"Historical questions are always monographic, either because of the limited manner in which the subject is conceived or because of the specialization of treatment. For history this is indeed necessary, since the academic division of labour imposes certain limitations. But when the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions."
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. p 90.
Showing posts with label sociology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sociology. Show all posts
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Chapter One, The Philosophy of Money
As part of my continuing attempt to be more educated in classical sociology, I’m beginning to read Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. I have so far read the first chapter of this rather large book. This chapter is an enormous amount of philosophical ground-preparation, about subjectivity, objectivity, relativism, and value--and then about ten pages discussing money in the vocabulary so constituted. Simmel is a frustrating writer. Yet he’s rewarding, if only for the occasional passage like this one,
I have not yet looked at the substantial (monograph-sized) introduction to this translation, but Simmel is working within an explicitly Kantian horizon. I don’t know enough to be able to judge what he is doing more finely than that.
His treatment of relativism is satisfyingly thoroughgoing. The Comtean-Durkheimian sociological relativism that I am more used to seems always to pull up before crashing into the more serious consequences of this line of thought. Simmel is adamant, and iterates a similar point often: it is true to say that the apple is falling towards the Earth, but it is also true to say that the Earth is falling toward the apple. In a familiar (common at this moment) formulation, he says that Science “has abandoned the search for the essence of things and is reconciled to stating the relationships that exist between objects and the human mind from the viewpoint of the human mind” (101). Hi handling of norms and laws, of objectivity through relativity—all this smacks of a slightly different tradition of philosophy of science than the French that I’m more familiar with—when he discusses measurement, it seems to owe something to Fechner, but perhaps I think this because Fechner’s is one of the few theories of measurement I’ve read anything about.
He gets, at the end of the chapter, finally to a set of definitions of money,
The last cryptic bit is made more clear, perhaps, by this,
All general and particular systems of knowledge meet in this form of the mutual interdependence of thought processes. If one attempts to understand the political, social, religious or any other cultural aspects of the present time, this can be achieved only through history, i.e. by knowing and understanding the past. But this past, which comes down to us only in fragments, through silent witnesses and more or less unreliable reports and traditions, can come to life and be interpreted only through the experiences of the immediate present. No matter how many transformations and quantitative changes are required, the present, which is the indispensable key to the past, can itself be understood only through the past; and the past, which alone can help us to understand the present, is accessible only through the perceptions and sensibilities of the present. All historical images are the result of this mutuality of interpretative elements, none of which allows the others to come to rest. Ultimate comprehension is transferred to infinity, since every point in one series refers to the other series for its understanding. (pg 110)
I have not yet looked at the substantial (monograph-sized) introduction to this translation, but Simmel is working within an explicitly Kantian horizon. I don’t know enough to be able to judge what he is doing more finely than that.
His treatment of relativism is satisfyingly thoroughgoing. The Comtean-Durkheimian sociological relativism that I am more used to seems always to pull up before crashing into the more serious consequences of this line of thought. Simmel is adamant, and iterates a similar point often: it is true to say that the apple is falling towards the Earth, but it is also true to say that the Earth is falling toward the apple. In a familiar (common at this moment) formulation, he says that Science “has abandoned the search for the essence of things and is reconciled to stating the relationships that exist between objects and the human mind from the viewpoint of the human mind” (101). Hi handling of norms and laws, of objectivity through relativity—all this smacks of a slightly different tradition of philosophy of science than the French that I’m more familiar with—when he discusses measurement, it seems to owe something to Fechner, but perhaps I think this because Fechner’s is one of the few theories of measurement I’ve read anything about.
