College of Social Studies

Sophomore Colloquium
Modern Social Theory

WEEK  9
(November 8-10)
Durkheim:|
The Forms of Social Solidarity and the Causes of Anomie

  [ Introduction ]  [ Assignment ] 
[ Questions ]

        During the first few weeks of this term we studied the political and social theories of Hobbes, Bentham, James Mill, and Locke.  These theories provide a philosophical and normative basis for modern society, particularly capitalism and liberal, representative democracy.  From a Marxist point of view, we could say that they formulated the ideas of the new class that was coming into power at the time.  And as it became the ruling class, its ideas became the ruling ideas – or illusions – of the epoch.

            Marx's theory was intended to replace these ideas by providing a more adequate account of capitalism, an account that would reveal the ways in which these conceptions of politics and society were ideological distortions of the social reality of capitalist society.  According to Liberal theory (i.e., the theories of people such as Bentham and Locke), market relationships are based on the exchange of equivalents among free persons in which each party gives up an object he or she owns in return for a commodity owned by another.  Marx did not argue that this account is false in any straightforward way, but rather that it is one-sided, for it conceals the exploitation of labor that is intrinsic to capitalism.  This is because labor-power has the property that it can produce more value than is required to produce it.  When workers sell their labor-power, the capitalists to whom they sell it are able to realize surplus value from this transaction.  Thus, what appears as an exchange of equivalents – workers selling their labor-power for what it costs to produce it – is in reality a relationship of exploitation.

            One of the crucial ideas of the individualist theory of society that Marx attacked, an idea that is central to the thinking of Hobbes and Bentham, is that social order is based upon and must be explained in terms of individuals acting rationally to advance their interests.  This can be seen most clearly in Hobbes, who argued that social order is possible only if there is a state that coerces individuals to obey the rules that are required for peaceful social relations to exist.  What the state does by enforcing the law is to change the situation one faces so that it comes to be in one's own interests to do what the law requires;  to do otherwise would be to incur a punishment (or the risk of punishment) which would cancel any possible gains from breaking the law.  Moreover, the existence of the state itself must be explained in terms of similar calculations.  The state exists because individuals find it in their interests to have an institution that, by forcing people to act in a manner consistent with the requirements of social order, enables them to escape the state of war in which they are unable to realize their most basic interest, self-preservation.  And while he differed fundamentally from Hobbes on many issues, Locke too had an essentially individualist theory of social order.  For he claimed that people must leave the state of nature because in it they cannot find the orderly and regular life they desire: certain "degenerates" regularly fail to respect individual rights, and even basically reasonable and decent people find it difficult to settle their disputes fairly.  Thus Locke also explained the existence of stable, ongoing social life as a result of the choices of individuals who are thought of as having certain capacities and desires that are "prior" to their membership in political society.

            Rousseau subjected this conception of society and this approach to social explanation to a scathing critique.  He argued that we cannot explain social phenomena by showing how they arise from the rational pursuit of self-interest by isolated, atomistic individuals because the interests that people have are themselves deeply shaped by society.  We can hardly explain the structure of society in terms of individual interests, and then turn around and explain these interests in terms of the structure of the society!  This was one of the main lines of argument that Rousseau advanced in the Second Discourse and it led him to propose a different way of thinking about society and social explanation.  In particular, we can see from Rousseau's argument that social explanation is necessarily historical, and that the nature of society and the "nature" of the individuals who make it up will vary with the history and social conditions of that society.

            This idea led Rousseau to re-examine another of the principal doctrines of the individualist thinkers, that social relations are inevitably marked by conflict.  Hobbes began with the assumption that human interests will necessarily conflict because people are motivated to gratify their wants in a world in which resources are scarce.  Even if external resources weren't scarce, Hobbes thought that conflict would arise because a person's "Joy consisteth in comparing himselfe with other men, [and so] can relish nothing but what is eminent" (Leviathan, ch. 17).  Thus, the satisfaction of one person's interests will necessarily require that another's be sacrificed.  While Locke thought of humans as "reasonable" and not driven by vanity in this way, he thought that some people were incapable of living by reason, and that all of us were liable to have our own interests cloud our judgment, so that conflicts would inevitably arise once resources became scarce due to the growth of population the introduction of money.  Individualist thinkers typically hold that serious conflict is a necessary part of any society.^[1]

            Because Rousseau thought of people as social and historical creatures, whose desires and needs were not given by "nature," he denied that human relationships were necessarily characterized by the degree of conflict that Locke and especially Hobbes posited.  Since people come to have certain desires and needs by living in a particular kind of society, we can imagine a form of social order in which the needs people come to have are mainly those which can be satisfied without frustrating the needs of others.  In such a society individuals would be able to live with others and to realize their aspirations without coming into conflict with their fellow citizens.  This kind of society would be one in which conformity to its laws and customs would not be experienced as a restriction but as an enhancement of the freedom of the individual.  Rousseau believed that a society organized in accordance with the "general will" of its citizens would realize this ideal.  Laws which express the general will respect the needs of everyone, and citizens will want to act in accordance with these laws because they will see them as their own, in part because they have participated in making them.  Of course, such a society will be possible only if people do not have fundamental needs, needs that are basic to their conceptions of themselves, that are inherently incompatible, that is, needs based upon vanity.  And this requires that inequality be limited: "no citizen should be sufficiently opulent to be able to purchase another, and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself" (Social Contract II, ch. 11).

