A few years ago I was planning a book on market capitalism—one that would demonstrate its inestimable virtues. But in a moment of candour it occurred to me that I had not exposed myself sufficiently to the arguments of the market's critics. In particular, I had not read any sociologists. So, reluctantly, I bought some works by Emile Durkheim, the French founding father of modern sociology. They would be tedious and imprecise, I feared, but they could surely do me no lasting harm. A few afternoons in Durkheim's company would salve my conscience without altering my convictions.
I was wrong. Reading Durkheim helped to initiate a process of intellectual change that left me more sensitive to the market's failings than most of my contemporaries. When I encountered him, sociology had already been out of fashion for at least two decades. So it was hardly surprising that few shared my enthusiasm for Durkheim's tracts. Moreover, I would be the first to concede that some sociology is verbose and poorly argued. Sociology is still regarded as an undemanding subject at school and university, so it probably attracts some undisciplined minds.
But Durkheim was not just any sociologist. Most budding intellectuals would concede the desirability of a passing familiarity with the ideas of Plato in philosophy, Locke in political theory and Keynes in economics. They should add Durkheim to their reading lists. And they should not fear thickets of impenetrable prose: he writes with the same lucid charm as the British empiricists. He is occasionally dogmatic, but he always backs his claims with rational arguments.
Yet Durkheim is not merely a powerful thinker with timeless appeal. He has something important to say to us. He wrote his major works—texts that helped to lay the foundations of modern sociology—during the belle époque decades before 1914 when the world was conducting its first experiment in globalisation. There are striking parallels between that liberal era and our own. In recent decades, governments have deregulated markets, cut taxes and privatised state industries. All this has unleashed an aggressive new strand of global capitalism. Durkheim was writing at a time of comparable social upheaval. Then as now, people saw market forces as threatening social solidarity and traditional ways of life. There are other parallels. Darwin was as popular when Durkheim was writing as the new Darwinism is today. In fact, Durkheim developed his early ideas partly in opposition to those of Herbert Spencer, who was renowned both as a Victorian exponent of market liberalism and for trying to apply Darwinian theory in the social domain.
In Durkheim's day, most of capitalism's critics were socialists. Yet he was as alive to the errors and oversimplifications of the socialist left as he was to those of the libertarian right. Having seen the results of Marxist coups, few now have much sympathy for traditional socialism. But Durkheim's critique of capitalism is not thereby compromised. He wanted to regulate markets because he felt they encourage selfishness, but he never saw a centrally planned economy as a solution.
Durkheim introduced the concept of "anomie"—the idea that the individual can suffer from having too much freedom, from being too little regulated by social institutions. He helped to ensure that sociology would have a permanent place in the university curriculum, not least by emphasising the importance of empirical research. And towards the end of his career, he advanced an influential new theory of the origins of religion. Although not a household name, Durkheim probably exerted as much influence over 20th-century social thought as any thinker except Marx. He cast his spell over British anthropologists, American sociologists and French structuralists, while also influencing criminologists, theologians and educationalists.
Born in Epinal in Lorraine in 1858, David Emile Durkheim was descended from a line of rabbis. He spent some time at a rabbinical school, but decided as a teenager not to follow the family tradition. In other respects he was a product of his frugal, orthodox family, and of the tight-knit Jewish community of Alsace-Lorraine. Colleagues remarked on his austere lifestyle, his elevated sense of duty and his appetite for hard work. His later emphasis on solidarity and communal values was entirely consistent with his early upbringing. He was a patriot, having grown up in a region scarred by the Franco-Prussian war. And, like many scholars of his generation, he badly wanted to help to modernise and strengthen the French state.
With that in mind, he left Epinal for Paris, and secured a place at the École Normale Supérieure. As was customary for intending academics, he then taught philosophy in provincial lycées for several years, before gaining his first university post. From the start, he saw himself as a social scientist rather than a philosopher, and his first academic post was a specially created lectureship in social science and education at the University of Bordeaux. In 15 happy years there, he published three of his four major works: The Division of Labour in Society, The Rules of Socio-logical Method, and Suicide.