He gets, at the end of the chapter, finally to a set of definitions of money,
In this sense, money has been defined as ‘abstract value’. As a visible object, money is the substance that embodies abstract economic value, in a similar fashion to the sound of words which is an acoustic-physiological occurrence but has significance for us only through the representation that it bears or symbolizes. If the economic value of objects is constituted by their mutual relationship of exchangeability, then money is the autonomous expression of this relationship. Money is the representative of abstract value. From the economic relationship, i.e. the exchangeability of objects, the fact of this relationship is extracted and acquires, in contrast to those objects, a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbol. Money is a specific realization of what is common to economic objects—in the language of the scholastics one might call it universale ante rem, or in re or post rem—and the general misery of human life is most fully reflected by this symbol, namely by the constant shortage of money under which most people suffer. (118)
The last cryptic bit is made more clear, perhaps, by this,
For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose essential significance is to reach beyond individualities. Thus, money is the adequate expression of the relationship of man to the world, which can only be grasped in single and concrete instances, yet only really conceived when the singular becomes the embodiment of the living mental process which interweaves all singularities and, in this fashion, creates reality. (128)No wonder it is also the symbol of our misery.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Durkheim and analogy
Durkheim begins “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives” by defending the use of analogy as a tool of scientific analysis. Those who attempt to understand society through analogy with biology are not wrong because they employ analogy, but because they employ it badly. Similarly, those sociologists who look first of all to psychology, that is to the individual, are not necessarily wrong to do so. Durkheim says,
This somewhat enigmatic explanation given, Durkheim turns to discuss the various materialist theories of psychology that attempt to reduce mental activity to a physical substratum—in the words of the period, to reduce the spiritual to the material. There follows a lengthy discussion of the various logical contradictions and metaphysical traps into which a rigorously materialist psychology must fall. Memory, perception, and the possibility of an unconscious mind are all discussed. William James figures prominently in this discussion, although Bergson (whose Matière et mémoire had appeared in 1896) is not explicitly mentioned. Durkheim concludes that it is impossible to reduce mental activity either to a physical substratum or to pure consciousness. This goes on for 30 pages, until one has nearly forgotten the point of the entire exercise.
The point is, of course, that there is an analogy to be made between psychology and sociology. (It should be said that for Durkheim ‘collective psychology’ is simply sociology—or rather the other way around—so ‘psychology’ can be used simply on its own, because it only ever refers to the individual. This leaves aside, I suppose, the whole range of groups that do not constitute ‘societies’ and must fall under ‘social psychology.’) Durkheim says: “Le rapport qui, dans la conception, unit le substrat social à la vie sociale est de tous points analogue à celui qu’on doit admettre entre le substrat physiologique et la vie psychique des individus” (34). That is, as brains are to minds, so individuals are to society. The analogy, then, is not between phenomena, but in the way that each science is delimited. The two ‘classic’ forms of explanation, called here materialist and idealist, are often (for instance, by Ravaisson in his survey) differentiated as, for the first, explaining the complex by the simple, and the second, the simple by the complex. Put otherwise, materialists explain the whole by its parts, and idealists the part by its whole. Debates in this period often organized themselves around physiology and morphology: does the function determine the organ, or the other way around?
Durkheim’s point here is that, as he says, to explain “le complex par le complex, les faits sociaux par la société” (41). Elements of one kind, to which one set of rules apply when in isolation, when combined give rise to phenomena that cannot be understood according to these rules. Durkheim says, “à mesure que l’association [for instance, of cells in a living being, or individuals into a society] se constitue, elle donne naissance à des phénomènes qui ne dérivent pas directement de la nature des éléments associés” (41-2). The potentially major problem of constituting these levels or systems of rules will be solved empirically. Suggesting, I suppose, that what will later be called ‘epistemological gaps’ in some sense ‘naturally’ occurring.
