Émile Durkheim Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Together with August Comte, Émile Durkheim (1858–1914) is often considered the founder of sociology. Durkheim’s significance is also felt in anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, and political science. His four major works are Division of Labor in Society (1893), The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). The principle argument that connects all these books is this: As societies (his Euro-centrist perspective is often criticized) enter into a transition from feudalism to capitalism, what are the social consequences for the individual as well as for society? How can a society afford individuals greater freedom of choice without undermining their attachment to institutions? Hence, integration, and how it is reproduced, is Durkheim’s central concern.

Moreover, as religion loses its historic function as the dominant ethical and moral force by which individuals develop as well as receive “social integration,” societies are increasingly challenged to develop a secular alternative to religion. To be sure, Durkheim did not think that the emerging modern secular society is any less moralistic than the premodern religious society. However, to the degree to which new integrative mechanisms fail or function insufficiently, the individual and society will have to pay a price. Thus, at the individual level, suicide may increase (as indeed it has), while at the level of society, anomie (normlessness) or the “forced division of labor” (coerced social cohesion or, simply, class conflict) may ensue.

Durkheim is sometimes considered the first “functionalist.” Functionalism can be described as a school of thought that takes as one premise that societies tend to produce their own equilibrium and that economic, political, legal, and cultural (including here religious) institutions have corrective abilities, perhaps even a mandate, should a society deviate “too much” from its normal state of affairs. Exactly “how much” too much is, or what, exactly, the “normal course” or direction of a society is, Durkheim never states explicitly. However, in The Division of Labor in Society, he goes to great lengths to distinguish the “normal” from the “pathological,” and in so doing reveals an ontological position not unlike that of, say, late nineteenth-century biology (and its influence on social theorists such as Schäffle).

In the United States, no one has built on Durkheim’s work more extensively than Talcott Parsons. Parsons’s structural functionalism was perhaps the most influential theoretical paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and certainly influenced an entire generation of political scientists. Yet other scholars have taken Durkheim’s ideas quite some place else. Philippe Schmitter, for example, was one of the earliest to see useful parallels between corporatism and Durkheim’s arguments in The Division of Labor. In turn, scholars who found corporatism a useful concept were themselves influencing later scholarship that focused on the breakdown of democracy, and, roughly, a decade later, on the transition to democracy. Durkheim’s work has thus proven to be of enduring relevance.

What is more, in light of recent debates around the clash of civilizations, Durkheim’s theories on religion and his attempt to establish a “science of morality” invite important comparisons between, on the one hand, late nineteenth-century social theory as an incipient social and empirical science with its own distinct methodology vis-à-vis the established field of philosophy, and, on the other hand, early twenty-first-century debates (as well as searches for common grounds) dealing with the intersection of religion and political democracy (and/or theology and political science).

Bibliography:

Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press, 1947.
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1947.
The Rules of the Sociological Method. New York: Free Press, 1938.
Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: Free Press, 1951.
Giddens, Anthony. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Huntington, Samuel, P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49.
Parsons, Talcott. Structure and Process in Modern Societies. New York: Free Press, 1965.
Toward A General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Schmitter, Philippe. “Still the Century of Corporatism?” In Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation, edited by P. Schmitter and G. Lehmbruch, 7–49. London: Sage, 1979.