Durkheim on society
by Michael G. Heller
Published in Social Science Files; January 18, 2025
Émile Durkheim argues that new societies do not create themselves whole because they are in large measure “ready-made” from leftover features of preceding societies. The newness of any society and its superiority over previous ones consists only in a few “additions which are made to its original base and which transform it”.
He says this repeatedly without ever being specific about the nature of the “parts” or “innovations” which are added on, and he is adamant that the new elements are of far less importance to the social scientist than the root fundamental phenomena that continue on from previous societies.
About the carry-overs Durkheim is much more specific. He has in mind antecedent social facts, in particular morality, laws, and artistic creations, and to a lesser extent, forms of economic organisation such as the division of labour. They change only superficially in the transition, just in emphasis or application. As an example, property rights that under Roman law protected the estate of the pater as head of household but in later societies protected the inheritance rights of the children.
Even were all this true, none of it helps us to distinguish one society from another. For such a task, Durkheim has no method to offer. This is surprising given that he does explicitly propose that it should be possible to classify different types of society in the same way that social scientists classify types of peoples by race, or families by their structures, or crimes by their punishments. Yet he never attempts it.
Nor does Durkheim suggest any general categories which could be used to differentiate societies. Because he relies heavily on the idea that antecedents are handed over from the old to the new societies he is dismal about individual capacities to shape societies. Men, he writes, “can never create something out of nothing”.
This is in some respects true. Existing materials are used to build new things. In terms of actual human agency, however, Durkheim places his faith at the opposite extreme, in an abstract amorphous force he calls “collective”.
Indeed, Durkheim’s fame largely rests on his hypothesis that individuals in society inevitably bow to a superior spiritual force, presented to them as a collective being, which makes “comprehensible the subordination which is required of him”.
Superior supernatural entities are the collective representations of society.
Thus, “society is to its members what a god is to its faithful”. On such spirited theoretical foundations one would be tempted to conclude that—aside from differences in religious practise—all societies are essentially the same. All entail religion in some form, thus the function of society is religion. Durkheim never says this explicitly, but a string of observations suggest his objective is to counter the notion, made famous by Thomas Hobbes, that the source of all human constraint is the human artifice of the governing organisation. For Durkheim, the action of religious constraint is “the supreme task of society”.
“… the individual finds himself in the presence of a force which dominates him and to which he must bow. … Through religion he represents this state to himself by the senses or symbolically …”
Durkheim does not extend the idea of constraints into the secular domains of governance. He argued for focusing on continuities rather than innovations. He insists on the perpetuity of society’s antecedents, mounted atop each other forever more, and seeks to minimise the sociological significance of any perceptible departures from established patterns.
Durkheim juxtaposes collective (we may say unsubstantiated) agency against individual (we may say substantiated). He traps himself in a “period of the domination of mythological truth” when “intellectual individualism” and “impersonal truth” did not exist. In almost every reference he makes to the nature of causation in social change—in any period—Durkheim raises the higher dignity of collective experience over individual impulses.
Durkheim has little interest in social change that depends on creative and constructive individual decisions. Even the cognitive role of individuals who interpret collective truth is always heavily caveated. The argument that societies change when they decide to change makes no sense at all to him:
“As all societies are born of other societies, with no break in continuity, we may be assured that in the whole course of social evolution there has not been a single time when individuals have really had to consult together to decide whether they would enter into collective life together, and into one sort of collective life rather than another.”
There are ways of avoiding Durkheim’s conundrum. When I think about society I visualise two dimensions: a) the constant and universal nature of society throughout history and b) differential universalising types based on secular-not-circular decisions that exemplify the changing form of society over time.
References:
Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method, Edited with an introduction by Steven Lukes, Palgrave Macmillan 1982
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated with Introduction by Karen Elise Fields, The Free Press 1985
Émile Durkheim, Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology, 1955, English translation Cambridge University Press 1983
Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville, by James McNeill Whistler, 1865