I mentioned already Bergson’s absence from this essay. It would be interesting to know more about Durkheim’s opinions of Bergson’s earlier writings—Les données immédiates...(1889) and Matiere et memoire (1896)—specifically in regard to the limits and meaning of materialist psychology. Later on, they come to represent two very different aspects of French philosophical/scientific culture, this is why I’d like to know more about the earlier period. Unexpectedly, this essay gives me yet more of a reason to read Emile Boutroux’s famous 1874 De la contingence des lois de la nature (reprinted 1895) supposedly grounding human freedom in these gaps between epistemological levels of determination. For striking contrast, and in order to have a hyper-modern perspective on these questions of materialist psychology, I would want to go back and look through my notes on Zizek’s Parallax View.
La vie collective, comme la vie mentale de l’individu, est faite de représentations; il est donc présumable ue représentations individuelles et représentations sociales sont, en quelque manière, comparables. Nous allons, en effet, essayet de montrer que les unes et les autres soutiennent la même relation avec leur substrat respectif. Mais ce rapprochement, loin de justifier la conception qui réduit la sociologie à n’être qu’un corollaire de la psychologie individuelle, mettre, au contraire, en reflief l’indépendance relative de ces deux mondes et de ces deux sciences (2).
This somewhat enigmatic explanation given, Durkheim turns to discuss the various materialist theories of psychology that attempt to reduce mental activity to a physical substratum—in the words of the period, to reduce the spiritual to the material. There follows a lengthy discussion of the various logical contradictions and metaphysical traps into which a rigorously materialist psychology must fall. Memory, perception, and the possibility of an unconscious mind are all discussed. William James figures prominently in this discussion, although Bergson (whose Matière et mémoire had appeared in 1896) is not explicitly mentioned. Durkheim concludes that it is impossible to reduce mental activity either to a physical substratum or to pure consciousness. This goes on for 30 pages, until one has nearly forgotten the point of the entire exercise.
The point is, of course, that there is an analogy to be made between psychology and sociology. (It should be said that for Durkheim ‘collective psychology’ is simply sociology—or rather the other way around—so ‘psychology’ can be used simply on its own, because it only ever refers to the individual. This leaves aside, I suppose, the whole range of groups that do not constitute ‘societies’ and must fall under ‘social psychology.’) Durkheim says: “Le rapport qui, dans la conception, unit le substrat social à la vie sociale est de tous points analogue à celui qu’on doit admettre entre le substrat physiologique et la vie psychique des individus” (34). That is, as brains are to minds, so individuals are to society. The analogy, then, is not between phenomena, but in the way that each science is delimited. The two ‘classic’ forms of explanation, called here materialist and idealist, are often (for instance, by Ravaisson in his survey) differentiated as, for the first, explaining the complex by the simple, and the second, the simple by the complex. Put otherwise, materialists explain the whole by its parts, and idealists the part by its whole. Debates in this period often organized themselves around physiology and morphology: does the function determine the organ, or the other way around?
Durkheim’s point here is that, as he says, to explain “le complex par le complex, les faits sociaux par la société” (41). Elements of one kind, to which one set of rules apply when in isolation, when combined give rise to phenomena that cannot be understood according to these rules. Durkheim says, “à mesure que l’association [for instance, of cells in a living being, or individuals into a society] se constitue, elle donne naissance à des phénomènes qui ne dérivent pas directement de la nature des éléments associés” (41-2). The potentially major problem of constituting these levels or systems of rules will be solved empirically. Suggesting, I suppose, that what will later be called ‘epistemological gaps’ in some sense ‘naturally’ occurring.
I mentioned already Bergson’s absence from this essay. It would be interesting to know more about Durkheim’s opinions of Bergson’s earlier writings—Les données immédiates...(1889) and Matiere et memoire (1896)—specifically in regard to the limits and meaning of materialist psychology. Later on, they come to represent two very different aspects of French philosophical/scientific culture, this is why I’d like to know more about the earlier period. Unexpectedly, this essay gives me yet more of a reason to read Emile Boutroux’s famous 1874 De la contingence des lois de la nature (reprinted 1895) supposedly grounding human freedom in these gaps between epistemological levels of determination. For striking contrast, and in order to have a hyper-modern perspective on these questions of materialist psychology, I would want to go back and look through my notes on Zizek’s Parallax View.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Flipping through the introduction to De la division du travail social, trying to get a sense of the text, I found a reference to an introductory course from 1888, in which Durkheim sets out the ambitions of his sociology. The course is republished in La science sociale et l’action, which I happen to have on my shelf. So, as my introduction to Durkheim, I read this introductory leçon. I’m glad I did.
