Abstract
Unconventional thinking often suffers the indignity of being mistaken for conventional thinking. This is especially true when sociological realism and other forms of anti-reductionism are at stake since, in many spheres, anti-reductionism is so far from conventional that, when unsuspecting observers encounter it, they often confuse it with reductionism. Marcel Fournier’s massive new biography of Émile Durkheim makes this crystal clear. Durkheim, who devoted his career to mapping the terra incognita of social facts, was accused of denying the facts of individuality. Rather than winning plaudits for attempting to balance sociology and psychology, Durkheim was charged with the radical negation of psychology. His professed goal (to open a new domain of human experience to investigation) was construed as an attempt to open one frontier and close another.
That Durkheim opposed the reduction of society to the individual is plain. In the mid-1880s, while still in his twenties, he concluded that society is more than “the arithmetical sum of its citizens”; it is, rather, a “real being which, while it is obviously nothing without the individuals who make it up, still has its own nature and personality” (p. 81). This is clearly sociological realism—the view that society has a sui generis reality all its own. Rejecting the one-sided individualism of most previous attempts at social explanation, Durkheim put forward the hermeneutic principle that sociologists must study not only individuals but also the distinctive facts that emerge from social interactions. Society, though made up of individuals, has supra-individual properties as well. It is a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.
But did Durkheim also oppose reducing individuality to society? As Fournier shows in great detail, many of his peers charged him with precisely this. From virtually the start of his career, Durkheim was regularly said to have reduced individuals to ciphers wholly dominated by a reified society. Durkheim, time and again, denied the charge. His sociology, he held, was not reductionist in any sense. It was unconventional; in some respects it was even unprecedented; but his intent was to widen the field of vision, not blinker it. He expounded his realist principles methodologically (in The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895) and illustrated them substantively (in Suicide, 1897, and in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912) in order to equip sociologists with the tools they would need to appreciate the multidimensionality of facts that do not subsist in individual life alone—among them money, language, solidarity, and the state.
These replies went largely unheeded in Durkheim’s day, and they have seldom won credence since then. Now, as in his own day, Durkheim is routinely portrayed as a sociological reductionist, as an enemy of psychology and the inner life. Scrupulous readers will judge for themselves. But I regard this as a caricature. Durkheim’s case for inquiry into the interplay of personal and group facts has been misleadingly stereotyped as Soziologismus, as reductionist individualism inverted, despite his best efforts to dispel the stereotype both discursively and empirically.
Fournier offers rich new evidence concerning Durkheim’s ill-starred encounter with his critics, much of which should cast doubt, at the very least, on the still-current stereotype. But Fournier also shows that, from the very start, many of Durkheim’s critics seemed almost immune to his actual words; indeed, some seemed positively enamored of the image of Durkheim the Metaphysician, elevating Society over the Individual.
Fournier’s chronicle allows us to see how this happened, year by year, as if we were watching time-lapse photography. At first Durkheim was confident that he could win over his critics: “…the resistance I am fighting has its uses,” he wrote to a vocal early critic (p. 208). But he was disconcerted when clarifications proved unavailing. He mused, after Suicide had failed to change his critics’ outlook: “Am I just slashing at water with a knife?” (p. 5). Soon he came to a sad realization: “I am beginning to see that I am powerless against prevailing opinion” (p. 270). By 1908, Xavier Léon could report to Elie Halevy that Durkheim had become, quite oddly, “one of the men you must insult in order to become a philosopher” (p. 611). The drumbeat of insults continued to the end of Durkheim’s life in 1917, coming not only from academics but from right-wing and chauvinist publicists like Agathon and Péguy. Endlessly, Durkheim was charged with the latter-day equivalent of medieval scholasticism—the view that society is a substantive, superordinate reality, constraining individuality so utterly that it has no separate existence.