He finally gained a post—in education—at the Sorbonne in 1902, but did not become a full professor until 1906. And it was only in 1913, after the publication of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, his late masterpiece, that his professorship was extended to embrace sociology. That France's leading sociologist had to toil so long in the provinces, and content himself with chairs in pedagogy, illustrated the low esteem in which sociology was then held. This was an individualistic age, like our own. And Durkheim courted hostility by insisting that the social order be treated as a reality in its own right, rather than as something entirely explicable in terms of the free choices of the individuals within it. But he saw the climate of opinion shift radically during his lifetime, and he became a leading influence on Parisian intellectual life.
Unlike Marx, Durkheim did not regard private property as inherently evil. Yet he was at one with socialists in condemning the strife, discord and inequality of industrial society. He lamented the apparent lack of solidarity between different social classes. He condemned the decline of traditional morality. And he saw the sharp rise in the suicide rate during the 19th century as evidence that greater prosperity was not creating the happiness or social harmony that the Enlightenment philosophes had predicted. Today such concerns find an echo in the work of contemporary economists, such as Richard Layard of the LSE, who argue that rising wealth does not necessarily promote happiness.
Durkheim agreed with Adam Smith on one decisive issue. He regarded the division of labour as the most significant of historical trends. He believed that modern societies differ from primitive or traditional societies mainly because this process is much further advanced. In primitive societies, the pattern of life for those within a given social category—young adult males, for instance—tends to be similar. This similarity of function, Durkheim argued, gave rise to a similar mentality. And by virtue of this similar mentality, they empathise with one another. Durkheim termed this "mechanical solidarity"—because the social group has a uniform structure, like an inorganic substance.
But once labour is divided, and people begin to specialise they become less similar. They share fewer beliefs and desires, and they acquire different tendencies and dispositions. Differences in function give rise to differences in attitude. The farmer, tailor, priest, teacher and soldier not only live different lives: they think differently. And as a result, mechanical solidarity—solidarity on the basis of similarities—becomes less feasible. Yet Durkheim argued that division of labour, at least potentially, gives rise to a new type of solidarity. Once individuals specialise, they become more dependent on others. The teacher relies on the baker for his bread, and the tailor for his clothes; they in turn rely on him to educate their children. Individuals or small groups can no longer secede from a society, because they are unable to satisfy all their own needs. Durkheim argued that this interdependence should promote warm feelings towards those on whom we rely. Because they have different functions, individuals become like the organs in a body, none of which can flourish unless the others also flourish. For this reason, Durkheim dubbed this new kind of togetherness "organic solidarity."
So why are modern societies so fractious? Why is there not more organic solidarity? One problem is that although market exchange always gives rise to a distribution of both jobs and of the total social product, it is not necessarily fair. Someone who feels fairly treated is likely to take a positive view of the interdependence created by division of labour. But someone who feels unfairly treated—perhaps because he has failed to secure a job that he judges commensurate with his abilities—is unlikely to view others as partners in a social enterprise from which all benefit, but rather as rivals that have bested him. Durkheim thus argued that a meritocratic division of labour is a precondition for organic solidarity. If careers are not open to all, if educational opportunities are not equalised, and if the inequalities created by inherited wealth are not eliminated, organic solidarity will be in short supply. In the absence of rules to promote social justice, the market will not produce social solidarity on its own.
But injustice was by no means Durkheim's only concern. He also worried about anomie. For many proponents of markets, the concept of anomie makes little sense. Their ideal is that everyone should enjoy the greatest possible freedom. They want to minimise social regulation of personal choices. Durkheim, by contrast, argued that in the absence of regulation, people's desires would always outstrip their capacity to realise them. With physical desires, there are built-in physiological limits: after eating a certain amount, for instance, we are satiated. Yet what distinguishes humans from other animals is that many of our desires are products of symbolic and social interaction rather than bodily functions. Thus our craving for financial rewards, for social prestige and for power are mediated by our social relations. There is no natural limit. Durkheim thus believed that even a meritocratic society would be undesirable if based purely on competitive principles.