Durkheim sets out to show what sociologie, or la science sociale, in fact is. He hopes to set down a series of inter-related questions that will constitute the specificity of this young science. The spirit will not be that of a professor simply explaining to his students a received truth, but rather of teaching mixed with research, where the students collaborate in a collective attempt to understand. The point here must be to contrast French with German universities. There are in fact many places in the text at which one can detect a certain national tension; to which we will return.
Most previous attempts to think scientifically about society have foundered at their very outset by assuming that society is a made thing. Durkheim says that Hobbes and Rousseau both, although the first makes it an individual and the second a collective enterprise, none the less see society as the conscious creation of man. I think one might perhaps argue with this characterization. I think the point here was really to attack a certain kind of utopianism that perhaps still hung, like a faintly bad smell, around French sociology. There is the broadly 19th century view of the Enlightenment (Rousseau) as an agent of Revolution, and Durkheim wants to distance himself from this. Then there are later socialists, like Fourier and Saint-Simon, with whom the science of society might be associated. Comte, after all, himself sprung from Saint-Simonianism.
Durkheim credits the economists with being the first to attempt to treat society scientifically: as a naturally occurring phenomenon that must, therefore, be subject to certain laws. This was a great step forward, but for the political economists, society is an abstraction that is not, itself, an object for scientific study. For economists, there are only individuals—and even then, these individuals, Durkheim says, are themselves in fact abstractions, without any concrete existence.
Durkheim makes his point through an analogy. In the past, ‘society’ was thought to be a machine, like a watch. The various parts and materials had been brought together specially for a purpose (for instance, to secure peace), and were not inherently related to one another except by dint of this bringing-together (the social contract). One might, Durkheim suggests, on the other hand, think of society as an organism. Just like any other naturally occurring phenomenon, then, society has its special laws. One might object that this contrasting analogy is highly politicized. Watches and machines obey natural laws just as much as dogs and other animals; it’s just that in Durkheim’s time no one could take apart a dog and make it again in a different way. The economists at least admit that society is not a made thing, but having taken the watch apart, they are not themselves able to arrive at the idea of society as an organism, having a reality greater than the sum of its parts.
Durkheim brushes aside, here, a perennial philosophical debate: is there such a thing as free-will? He allows that this is an interesting metaphysical question, but insists that it is only an interesting metaphysical question. He speaks of causality rather than determinism. That causality is a basic principle of the world is presented as the single best-established result of scientific investigation. It would perhaps be more honest to say that a firm belief in causality is not so much the result as the premise, and condition of possibility for modern science. Durkheim’s way of thinking about causality and the special laws of the organism remind me strongly of Claude Bernard. Bernard (or perhaps an intervening factor) might well be the source for Durkheim’s brushing-away of the free-will question—just as Bernard rejected the vitalist thesis that would have made it illegitimate to study living things, Durkheim rejects the idealist (spiritualist?) thesis that would say human free-will renders impossible the scientific study of society.
August Comte is the father of sociology. His great contribution was to make just the leap that the political economists failed to make. For him, sociology contained all the other positive sciences, because society itself contained these facts and was therefore more complex than any of them. But Comte, says Durkheim, was unable to distinguish between societies. For him, there was only l’Humanité, radically set apart from the natural world with an internal development all of its own, which, moreover, was always the same. There are three stages of civilization, and all societies go through them in the same way. Thus, in the end, Comte’s sociology reduces, for Durkheim, to a philosophy of history.