            Rousseau thought that his ideal of a free society could be realized only under very special circumstances.  It would have to be a small, rather simple society with a limited division of labor, enjoying a fairly high degree of distributive equality (everyone having some property, no one having too much), and having had the good fortune of the appearance of a great law-giver at a propitious moment in its history.  Rousseau was writing at the dawn of the industrial age when the vast majority of people lived in small communities, having rather little contact with other communities, and where the state appeared to do little more than extract taxes and engage in occasional depredations during times of war.  Under these circumstances, Rousseau's ideas were not altogether implausible, at least outside of the major countries of Europe that had already undergone an extensive process of urbanization and commercial development.  But once the industrial revolution had occurred, Rousseau's small-scale state came to seem anachronistic.  This was not only because the changes wrought by industrialization were irreversible, but also because of the enormous possibilities for human well-being that industrialization promised.  Although the early phases of the industrial revolution produced enormous dislocation and suffering (and continue to do so even now in countries where industrialization is just beginning), it also produced enormous wealth.  To many it held out the hope that a level of material production might be achieved that could liberate humanity from much of the toil and suffering that had always seemed to be an essential feature of the human condition.

            If Rousseau's vision of a pre-industrial, small-scale community seems anachronistic, his moral vision of a society in which individuals would be free and self-determining, and in which the opposition of individual and society would be largely^[2] overcome, had (and continues to have) great appeal.  Certainly it appealed to Marx, whose vision of communism as a state of human emancipation and self-determination, as a state in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” bears an obvious resemblance to Rousseau's.  But where Rousseau thought that such a society could only be created by an act of political will, and under pre-industrial conditions of production, Marx held that it could only be achieved on the basis of the full development of the productive forces of society.  Where Rousseau thought that a society that had become capitalist had virtually no chance of returning to the kind of simplicity and equality that would characterize the state based on the general will, Marx held that a communist society could be constructed only on the basis of the achievements of capitalism. Marx's argument, as we have seen, is based on a general theory of historical and social change, and on an elaborate account of the structure and dynamics of capitalist society.  According to Marx's theory, capitalism prepares the material basis for a communist society in which men and women will be able consciously to determine the conditions of their own lives, creating a social world that does not impose constraints and suffering upon them.

            Like Marx, Durkheim developed theories to enable us to understand the enormous changes that have occurred in society as a result of industrialization and commercialization.  Durkheim was a  descendant of Rousseau in his claim that society cannot be understood in terms of the self-interested actions of individuals because he believed that one's interests are themselves determined by the society in which one lives.  And he was deeply affected – and attracted – by the moral ideal of Rousseau and Marx: the image of society as a moral community whose order is based upon shared values and a willing obedience to rules, and whose life is not marked by conflict so deep and systemic as to require force to insure co-existence.  However, Durkheim rejected the claim that such an ideal requires a high level of citizen participation in legislation and a high degree of equality, and he did so because he thought that Rousseau and Marx made important mistakes in their theories of social order and in their accounts of modern society.  Durkheim thought that the ideal societies of Marx and Rousseau were not only utopian but dangerous, and he thought that their accounts of modern life failed to appreciate what was significant in industrial societies.  Thus, although Durkheim rejected the "individualism" and "atomism" of earlier theorists, he provides a basis for many of the values and practices, including representative democracy and market society, which were important to those theorists.

            The central question that concerned Durkheim was, "How can a multiplicity of individuals comprise an on-going social group?"  Even more pointedly, he wanted to know how such an order is possible when the individuals involved in it are very different from one another, when the population is very large, and when people are largely concerned to satisfy their own interests and aspirations.  In other words, Durkheim's basic concern was to understand the nature of social solidarity in modern societies, which are marked by an elaborate division of labor and a commitment to the value of individualism or individuality.