By now, this stereotype has achieved so much reputational inertia that many sociologists take its truth for granted. And there are unquestionably bold and imperious passages in some of Durkheim’s texts, especially his earlier works, which, viewed apart from his larger argument and the clarifications he offered in ensuing years, could seem to constitute an obvious warrant for this view. But I hold that Durkheim’s views are far subtler than conventional readings suggest.
Fournier—whose giant volume is just the second full-scale biography to date—offers many reasons to support this contention. He writes on page one that he wants to dispel the myth of Durkheim’s “supposed negation of individuality.” Much of what he reports in the ensuing text contributes to this goal.
Against the Stream
Before we turn to Fournier’s details, we can reasonably ask why inversions of this kind take place. Many readers will suspect that Durkheim’s story is unique, and that he provoked (and earned) the unflattering response he received. But my sense is that many people find sociological realism so alien and counterintuitive that they misconstrue it in the light of their own preconceptions. The experience of Solomon Asch is instructive in this respect. One of the top social psychologists of the past century, a seminal theorist and experimentalist, Asch was committed to sociological anti-reductionism, which he articulated with striking clarity. His core experimental finding, and his main theoretical conclusion, was that people under group pressure are equally capable of conformity and nonconformity. Yet Asch is now an icon of reductionism. He is credited with a view that he repeatedly and sharply rejected—that people are mere puppets, moved by group pressure. And even Asch, unconventional thinker that he was, misread Durkheim in a similar way, mistaking a kindred spirit for an adversary.
What sparks this kind of reversion to conventionality? I will return to Durkheim, and Fournier, in a moment. But first, to put Durkheim’s quest to establish first principles in context, I will consider Asch’s parallel experience.
Asch, of course, is most famous for the “line length” experiment, which he reported in several places, beginning with the treatise Social Psychology in 1952. His experiment was simplicity itself. Placing an unsuspecting test subject in a group of play-acting confederates, Asch asked each person in turn to volunteer an opinion about the relative lengths of several vertical lines. By the time the naïve subject was asked for an opinion, Asch’s confederates had already agreed, unanimously and aloud, that two lines of clearly unequal length were actually equal in length. Some of Asch’s naïve subjects then agreed with the majority despite the clear evidence of their sense; others resisted the opinion of the majority and voiced their own views.
This study is now generally known as the “Asch conformity experiment,” and most commentators say that it proves the decisive power of the group over the individual. But Asch himself reported something quite different—namely, that his subjects were even likelier to resist majority opinion than to surrender to it—and he was perplexed and perturbed when conventional interpreters began to credit him with results and conclusions that he rejected.
In 1952, in his first report on the experiment, Asch reported that one-third of the subjects yielded to majority opinion, but that two-thirds were “critical” and independent subjects who disavowed the unanimous opinion of the majority. His conclusion was simple: “…There were extreme individual differences in response to majority pressure, ranging from complete independence to complete yielding” (pp. 457, 459). Asch then marshaled this finding against the “baseless consensus” which he said prevailed in conventional social psychology: “Current thinking has stressed the power of social conditions to induce psychological changes arbitrarily. It has taken slavish submission to group forces as the general fact…” (pp. 450, 451).
This, plainly, is sociological reductionism, as Asch explains: “The model was an individual deprived of autonomy, one whose actions stemmed not from an inner direction but from external influences forcing themselves upon him and taking control away from him” (pp. 400, 401). 1
Asch repeated his findings and conclusions in Scientific American in 1955. He cited his evidence as a counter to conventional thinking in the social sciences, for which social life was equivalent to sleepwalking. “Gabriel Tarde summed it all up in the aphorism: ‘Social man is a somnambulist’.” Asch traced this outlook to early students of hypnotism like Bernheim, who had “proposed that hypnosis was but an extreme form of a normal psychological process which became known as ‘suggestibility’“ (p. 31). But in his own work, instead of “waking suggestibility,” Asch found “startling individual differences” in behavior that reflected deeply rooted differences in personality: “The performances of individuals in this experiment tend to be highly consistent. Those who strike out on the path of independence do not, as a rule, succumb to the majority, even over an extended series of trials, while those who choose the path of compliance are unable to free themselves as the ordeal is prolonged.”