Herbert Spencer, who marked the next great step in sociological thinking, in the end succumbs to the same error. He admits that each society is its own individual organism, but then he applies a single rule of evolution to every single society he investigates. His empirical reach is impressive, but in the end he sees the same thing everywhere he looks. He, too, is really only applying a philosophy to society.
Durkheim then turns to something of a panoramic view of contemporary sociology. Alfred Espinas (who plays something of a role in Pierre Rosanvallon’s The demands of liberty) is credited with founding genuinely scientific sociology. That is, he is the first, in fact, to derive rules from empirical observation, rather than apply a philosophical system to selected data. Strong words. It’s good that Espinas gets this position, because without it, the French would look very thin on the sociological ground. Nearly all of the scholars Durkheim singles out in the following pages are German.
An interesting mise en abyme then occurs. Durkheim, discussing the various subdivisions of sociology, and the merit of division in general, says, “une science est, elle aussi, une sorte d’organisme” (101). That is, a science is like a society in that it develops both as a whole and in its constitutive parts by becoming more complex and subdivided.
Durkheim sets out the following non-exhaustive list of the broad fields of application that are, he says, already plainly to be found in sociology. First is social psychology, which on his telling is quite broad, including customs and traditions—we might today say culture. Second is sociology as a science of morals. This is recognized as related to the first, but its specificity is insisted upon. Third is law, which is itself in a sense only an ‘imperious’ application of collective moral sentiments. Lastly, there is economic science. Durkheim says that this is in a sense already close to genuine scientificity, but must first give up its supposed autonomy. I think the same point would be made by saying that Durkheim wants economics to give up its false naturalism and admit that economic behavior is embedded within a complex socio-cultural environment. Durkheim mentions two possible subfields, defined by subject, for sociology that aren’t yet even close to constituting themselves: the army, and diplomacy. I found this striking because the first seems to me a very natural subject for the kind of investigation of collectivity that Durkheim is proposing, while the second seems completely different. What did Durkheim mean by diplomacy?
Each of these subfields, Durkheim says, could be approached in two basic ways. He illustrates this by analogy to a basic division in medical science (also mentioned in Bernard): that of form and function, or morphology and physiology. Durkheim comes down solidly on the side of function. In the organism that is modern society, he says, the actual institutions are generally able to perform various functions, and the function performed by any given institution might change rapidly. It is therefore the functions, rather than the institutions which perform them, that are primary. I have always been made uneasy by what I have understood to be Durkheim’s functionalism, and here it is explained. I am still uneasy. It is possible to speak of the functions of an actual organism, because we are authorized to assume that, qua organism, it has a limited set of non-complex goals: eating, breathing, and so on—which we might themselves reduce, as Claude Bernard does, to sustaining the artificial milieu that the organism itself constitutes. It is to this end that we explain the regulation of various levels of chemicals, or of heat. Is it legitimate to make an analogy to society in this way? (ignoring, for the moment, the problem of delimiting each society, which I suppose needn’t be in principle different from the problem of delimiting different organisms). I do not think that we can, as Spencer does, assume that societies are organisms in the sense that they are born, grow, live, and die. Despite Marx’s attraction, as well, to the image of social metabolism, I do not think that we can say that societies eat and excrete. Perhaps Durkheim elsewhere explains himself differently, and more.
The remainder of the essay is taken up by an overview of the various sorts of students Durkheim feels would benefit from studying his sociology. In the first place, his wants to speak to students of philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline, he says, is already far on the way to dividing itself into two distinct disciplines: psychology and morals. Psychology is turning increasingly toward experimental science—it is Durkheim’s ambition that sociology should constitute a science of morals. A genuinely scientific study of morality is also, he says, the only way to overcome the oft-remarked upon dichotomy between science and morality. We might point out that, in the form of the free-will/determinism conceptual bind, Durkheim has already simply refused to discuss the relation of morals (presumably depended on some conception of human freedom) to science. I wonder if there isn’t a little slight of hand here. At any rate, this division of philosophy into psychology and morals is described as the division of labor in studying facts about individual consciousness and “la conscience de la société,” which is a naturally sociological object of study.