            One can best appreciate Durkheim's answer to this question by viewing it in light of Rousseau.  Like Rousseau, Durkheim rejected the answer Hobbes provided to these questions, and a significant part of the book we will be reading is devoted to a critique of the theories of the English sociologist, Herbert Spencer, whose basic conception of the person and society is very much in the tradition of Hobbes.  Following Rousseau, Durkheim conceived of people as essentially social beings whose character, values, and very "nature" are dependent upon the kind of society in which they live.  Moreover, for Durkheim social order is possible only because human beings internalize a set of norms and values that they accept as rational and just, and on the basis of which they act.  Social order must be construed as a consensual order of willingly accepted rules, and not as a system of rules that are operative only because they are backed up by force.  In particular, Durkheim insisted that altruism is not only possible for humans, but absolutely necessary:

. . . altruism is not destined to become, as Spencer would wish, a sort of pleasant ornament of our social life, but one that will always be its fundamental basis.  How indeed could we ever do without it?  Men cannot live together without agreeing, and, consequently, making mutual sacrifices, joining themselves to one another in a strong and enduring fashion.  Every society is a moral society.  (173, emphasis supplied)

            Rousseau, as we saw earlier, agreed that (a legitimate or good) society must be based on a consensus on values among its members: "the strongest is never strong enough to be always the master unless he transforms strength into right and obedience into duty."  But Rousseau thought that such a consensus on values could occur only in the kind of society he sketched in the Social Contract, only in a society based on the general will.  If Rousseau is right, it would seem that modern society would have to be inherently unstable.  The complex, individualistic mobile, cosmopolitan world in which we live precludes the kind of participation Rousseau envisioned, and it provides numerous opportunities for the development of vanity.  Rousseau paints a grim picture of modern society at the end of the Second Discourse.  It is a society characterized by tyranny and continual revolution, in which social order is impossible because the society is held together only by force and the calculation of individual interest.

            Although Durkheim shared Rousseau's basic conceptions of the individual and society, he took issue with Rousseau's general account of the conditions that are necessary for a genuine consensus on values to emerge.  Broadly speaking, Durkheim argued that Rousseau had too narrow an understanding of what is required for a people to have shared norms, and therefore he had too narrow a conception of the conditions necessary for social solidarity.  Durkheim argued that there are different sorts of social solidarity, and that with an advanced division of labor a new sort of "organic" solidarity is possible.  He contrasts this type of solidarity with the earlier "mechanical" type which is found in undifferentiated, primitive forms of social life.

            In sorting out the differences between these two forms of solidarity, you should note that the difference is not that the organic type doesn't depend on shared beliefs (the "collective consciousness"), whereas the mechanical type does (although Durkheim sometimes suggests this).  Both forms of social solidarity depend at least in part on shared beliefs, but the content of the collective consciousness changes drastically as a result of the division of labor.  The important point about this change is that it opens the way for an understanding of modern, complex societies which does not see them as inherently conflictual and unstable.  The order of modern society is or at least can be rooted in a genuine consensus, which does not require that people give up their commitments to individuality and individual differences in order for the society to be viable and healthy.

            One way of characterizing the difference between Rousseau and Durkheim regarding social solidarity in a society with an elaborate division of labor is to distinguish between egoism and individuality.  Rousseau believed that the division of labor would lead to systematic and permanent inequalities, and that these inequalities would in turn lead to egoism.  As egoism becomes more pervasive, compassion or pity vanishes and a moral way of life becomes impossible.

            Unlike Rousseau, Durkheim did not believe that the division of labor would necessarily lead to a breakdown of the moral basis of political and social order.  For him, the development of the division of labor can lead to individuality rather than egoism, and individuality can itself provide the basis for the "mutual sacrifice" and the "strong, durable bonds" which both he and Rousseau thought were necessary foundations for social cohesion.  Durkheim argued that even though people come to value their individual distinctiveness and aspire to live their lives in accordance with their own choices, they can recognize the deep ties they have to others and to society as a whole:

Because no individual is sufficient unto himself, it is from society that he receives all that is needful, just as it is for society that he labours.  Thus there is formed a very strong feeling of the state of dependence in which he finds himself:  he grows accustomed to valuing himself at his true worth, viz., to look upon himself only as part of a whole, the organ of an organism.  Such sentiments are of a kind not only to inspire those daily sacrifices that ensure the regular development of everyday social life but even on occasion acts of utter renunciation and unbounded abnegation.  (173)

            Durkheim thought that the "cult of the individual" was the great, positive achievement of the modern age, an achievement which makes contemporary society an improvement over earlier forms of social life.  Durkheim celebrated the individuation which is possible in modern society, the rich development of capacities and talents, the autonomy that comes with being "one's own person," the originality that this makes possible, and the diversity and range of experience open to us.  Moreover, Durkheim thought that this went hand in hand with a kind of tolerance of others not found in more primitive societies.  He thought that only these qualities could produce a truly universal kind of solidarity in which people come to show respect to each other simply because they are persons.  He believed that the modern age extracts a price in the form of a decline of human happiness, but he thought the achievements of individuality made that price worth paying.

