Pedagogy offers substantial contributions to the theory of individual consciousness and the dynamics of historical transformations, paving the way for his final masterpiece: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

The following chapter, Gregor Fitzi’s ‘Moral Sociology: The Actuality of a Research Programme’, reconstructs how normative societal stabilization emerges as a central concern of Durkheim’s sociology as soon as it is released from its Parsonian interpretation. The social phenomenon of suicide constitutes the symptom for a deeper crisis of complex societies, showing that not only from the viewpoint of Durkheim’s methodology but already in his Division of Labour, he sees the capitalist economy as a pathological form of organic division of labour. The resulting programme for an ethics of economic behaviour, as Durkheim describes it in his lectures on Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, offers an analytical strategy capable of facing today’s phenomena of normative intermittency. Ivan Strenski’s ‘Affinities, Antipathies and the Buddhadharma: The Genesis of Durkheim’s Concept of Religion’ asks about the manifold influences that conditioned Durkheim’s notion of religion and determines that it emerges less from the social science of his day than from his relations with major ideological and religious tendencies then engaged in the study of religion in Paris. The chapter shows in particular how Durkheim’s theory of religion emerged from attractions to and struggles with scholarly and religious communities that dominated the discursive landscape of the study of religion in Paris’s École Pratique des Hautes Études. The novelty of Durkheim’s concept of religion lies in its inclusion of Buddhism under the definition of religion. As the chapter shows, this move had a number of consequences for the development of a sociological conception of religion.

The third part, ‘Law and Politics’, follows Durkheim’s reflection and disciplinary exchanges at the intersection between law, political theory and sociology. These interventions show how the legal and political potential of Durkheim’s theoretical work can be understood only by properly situating the radical conceptual shifts that his sociology entailed for the understanding of law, moral and political obligation, and socialism. In ‘Law and Justice in Durkheim’s Sociology’, Roger Cotterrell reconstructs Durkheim’s lesser-known writings on law. Cotterrell denies the classical thesis that Durkheim’s mature thought replaced his early concern with law for a concern with religion and shows that in The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim discusses law as an indicator for different types of social solidarity. In his later work, he treats law as one of the fundamental expressions of social structure, and inquiring into the sociological character of law becomes one of his major concerns after Division of Labour. The sharper focus on law’s sociological significance is developed alongside a changed view of individualism as the place of shared ultimate values in modern society. A thought experiment thus emerges, in which law is assumed to have a moral vocation to serve the social need of solidarity.

In ‘Justice as Institution: Solidarity and the Obligation of Moderns According to Durkheim’, Nicola Marcucci refers to the paradigmatic polarization between law and justice that stems from Hobbes’s political thought. Durkheim’s contribution to a new understanding of the contractual tradition is a radical critique of this polarization that aims to highlight a different and constitutive tension between law and justice. Durkheim’s criticism of contract theories reframes the juridical order through the notion of solidarity ‒ which he considered the unspoken premise of modern obligation. The institution of contract must be considered the modern way of thinking the relations between society, individuality, property and work. For this reason, the institution of contract is what allows for the emergence of a new conception of justice that calls into question ‒ by way of the notion of ‘just contract’ – the formal premises that ground contract itself. When characterized in this way, social justice joins the notion of solidarity in reframing the liberal conception of obligation.

Francesco Callegaro’s ‘Towards a Sociological Socialism: Durkheim’s Political Perspective in Retrospect’ enquires into Durkheim’s position on the relationship between social science and politics relative to the historical development of socialism. Contrary to the traditional interpretation, the chapter shows how Durkheim critically reconstructs the internal link between socialism and sociology. In his unfolding of the heritage of the Saint-Simonian tradition, Durkheim understood socialism as the guiding political principle aiming to rationally confront the political problems that the French Revolution had left unanswered. Yet in order to develop this potential, socialism cannot just express an identification with its political goals; it requires the greater degree of awareness that only the reflexivity of social science offers. By addressing this issue, the chapter makes a significant contribution to current debates that aim to rearticulate the idea of socialism.