Durkheim next suggests that students of history would benefit greatly from the study of sociology. I think it is fair to say that the battle for disciplinary supremacy within the French academy between historians and sociologists begins here, later t be carried on between the various iterations of the Annales school and Durkheim’s inheritors.
With less imperialist intent, Durkheim also argues that law students should come out of their hermeneutic bubbles and allow sociology to speak to them of the function of law in society, and in particular of the nature of the various major juridical institutions (the family, the state).
Last but not least, sociology has a general pedagogical mission. Here is expressed in a bald form what I take to be Durkheim’s basic worldview and project. I quote at length:
Or, much more succinctly, Durkheim wants to teach the over-inflated modern self that, “il n’est pas un empire au sein d’un autre empire, mais l’organe d’un organisme, et lui montrera tout ce qu’il y a de beau à s’acquitter consciencieusement de son rôle d’organe” (110).
As by temperament a liberal-reformist, I can only approve of Durkheim’s general project. Yet his language makes my collar feel a little tight. The ‘professor’ in Conrad’s Secret Agent would often feel, quite concretely, the massive weight of the people around him, their numbers and the power the numbers gave them over him. This isn’t so structured an appreciation of the social bond as Durkheim wants, but it seems, somehow, a more plausible response to modern society than actively appreciating and taking joy in one's role as a functioning organ within a larger social organism.
Durkheim sets out to show what sociologie, or la science sociale, in fact is. He hopes to set down a series of inter-related questions that will constitute the specificity of this young science. The spirit will not be that of a professor simply explaining to his students a received truth, but rather of teaching mixed with research, where the students collaborate in a collective attempt to understand. The point here must be to contrast French with German universities. There are in fact many places in the text at which one can detect a certain national tension; to which we will return.
Most previous attempts to think scientifically about society have foundered at their very outset by assuming that society is a made thing. Durkheim says that Hobbes and Rousseau both, although the first makes it an individual and the second a collective enterprise, none the less see society as the conscious creation of man. I think one might perhaps argue with this characterization. I think the point here was really to attack a certain kind of utopianism that perhaps still hung, like a faintly bad smell, around French sociology. There is the broadly 19th century view of the Enlightenment (Rousseau) as an agent of Revolution, and Durkheim wants to distance himself from this. Then there are later socialists, like Fourier and Saint-Simon, with whom the science of society might be associated. Comte, after all, himself sprung from Saint-Simonianism.
Durkheim credits the economists with being the first to attempt to treat society scientifically: as a naturally occurring phenomenon that must, therefore, be subject to certain laws. This was a great step forward, but for the political economists, society is an abstraction that is not, itself, an object for scientific study. For economists, there are only individuals—and even then, these individuals, Durkheim says, are themselves in fact abstractions, without any concrete existence.
Durkheim makes his point through an analogy. In the past, ‘society’ was thought to be a machine, like a watch. The various parts and materials had been brought together specially for a purpose (for instance, to secure peace), and were not inherently related to one another except by dint of this bringing-together (the social contract). One might, Durkheim suggests, on the other hand, think of society as an organism. Just like any other naturally occurring phenomenon, then, society has its special laws. One might object that this contrasting analogy is highly politicized. Watches and machines obey natural laws just as much as dogs and other animals; it’s just that in Durkheim’s time no one could take apart a dog and make it again in a different way. The economists at least admit that society is not a made thing, but having taken the watch apart, they are not themselves able to arrive at the idea of society as an organism, having a reality greater than the sum of its parts.