            In thinking about Durkheim's argument, you may be struck by the way in which he puts forward his own evaluations as "objective," even scientific judgments.  How can he do that?  How can he suppose that moral questions can be answered by social scientific investigation?

            After developing an account of the moral basis of modern society, Durkheim goes on to explain why the division of labor develops at all.  He argues that it is a result in part of increasing "moral density" of society.  (He also discusses change in the “volume” of society.)  Durkheim insists that the division of labor cannot be understood on purely economic grounds, explicable in terms of the size of markets and the requirements of efficient production.  He argues instead that it must be explained in terms of changes in the nature of social relations and social structure.  Note that it is a mistake to interpret "moral density" (as many commentators on Durkheim do) as an essentially biological concept referring to an increase in population or population density.

            While Durkheim argued that the proper growth of the division of labor would provide a moral basis for social and political life, he also recognized that the division of labor could assume "abnormal forms," which would not produce the required social solidarity.  These abnormal forms can result from a number of factors:  1.  people may not understand the values or rules which form the basis of their collective life;  2.  these rules are not sufficient to keep conflict among individuals at a minimum;  3.  the rules are unilaterally imposed by one group on another, and are thus experienced as forms of domination.  Under these circumstances individuals will experience what Durkheim called "anomie," or normlessness.  That is a condition in which people do not feel themselves to be participants in an ongoing social order in which they willingly believe, and so they lack a sense of direction and purpose in their lives.  Anomie, therefore, places great strains upon society;  it is, according to Durkheim, the central problem of life in advanced societies.

            A good way to see if you have a grip on the notion of anomie is to contrast it with Marx's notion of alienation.  Can you see how they are deeply opposed diagnoses of what is wrong in modern life?  More important, can you explain how these diagnoses derive from conceptions of the person and society that are in important respects incompatible with each other?  It is also important to see that they are not entirely incompatible;  both Durkheim and Marx, for example, share a belief in what we might call "the priority of the social," the view that social phenomena must be explained in terms of social facts, and that they cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, individual judgments and behaviors.

            It is important for a full understanding of Durkheim that you appreciate his political recommendations in order to deal with the problem of anomie.  Basically, he made two proposals:  first, he called for a revitalization of occupational or what your translation calls "professional" groups in general;  he believed that the different branches of industry should be organized in a "corporatist" manner, as he argues in the "Preface to the Second Edition."  Second, Durkheim argued that the social order of modern society must be "just"; it must conform to the fundamental values of individuality on which modern society is based.  This means that there must be greater equality of life chances, and particularly equality of opportunity, than prevailed in Western countries at the time.  In many ways, then, we can see Durkheim as developing a political theory of the welfare state;  many of the ideas he presents will have a bearing on topics you will study in the Government tutorial.  A good way to see if you understand his theory of anomie is to see if you can explain how these two proposals can provide solutions to anomie in modern society.  In doing so, you may also gain an appreciation of how a follower of Durkheim might outline the chief political problems of our day, and what is required to solve them.

Assignment:

I am sorry to say that, in spite of my best efforts to trim it, the reading for this week is quite long – about 275 pages.  A good bit of this consists of examples Durkheim offers to illustrate his points, and it should be possible to skim parts of it.  But there is a good deal of reading, and I urge you to get started on it early. 

            Durkheim, The Division of Labor, Book I, chs 1, 2, 3, 5.1-5.3, 5.5, 6.1, 6.2, 6.4, 7.1, 7.4;  Book II, chs 1, 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, 3 and 5.3;  Book III, chs. 1, 2;  Conclusion;  Preface to the Second Edition.  (N.B.  The "Preface to the Second Edition" will be most intelligible if you read it last.)

          Durkheim, Suicide, pp. 246-57 (xeroxed).

Because of the length of the reading for this week, no essay will be required.  You should prepare notes for the following questions.

1.  Compare Bentham's and Durkheim's accounts of the function(s) of punishment.

2.  One of Durkheim's objectives is to be explain the development and significance of individualism.  Consider, for example, two of his statements:  First, he writes "... if in lower societies so little place is allowed for the individual personality, it is not that it has been constricted or suppressed artificially, it is quite simply because at that moment in history it did not exist" (p. 142).  He also says that, with the coming of organic solidarity, "the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion" (p. 122).  Critically analyze these claims.  What do they mean?  Are they true?

3.  What does Durkheim mean by anomie, and how does it compare with Marx's account of alienation?

4.  Why does Durkheim believe that "a nation cannot be maintained unless, between the state and individuals, a whole range of secondary groups are interposed" (p. liv)?  Is Durkheim's position plausible?

5.  "The task of the most advanced societies may therefore said to be a mission for justice."  Why?  Is this claim correct?

6.  Why does Durkheim argue that value judgments can be objective?

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