The last part, ‘Social and Political Controversies’, focuses on two main aspects of Durkheim’s thought that connect to the contemporary agenda: gender equality and environmental crisis. The authors understand that Durkheimian sociology can’t offer straightforward ideological answers to these issues, but they show how Durkheim’s thought connects to the controversies these issues entail for the modern understanding of human freedom. Stefania Ferrando’s ‘Durkheim’s Theory of the Modern Family: Freedom, the State, and Sociology’ focuses on how Durkheim addresses the issue of women’s rights across his scattered writings on the sociology of family. The family offers a unique vantage point for understanding the link between freedom and membership that characterizes modern societies, and it lets Durkheim raise three major questions about freedom, the state and sociological knowledge. However, in his sociology, it is particularly difficult to frame freedom as it regards women. With historical and conceptual acuteness, the chapter considers how Durkheim developed and changed crucial aspects of his conception of familial and gender relations during the contemporary debate on divorce law. By minimizing the role of the feminist movement, Durkheim’s analysis shows his lack of understanding of its emancipatory content despite feminism’s political and intellectual centrality in the Saint-Simonian socialist tradition he made his own. Nevertheless, his sociology of familial relations also has potential, because of its ability to revise our understanding of the sexual and social division of labour. Inquiring into the relationship between the state, the individual and the peculiarly intermediate body that is the family provides better insight into this matter.

Pierre Charbonnier’s ‘Durkheim and the Industrial Remaking of the World: Autonomy with and against Nature’ develops the question of environmental issues in Durkheim’s work. Durkheim’s thought finds itself in a difficult position vis-à-vis today’s ecological movement, because he did not make an explicit contribution to the environmental question. Yet, in the perspective of environmental history and ecological political philosophy, the analysis of The Division of Social Labour can be understood as a reflection from a period characterized by the massive incorporation of fossils fuels to maintain social coexistence. It is thus possible to question the internal mechanisms of Durkheim’s thought about the relations between nature and society, starting from his account of the general relation between sociology and industrial society. Seen in this way, Durkheim appears closer to contemporary reflections on the limits of development as defined in direct opposition to the neoliberal horizon. His thought offers an alternative understanding of the issue that goes beyond the ‘economical imperatives’ of modern society and the necessity of liberating labour, recognizing thus the ambivalent role of industrial labour in promoting an awareness of the necessity of cooperation and of collectively regulating industrial appropriation of natural resources.

We hope this brief synopsis of the essays collected in this volume shows how they accord with the spirit that the research on the ‘new Durkheim’ has initiated. This Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim intends to offer different practical attempts to build on Durkheim’s legacy and investigate the issues and controversies that characterize contemporary societies and thus contribute to develop further this path of critical enquiry into ‘classical sociology’.

References

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Cladis, Mark S. 1992. A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism: Emile Durkheim and Contemporary Social Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 2001. Durkheim and Foucault: Perspectives on Education and Punishment, New York: Berghahn Books.

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Part 1

Intellectual Contexts and Epistemological Issues

Chapter One

BACK TO THE FUTURE: DURKHEIM AND THE APORIA OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Susan Stedman Jones

Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that the past 2,000 years of philosophy were a series of footnotes to Plato. Similarly, we can see sociology in the past 100 years as a series of footnotes to Durkheim – in both a positive and a negative sense. In the responses to his thought, we find a number of accusations which have been built up, through repetition, into a standard view of his failures. So for British ethno-methodology, he ignores signs, gestures, and language, excludes subjectivity and ignores the subject–object relation (Walsh 1972) and lacks a theory of communication (Silverman 1985). These accusations are false, but damaging. (I will address the source of these misunderstandings below, and I suggest that they are rooted in Durkheim’s infamous methodological strictures about treating social facts as ‘things’ and from the ‘outside’.) What is being presented in these critiques is a ‘way of thinking’ about Durkheim’s project. Here, there is a constitution of prejudice which is similar to the formation of social facts for Durkheim for these critiques are repeated in teaching and publication. It is ‘repetition’ which gives ‘ways of thinking’ a kind of ‘consistency’, which thereby acquire a kind of ‘form’ and ‘a body’ (1895a, 9/54). These are a form of theoretical ritual whereby he has become a negative totem for post-positivist sociology. And when we add the accusations of holism, determinism and conservative functionalism, then the founder is ritually buried.

‘Durkheim,’ said Charles Lemert, ‘like most of his age, is dead. Like few others, his body of work lives on to haunt the present’ (Lemert 2008, 8). But in what does this haunting consist? My suggestions are the following: Firstly, he is held as the originator of sociological functionalism. But what is really involved here and do the critiques of functionalism actually apply to him? Secondly, the rationalism of the Durkheimian project would appear to be swept away by post-modernism and post-structuralism. And thirdly, for the verstehen and the phenomenological traditions, he is a shade to be exorcised. In each of these cases, I will show that Durkheim should be recalled to life: when rightly understood, he has answers to the critiques addressed to him and further can be seen to address the aporia of these theories themselves. When rightly understood, his theory not only can be seen to have anticipated central features of these but also can call others out for their inadequacy. In this sense, the ghost of Durkheim stands in judgement of the subject which he founded.

Theory after Durkheim I: Functionalism?’

The structural functionalism of