Durkheim brushes aside, here, a perennial philosophical debate: is there such a thing as free-will? He allows that this is an interesting metaphysical question, but insists that it is only an interesting metaphysical question. He speaks of causality rather than determinism. That causality is a basic principle of the world is presented as the single best-established result of scientific investigation. It would perhaps be more honest to say that a firm belief in causality is not so much the result as the premise, and condition of possibility for modern science. Durkheim’s way of thinking about causality and the special laws of the organism remind me strongly of Claude Bernard. Bernard (or perhaps an intervening factor) might well be the source for Durkheim’s brushing-away of the free-will question—just as Bernard rejected the vitalist thesis that would have made it illegitimate to study living things, Durkheim rejects the idealist (spiritualist?) thesis that would say human free-will renders impossible the scientific study of society.
August Comte is the father of sociology. His great contribution was to make just the leap that the political economists failed to make. For him, sociology contained all the other positive sciences, because society itself contained these facts and was therefore more complex than any of them. But Comte, says Durkheim, was unable to distinguish between societies. For him, there was only l’Humanité, radically set apart from the natural world with an internal development all of its own, which, moreover, was always the same. There are three stages of civilization, and all societies go through them in the same way. Thus, in the end, Comte’s sociology reduces, for Durkheim, to a philosophy of history.
Herbert Spencer, who marked the next great step in sociological thinking, in the end succumbs to the same error. He admits that each society is its own individual organism, but then he applies a single rule of evolution to every single society he investigates. His empirical reach is impressive, but in the end he sees the same thing everywhere he looks. He, too, is really only applying a philosophy to society.
Durkheim then turns to something of a panoramic view of contemporary sociology. Alfred Espinas (who plays something of a role in Pierre Rosanvallon’s The demands of liberty) is credited with founding genuinely scientific sociology. That is, he is the first, in fact, to derive rules from empirical observation, rather than apply a philosophical system to selected data. Strong words. It’s good that Espinas gets this position, because without it, the French would look very thin on the sociological ground. Nearly all of the scholars Durkheim singles out in the following pages are German.
An interesting mise en abyme then occurs. Durkheim, discussing the various subdivisions of sociology, and the merit of division in general, says, “une science est, elle aussi, une sorte d’organisme” (101). That is, a science is like a society in that it develops both as a whole and in its constitutive parts by becoming more complex and subdivided.
Durkheim sets out the following non-exhaustive list of the broad fields of application that are, he says, already plainly to be found in sociology. First is social psychology, which on his telling is quite broad, including customs and traditions—we might today say culture. Second is sociology as a science of morals. This is recognized as related to the first, but its specificity is insisted upon. Third is law, which is itself in a sense only an ‘imperious’ application of collective moral sentiments. Lastly, there is economic science. Durkheim says that this is in a sense already close to genuine scientificity, but must first give up its supposed autonomy. I think the same point would be made by saying that Durkheim wants economics to give up its false naturalism and admit that economic behavior is embedded within a complex socio-cultural environment. Durkheim mentions two possible subfields, defined by subject, for sociology that aren’t yet even close to constituting themselves: the army, and diplomacy. I found this striking because the first seems to me a very natural subject for the kind of investigation of collectivity that Durkheim is proposing, while the second seems completely different. What did Durkheim mean by diplomacy?
Each of these subfields, Durkheim says, could be approached in two basic ways. He illustrates this by analogy to a basic division in medical science (also mentioned in Bernard): that of form and function, or morphology and physiology. Durkheim comes down solidly on the side of function. In the organism that is modern society, he says, the actual institutions are generally able to perform various functions, and the function performed by any given institution might change rapidly. It is therefore the functions, rather than the institutions which perform them, that are primary. I have always been made uneasy by what I have understood to be Durkheim’s functionalism, and here it is explained. I am still uneasy. It is possible to speak of the functions of an actual organism, because we are authorized to assume that, qua organism, it has a limited set of non-complex goals: eating, breathing, and so on—which we might themselves reduce, as Claude Bernard does, to sustaining the artificial milieu that the organism itself constitutes. It is to this end that we explain the regulation of various levels of chemicals, or of heat. Is it legitimate to make an analogy to society in this way? (ignoring, for the moment, the problem of delimiting each society, which I suppose needn’t be in principle different from the problem of delimiting different organisms). I do not think that we can, as Spencer does, assume that societies are organisms in the sense that they are born, grow, live, and die. Despite Marx’s attraction, as well, to the image of social metabolism, I do not think that we can say that societies eat and excrete. Perhaps Durkheim elsewhere explains himself differently, and more.