Durkheim used the example of marriage to illustrate the problem of anomie or inadequate social regulation. You might think that men would be happiest if able to pursue their sexual desires without restraint. But it is not so, Durkheim argued: all the evidence (including relative suicide rates) suggests that men do better when marriage closes their horizons. As bachelors they can chase every woman they find attractive but they are rarely contented because the potential objects of desires are so numerous. Nor do they enjoy any security because they may lose the woman they are currently involved with. By contrast, Durkheim argued, the married man is generally happier: he must now restrict himself to one woman (at least most of the time) but there is a quid pro quo. The marriage rules require the woman to give herself to him: hence his one permitted object of desire is guaranteed. Marriage thus promotes the long-term happiness of men (Durkheim was less certain that it helped women) because it imposes a sometimes irksome constraint on their passions.
Durkheim believed that the same kind of regulation of egoistic impulses is necessary throughout civil society. This may strike many readers as unacceptably authoritarian. Yet Durkheim, like Kant, did not accept the British empiricists' conception of freedom as the unrestricted pursuit of desire. He favoured a "moral liberalism" that also emphasised self-discipline and the individual's duty to others. With the decline of religious faith at the turn of the 20th century, he feared that the call of conscience would no longer be so effective in moderating behaviour and that people increasingly lacked a moral compass. "If, in activities that almost completely fill our days," he wrote, "we follow no rules save that of our own self-interest… how can we acquire a taste for altruism, for forgetfulness of self and sacrifice?"
Controversially, Durkheim looked for a cure for anomie in the revival of medieval guilds; he wanted all workers and employers to think of themselves as having obligations in something like the fashion still common among doctors and lawyers. He accepted that guilds had failed in the past because they had defended special privileges and inefficient work practices. But he saw no reason why re-invented professional bodies should repeat past errors. Their role would be to impose upper limits on remuneration, to prevent excessively brutal competition, and generally to champion the interests of the weak and downtrodden. They would not be like trade unions because they would include both workers and employers. In fact, he expected them to behave more like impartial judges than trade unionists or lobbyists— a hope that modern "public choice" theorists would dismiss as naive.
The trouble with Durkheim's idea, economists will object, is not merely that it underestimates the force of self-interest. If his professional associations played more than a token role in the economy, they would undermine or destroy the price mechanism—an impersonal device that aims to shift resources between sectors in response to changes in personal preferences and technology. A multitude of bodies responsible for particular bits of socioeconomic life would tend to devise inconsistent rules for combating anomie and be strongly tempted to defend their members' interests against those of other occupational groups. So it would be better to rely on rules that apply universally throughout a society, and thus do not stifle the market mechanism. Durkheim's observation that the voluntary contracts that economists so admire presuppose contract law, or some way of deciding how to proceed in the face of disagreement about their implications, pointed to a different and perhaps more promising solution.
In practice, anomie was countered during the 20th century not through the revival of guilds or corporations but by state intervention. Governments increasingly imposed legal obligations on the parties to contracts in addition to those that were freely negotiated between them. Thus employment law reduces anomie by insisting that employers treat their employees with a modicum of respect and consideration. Similarly, product liability laws are far more onerous than in Durkheim's day. By promoting fairer dealing, such laws have encouraged a greater sense of social solidarity than would have arisen in unfettered markets, while leaving individuals greater personal autonomy than would a network of guilds.
Durkheim wanted to put sociology on a sound methodological footing. Yet his attempts to do so have provoked much criticism and misunderstanding. In part, this reflects his metaphorical writing style. Durkheim often appears to imply that "society" is a conscious agent with goals of its own—that it possesses a "collective consciousness" that somehow floats above or beside those of its individual human members. For Anglo-American empiricists, such ideas seem nonsensical—a reworking of the worst excesses of German idealism. And indeed, Durkheim did repeatedly claim that society is not merely the sum of its individual members. "By aggregating together… individuals give birth to a being, psychical if you will, but one which constitutes a psychical individuality of a new kind." And so, he argued, "we can and must speak of a collective consciousness distinct from individual consciousnesses."
Durkheim insisted on the "reality" of social phenomena: one of his favourite slogans was that "social facts are things." But he did not regard social phenomena as things in the same sense as material objects. Nor did he regard "society" as an agent with its own goals. In referring to social facts as things, he was merely trying to remind us that the social realm is a domain external to us that we must investigate using empirical techniques similar to those of natural scientists. The collective consciousness refers to ways of thinking and acting that could not arise in one individual in isolation but that must be a product of the interaction of the members of a social group. A social rule such as that underlying private property is an example. An individual can gain physical possession of something through force or deception, but he can become its legitimate owner only if others recognise his right to it. This is possible only if the members of a group mutually agree to accept certain rules for the acquisition and possession of objects, and if the individual in question has respected those rules.