In short, personality matters. Society acts upon individuals whose dispositions are not simply malleable. Asch hence objected to research guided by the banal assumption “that people submit uncritically and painlessly to external manipulation,” adding, with a touch of irony: “There is some reason to wonder whether it was not the investigators who, in their enthusiasm for a theory, were suggestible” (p. 32).
Asch further elaborated his findings and conclusions in a research monograph in 1956. His position was unchanged and unambiguous. And yet, soon, a stereotyped account of “the Asch conformity experiment” contradicted Asch across the board. A review of 99 textbooks found a steadily rising emphasis on conformity from 1953 to 1984. Fifty-seven books cited only those who yielded, while only 17 even noted that twice as many subjects had remained unyielding! (Friend et al., pp. 35–36) By 1961, Asch was sufficiently disturbed by this trend to criticize it. Many key facts had been “slighted” or “ignored,” he wrote, and even “cursory observation” should have convinced his readers “that it is not sufficient to concentrate on conformity, they must be equally concerned with the conditions of independence.” “Independence is not simply the weakening of conformity…. The respective trends are in opposition to each other” (p. 153; italics mine).
Asch argued that these “obvious distinctions” had been largely ignored because many scholars were blinded by the prejudice that people are sheep-like (p. 154). He restated this point in the 1987 reprint of Social Psychology, observing that inflated claims for the efficacy of marketing and propaganda had been credulously accepted by many scholars, who increasingly saw people “in a miserable light” as either cheerful or spiritless robots. “What struck me most…was a drift toward the trivialization of human possibilities…” Asch sought to challenge these “taken for granted” assumptions, which he believed his research had accomplished. But others saw matters differently: “Ironically, many investigators were friendly to these efforts and tried to carry them forward, without however departing in the slightest from their irrationalistic starting point”—the view, that is, that group pressure moves people, not individual reasons for action. Asch’s conclusion is wistful: “As I was to discover, my medicine was evidently not sufficiently powerful” (p. x).
How true this was! Serge Moscovici, for example, saw the contradiction between Asch’s views and the standard interpretation, but he was so loyal to the stereotype that he enjoyed Asch’s discomfiture: “…the Asch experiment…clearly invalidated his theory. It serves, on the contrary, as one of the most dramatic illustrations of conformity, of blindly going along with the group, even when the individual realizes that by doing so he turns his back on reality and truth” (pp. 348–49). 2
Asch called this prejudice—a bias, á la Moscovici, which inhibits insight into even simple statistics—”social determinism,” and he called Émile Durkheim its best representative. This brings us full circle to Marcel Fournier’s biography. Was the world wrong about Asch but right about Durkheim?
Through a Glass Darkly
Asch’s reading of Durkheim is classic: “Durkheim, the outstanding exponent of the position that social facts have an existence and a lawfulness of their own, concluded that psychology is at bottom irrelevant to the facts of society and historical change.” Unaware that he himself would later become the object of similar criticism, he accused Durkheim of holding the same determinist views that were subsequently identified with “the Asch experiment”: “The group swallows the individuals who become mere recipients of group forces. The individual thinks, feels, and decides in accordance with forces to which he can only submit” (1952, pp. 16, 254). 3
Durkheim was drawn into debate on this subject in 1895, when his ardent critic, Gabriel Tarde, wrote four articles attacking the “fantasmagorie ontologique de M. Durkheim.” With silky innocence, Tarde demurred: “I admit, I have great difficulty understanding what remains of society once we set aside individuals…Are we to return to the realism of the Middle Ages?” (2007, p. 234). 4 Durkheim responded with alacrity: “Most of the propositions that my eminent critic attributes to me are not mine” (p. 205).