The remainder of the essay is taken up by an overview of the various sorts of students Durkheim feels would benefit from studying his sociology. In the first place, his wants to speak to students of philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline, he says, is already far on the way to dividing itself into two distinct disciplines: psychology and morals. Psychology is turning increasingly toward experimental science—it is Durkheim’s ambition that sociology should constitute a science of morals. A genuinely scientific study of morality is also, he says, the only way to overcome the oft-remarked upon dichotomy between science and morality. We might point out that, in the form of the free-will/determinism conceptual bind, Durkheim has already simply refused to discuss the relation of morals (presumably depended on some conception of human freedom) to science. I wonder if there isn’t a little slight of hand here. At any rate, this division of philosophy into psychology and morals is described as the division of labor in studying facts about individual consciousness and “la conscience de la société,” which is a naturally sociological object of study.
Durkheim next suggests that students of history would benefit greatly from the study of sociology. I think it is fair to say that the battle for disciplinary supremacy within the French academy between historians and sociologists begins here, later t be carried on between the various iterations of the Annales school and Durkheim’s inheritors.
With less imperialist intent, Durkheim also argues that law students should come out of their hermeneutic bubbles and allow sociology to speak to them of the function of law in society, and in particular of the nature of the various major juridical institutions (the family, the state).
Last but not least, sociology has a general pedagogical mission. Here is expressed in a bald form what I take to be Durkheim’s basic worldview and project. I quote at length:
Nous vivons dans un pays qui ne reconnaît d’autre maître que l’opinion. Pour que ce maître ne devienne pas un despote inintelligent, il est nécessaire de l’éclairer, et comment, sinon par la science? Sous l’influence de causes qu’il serait trop long d’analyser ici, l’esprit de collectivité s’est affaibli chez nous. Chacun de nous a de son moi un sentiment tellement exorbitant qu’il n’aperçoit plus les limites qui l’enserrent de toutes parts. Se faisant illusion sur sa propre puissance, il aspire à se suffire à soi-même. C’est pourquoi nous mettons tout notre mérite à nous distinguer le plus possible les uns des autres, et à suivre chacun notre mouvement propre. Il faut réagir et de toutes nos forces contre cette tendance dispersive. Il faut que notre société reprenne conscience de son unité organique; que l’individu sente cette masse sociale qui l’enveloppe et le pénètre, qu’il la sente toujours présente et agissante, et que ce sentiment règle toujours sa conduite; car ce n’est pas assez qu’il ne s’en inspire que de temps en temps dans des circonstances particulièrement critiques (109).
Or, much more succinctly, Durkheim wants to teach the over-inflated modern self that, “il n’est pas un empire au sein d’un autre empire, mais l’organe d’un organisme, et lui montrera tout ce qu’il y a de beau à s’acquitter consciencieusement de son rôle d’organe” (110).
As by temperament a liberal-reformist, I can only approve of Durkheim’s general project. Yet his language makes my collar feel a little tight. The ‘professor’ in Conrad’s Secret Agent would often feel, quite concretely, the massive weight of the people around him, their numbers and the power the numbers gave them over him. This isn’t so structured an appreciation of the social bond as Durkheim wants, but it seems, somehow, a more plausible response to modern society than actively appreciating and taking joy in one's role as a functioning organ within a larger social organism.
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