But how could Durkheim convince sceptics? How could he demonstrate the necessity for, and power of, his brand of empirical, holistic sociology? In the event he made an inspired choice: he decided to analyse the causes of suicide. Suicide is seemingly the most subjective of deeds. If Durkheim could show that social structure plays a role in influencing even this most private of decisions, he would have shown how futile it is to conceive of the individual as a sovereign being that can be detached from his social environment. Suicides, of course, do not cite arcane details of social structure in their suicide notes. They cite factors that seem personal to them, such as disappointments in love, illness, bankruptcy, poverty and depression. Durkheim did not deny that individuals act in response to their subjective beliefs and desires. What he denied is that such transitory mental phenomena are the underlying cause of their actions.
By looking at how the frequency of suicide varies with factors such as religious affiliation, ethnic and national background, marriage, family size, and economic and political developments, Durkheim identified three generic types of suicide, which he called egoistic, altruistic and anomic. Altruistic suicide becomes a danger when individuals identify so closely with a social group that they place little value on their continued personal existence. This kind of suicide was common in primitive societies. Islamic suicide bombers provide a classic modern example.
By contrast, egoistic and anomic suicide are modern phenomena: they occur because individuals are insufficiently attached to, or regulated by social groups. For instance, Durkheim found that the risk of suicide is much higher among Protestants than among Catholics or Jews. The reason, he suggested, is that the latter groups bind their members more closely together: they support a more intense collective life than does the typical Protestant church. But if religions protect individuals against self-destruction, he argued, it is not because they preach respect for one's person. What matters is not so much the nature of any shared beliefs or rites, but the fact that they are shared. With egoistic suicide the individual becomes so disengaged from his fellows that he fails to see any point in life. He wallows in melancholy. By contrast, anomic suicide is a product of anger and frustration. The individual takes his life because an insupportable gap arises between his ambitions or desires and his means of fulfilling them. He considers himself to have failed in life—relative to others and to his own expectations. The self-absorption is as great as in egoistic suicide but its origins are subtly different. It becomes prevalent only under social systems such as market capitalism that fail to set sufficient boundaries for individuals—that leave individuals the taxing task of regulating their own passions.
But no matter what form suicide takes, Durkheim's underlying message was the same. The individual's actions are often heavily influenced—if not rigidly determined—by aspects of social structure of which he is unaware. In his pioneering work on suicide Durkheim thus acted as midwife to influential 20th-century social theories, such as structuralism and poststructuralism, that regard individuals as mostly products, rather than producers, of their social and cultural environments.
Towards the end of his career, the social analysis of religion absorbed most of Durkheim's energy. As a scientist committed to empirical methods, he had long ago stopped believing that religion offers an accurate description of the world. Yet Durkheim also rejected as facile the view that religion is just an illusion or mistake. He was convinced that all religions "are true after their own fashion." Religion has to reflect some fundamental aspect of human existence, he reasoned, because it could not otherwise have played so prominent a role historically or have survived the rise of empirical science. The challenge was to reach beneath religious symbols and grasp the underlying reality that they represented. And he concluded that the most promising way to do this was to examine some of the earliest and simplest forms of religion rather than to grapple with the complexities of a contemporary faith. It was thus to Australian and American totemism—then a popular field of anthropological research—which Durkheim turned for insights into the underlying nature of religion.
Critics have condemned this manoeuvre on the grounds that totemism is not a proper religion, and so can tell us nothing about faiths such as Christianity or Islam. But Durkheim anticipated this objection. A God or gods do not represent the essence of religion, he argued. It lies instead in an absolute division of the world into two categories: the sacred and the profane. His definition of religion was "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community… all those who adhere to them."