This kind of response did not deter others from issuing similar criticisms. In rapid succession, Durkheim found himself replying to Lucien Herr, who accused Durkheim of resurrecting the “phantom of the old realist metaphysics”; Paul Lapie, who faulted him for allegedly wishing to “annul individual initiatives”; and Charles Andler, who wrote, sarcastically, that “No one has ever seen ‘the collective spirit’ speak or guide the pens of secretaries of deliberative assemblies” (*pp. 238, 239). Durkheim replied patiently and respectfully to Lapie, as he did to everyone who appeared to want to understand him: “I do not see sociology as anything other than a psychology, but it is a psychology sui generis“ (p. 264). But he was much less gentle with Andler as he was with anyone else whose criticisms were, in his estimation, careless or disingenuous: “…I completely reject the ideas M. Andler ascribes to me…” These ideas are “absurd.” “He is able to attribute them to me only by distorting a few isolated words, whereas I took great care to warn the reader against such distortions” (p. 217).
Durkheim was distressed to discover that even his own circle was not immune to this kind of misreading. “Let me say once more,” he wrote to Celestin Bouglé in this period, “that I never dreamed of saying that one can be a sociologist without having a background in psychology, or that sociology was anything other than a psychology. What I did say was that collective psychology cannot simply be deduced from individual psychology because a new factor—association—has intervened and has transformed the psychic raw material. That factor is the source of all the differences and of everything that is new. A phenomenon of individual psychology has as its substratum an individual consciousness, and a phenomenon of collective psychology has as its substratum a ground of individual consciousnesses.”
Characteristically, he told Bouglé that he hoped Suicide would soon “clear up any misunderstandings” (p. 263). But not long after Suicide appeared, he reported that he was “profoundly discouraged” (*p. 345). “I thought that my Suicide would clear up the ambiguities and determine an agreement. I now see that that will not be the case. I still sense the same misgivings in what people write to me…” (p. 270).
This would be a recurring pattern. Each time Durkheim published a new work, he voiced the hope that his critics and colleagues would finally see that his sociology could, and indeed must, accommodate the insights of psychology. 5 But each time, alas, he was disappointed. In 1912, he wrote to Bouglé for the Nth time, with more than a hint of recrimination: “I have so often been told that sociology is unable to account for the ideal, that it is positive and realist. I have shown that it attends to the ideal because it is living.” But “until now, not a single word” had been said in defense of that point—not even by Bouglé (p. 583).
It could be the case, of course, that Durkheim’s critics simply grasped the import of his work better than he did. But to consider that possibility with proper care (or the alternative possibility, to which I subscribe, that Durkheim remains an irreplaceable source of insight into self and society) we need to return to the books themselves. I invite anyone who has not recently re-read Suicide or The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life to consult the fresh new translations, by Robin Buss and Karen Field, that have appeared in the past two decades. Few works of sociological theory, in my opinion, come close to matching the subtlety and power of the final third of Suicide or the final two-thirds of Forms. And combined, these two books are quite a bit shorter than Fournier’s biography!
What Fournier offers, above all, is material drawn from Durkheim’s correspondence. His interest, as a biographer, is primarily Durkheim’s career, which he documents in great and, at times, excruciating detail. Despite the vast scale of the work, he pays only modest attention to Durkheim’s books, and says surprisingly little about myriad figures of major intellectual interest. At the same time, he devotes an astonishing number of pages to Wikipedia-like summaries of the careers of secondary and tertiary figures in Durkheim’s orbit. Only dedicated specialists will have the patience to wade through the endless detail, and few will regard Fournier’s attempt to turn this detail into a rounded biography as a literary success. Beginners will continue to find Steven Lukes’ 1972 biography more artful and engaging. The English-language edition of Fournier’s book, meanwhile, has some very grave limitations. 6 But Fournier offers many invaluable nuggets. On the subject of anti-psychological reductionism in particular, he presents us with more than enough material to gauge how seriously Durkheim took the issue.