Under totemism, each clan has a sacred object or totem, often named after a local plant or animal. But what fascinated Durkheim is that an image of the totem, for instance carved into a piece of wood, may be more sacred than the totemic animal or plant itself. The eagle clan names itself after the eagle. But why should an image of an eagle be treated with greater reverence than a real eagle? The answer is that the totem is sacred not because of what it is in itself but because of what it represents—the fact that all the members of the clan have the same totem. The totem represents the clan's sense of togetherness. An image of the totem can perform this representational task with even greater authenticity than the animal or plant, because it is just a symbol. The totem is thus at once the badge or flag of a particular clan, and an expression of all that it finds sacred, and something that inspires in it the reverence that would later be accorded to gods. Seeing this, Durkheim wrote: "Thus, if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the same?" He had penetrated the mystery of religion—or so he believed. When people experience the divine, they are not just deluded. Something real corresponds to those feelings: the social bonds that link us together in human communities.
Believers experience God as both a liberating and a constraining force. God uplifts, protects and inspires them, yet he also imposes a discipline that at times is unwelcome. God also strikes many believers as a power that is simultaneously within and outside them. He is external in the sense of being independent of them, yet he speaks to them through the inner voice of conscience. Durkheim argues that the phenomenology of the social is identical. When members of a social group are committed to certain laws, they too feel both liberated and constrained.
"Because social pressure makes itself felt through mental channels," Durkheim wrote, "it was bound to give man the idea that outside him there are one or several powers, moral yet mighty to which he is subject." Yet the untutored observer cannot grasp precisely how social structure exerts its influence on the individual. So it is not surprising that primitive peoples first represented their social bonds in a tangible rather than abstract form: as the totemic animal. Later, social rules and practices were reified in the forms of a God or gods. But at every stage people were really grappling with an aspect of their existence that they could neither understand nor deny— their social ties with others.
Durkheim's claim about religion will strike some as intuitively plausible. The sacred is surely better understood as a transfiguration of social bonds than as a product of dream experiences or wonder at the immensity of physical nature. But it has not pleased those with a traditional faith, and still less those inclined to treat religious texts as representing a literal, descriptive truth. And although Durkheim professed sympathy for religion, it is not clear that genuine faith can survive his analysis. After all, most believers feel strengthened by faith because they believe they are relating to an entity that is independent of the human race. They would be disappointed, if not dismayed, to learn that they must do without an afterlife because the object of their worship is created by their own social interaction. In some respects such a reorientation might have advantages: to conceive of religion in terms of the fellowship that it fosters between believers is surely better than to conceive of it instrumentally—as a way of securing divine rewards or avoiding divine punishments. And yet the lesson from the rise of empirical science is that when confidence in a supernatural element is destroyed, few see the point of faith. Durkheim appeared to believe that a secular religion is possible—in other words that people can gain the benefits of religion while regarding it as a social construction. But no such faith has yet emerged.
In the past century, sociologists (and others) have attacked almost everything that Durkheim stood for. Many argue that he misunderstood capitalism and proposed—through the modernisation of medieval corporations—a dangerously unrealistic cure for its shortcomings. Many complain that his ambitious methodology—his insistence that the social realm is more than merely the sum of its individual members—was seriously flawed. Others argue that he failed to grasp the degree to which real societies are riven by conflict: in place of a high-minded Durkheimian consensus they paint a disturbing picture of factions and interest groups vying ceaselessly for power and influence. Still others contend that his empirical research, while statistically sophisticated for its day, fell far short of true science. There is probably substance in all these criticisms.
And yet Durkheim rises above his critics. His grasp of the social domain was richly original. Although he considered himself an objective scientist, he brought to the study of social phenomena a gripping moral intensity. To read Durkheim is to be transported into a realm in which the right and the good matter far more than the useful or the pleasurable. Like Marx, he was interested not just in understanding the world but in changing it for the better. But unlike Marx, he favoured incremental, practical reform. As a result he exerted a far more benign influence during the 20th century: rather than fomenting pointless revolutions, he helped to inspire the social democrats who created the welfare state. Today his social conservatism would irritate the left and his critique of markets the right. As social animals, we seem to be growing more diverse and individualistic. And yet, perhaps because of our hunter-gatherer past, we still yearn for solidarity and unity. Short of an economic meltdown brought about by global warming, or some other natural disaster, we are unlikely to achieve a Durkheimian consensus. Yet there remains much to learn from his non-socialist critique of capitalism and his passionate belief in our ethical possibilities.