In 1898, Durkheim published an essay in which he wrote: “The agent endowed with reason does not behave like a thing of which the activity can be reduced to a system of reflexes. He hesitates, feels his way, deliberates, and by that distinguishing mark he is recognized.” In 1909, he stated categorically: “Sociology in no way imposes upon man a passively conservative attitude….It only turns us away from ill-conceived and sterile enterprises inspired by the belief that we are able to change the social order as we wish, without taking into account customs, traditions, and the mental constitution of men and societies” (pp. 303, 525). 7
One of the best sections of Fournier’s book focuses on Durkheim’s pamphlets and activities during World War I. He pays close attention to the neglected but serious pamphlet, Deutschland über alles, which pivots around the premise that Pan-German mentality was not only socially real but a phenomenon of “morbid enormity,” infused with will-mania and delusions of grandeur. Though this pamphlet has typically been dismissed as a journalistic or even jingoistic tract, it is, in fact, a subtle study of the anomic extremes to which states and nations can be led by despair. That Durkheim’s intent here is psychological as well as political is evident in the very vocabulary of this pamphlet: “humeur aggressive,” “volonté belliqueuse,” “cruautés réglementaires,” and ‘l’inhumanité systématique” (*p. 681). This analysis does not rise to the level of Durkheim’s exceptionally acute inquiry into melancholy and rage in the later chapters of Suicide, but it reflects a similar impulse.
Food for Thought
One of the ironies of Durkheim’s struggle against the reductionist reading of his work is that he was vilified for this alleged reductionism. He fought, in part, to vindicate his integrity, moral as well as intellectual—to refute the notion that he saw individuals as small cogs in the social machine. But something changed in the decades that followed. When Asch was accused of the same reductionist view, he was lionized. When he resisted the reductionist reading of his famed experiment, he was resisting acclaim, not infamy. He is still lionized, and for the same reason.
Reductionism, in this sphere at least, is thriving. It has every quality of the collective representations that preoccupied Durkheim. When we as individuals try to undo them, we discover they have a lasting and constraining power. Culturally speaking, collective representations have lives of their own. They can, of course, be changed; but that requires collective action.
Footnotes
1
Asch credits the dominance of this reductionism to the influence of marketing and managerial psychology, which takes as its premise the claim “that if these methods are followed, men can be made to accept wilfully imposed views.” Of the “modern psychology” that embraces this premise, Asch says that, “at bottom, it works with a concept of man not very different from that of modern organs of propaganda” (pp. 28, 29).
2
Lee Ross, in a 
volume on Asch’s work, took an equally typical albeit less nuanced stance: Asch’s “compelling conformity studies, and Milgram’s…obedience studies, and many less dramatic and celebrated experiment[s], all offer one common message: situational manipulations in general, and relatively subtle situational features or variations in particular, can produce behavior that one never could have anticipated from knowledge about the actors or their past behavior…” (p. 86).
3
What is particularly striking about Asch’s approach to social facts is that, though he came very close to Durkheim, his starting point was the wish to embed Gestalt social psychology in the notion of a matrix of social interactions. For this purpose, he found the concept of the “individual” shallow, since actual empirical individuals are always, in ways reminiscent of Mead, intersubjectively linked as “I,” “you,” and (vitally) “we.” The wealth of insight in this perspective remains to be fully tapped.
4
Henceforward, I will cite the original 2007 edition with asterisks, in this way: (*p.234) or (*p. 903). Citations from the translated edition will appear sans asterisks: e.g., (p. 234) or (p. 601). Many of these citations are silently emended, since the translation is not always very precise.
5
One of his most direct attempts to correct prior misunderstandings appeared in the preface to the second edition of Rules, which is available in the 1982 edition translated by W. D. Halls.
6
Although Polity does not bill the translation as an abridged edition, it is, in fact, sharply abridged. The original edition is over 150,000 words longer than the translation. Innumerable passages have been deleted throughout the volume, shortening nearly every substantive discussion and making many passages abrupt and disjointed. Often, minor material is left untouched, while significant topics are pruned away. So—caveat lector!
7
This, of course, is just a sampler of the many similar and amplifying remarks which are offered throughout Fournier’s long chronicle.