The ideal of the person: Recovering the novelty of Durkheim’s sociology. Part II: Modern society,the cult of the person,and the sociological project

Morality as a modern social fact

As the title suggests, Durkheim’s essay Détermination du fait moral aims at defining the conceptual structure of the moral fact. Now, in contrast with popular readings of this essay, which tend to see it as a general analysis of moral rules as such, Durkheim shows that morality is, in fact, a modern social fact. Durkheim saw in moral rules the paradigmatic expression of the influence of society on individual action, because in moral actions, impersonal reasons appear more clearly than in other kinds of actions, for instance, those based on technical rules. ⁷ In moral rules, society shows its ability to lay down a rule that does not depend on any prior natural consideration. Thus, morality consists of categorical imperatives that make “violence to desire,”, if by “desire,” we refer to the natural preferences of individuals. Socialization is the primary phenomenon that introduces the split between the natural and social individual, reorienting desire toward the social goods that these obligations presuppose and allow us to achieve. Thus, for Durkheim, morality can be described as a system of imperative goods.

If there is something in common between morality and religion, it is the opposition that imperative goods establish with the profane sphere of merely natural (individual) preferences. As Durkheim puts it, whenever “the public consciousness does not allow … fail[ure] to perform a duty for purely utilitarian reasons,” there is “a sacred dimension in morality” (1906: 104). Does this mean that any duty, because it is required for achieving a social good, is sacred and that any sacred rule expresses therefore a duty? Durkheim does not think so. Ritual practice obscures the distinction between moral and technical rules. Moral rules can only be grasped in their determined nature once society, cutting its ties with the order of nature, appears as an autonomous, self-instituting power, instituting a set of predetermined rules which give rise to social, and not natural, sanctions. This is the first reflexive dimension of morality, considered as an essentially modern social fact.

Once the obligation is no longer entangled in the natural order as it was with worldly, customary religions, the question arises concerning the justification of sanctions. The sanction cannot be seen as justified unless the individual endorses the rule to which sanctions are attached. For this reason, according to Durkheim, “full and complete morality” presupposes that “when we conform to the moral rule, we want not only to conform to it, but we want the rule itself,” and this is possible only if “we see the reasons that justify the rule and if we judge them legitimate” (1906: 109). If, beyond the obligations that inflict violence on desire, we must refer to the sphere of “moral ends” that can justify them, modern morality aims to make this full structure explicit. As “objects of desire,” moral ends, while social, must be at the same time the result of reasoning: in this way, “sensibility has, to a certain extent, the same end as reason” (1906: 65). We must reason about the desired good in order to desire the rational obligation.

Modern autonomy within the moral consciousness

In the lectures on moral education given in 1902, which were intended to have practical consequences for educators, Durkheim, far from providing an abstract and universal definition of moral facts, articulates the coordinates of morality as it appears, transformed and constituted as such, in modern societies. Durkheim begins by recalling the basic requirements of a moral sphere: “The domain of morality is the domain of duty” (1902: 26). The peculiar normative force of moral rules shows that “in the idea of a rule,” there is something more than “the idea of regularity,” namely, “the idea of authority” (1902: 33). Through “obedience by consent” to social authority, moral rules become possible as such and the individual becomes a person in its first minimal meaning: a being capable of acting for reasons and not only a being constrained by natural impulses.

Durkheim’s first pedagogical translation of this dimension of morality is well-known, perhaps too well-known. It is the idea of social discipline: “it implies that acts repeat themselves under determinate conditions; but it does not go without authority. It is a regular authority” (1902: 36). This social discipline forges individual freedom. In this sense, it is “useful not only to moral life,” since it molds the “character and the personality in general” (1902: 52). We see Durkheim moving here toward his mature conception of the human individual as a person: a being capable of “governing his passions, desires, habits, and of imposing on them a law” (1902: 52). This is the first layer of human autonomy, which consists in superimposing on natural, causal, laws socially instituted norms. ⁸

Since this ability depends on society, it can be established only if the individual is acting in a social setting. This is where Durkheim’s second pedagogical principle comes in. For morality to be maintained, the individual must have “a liking for collective life,” and in order to “take pleasure in common life, he has to get into the habit of acting and thinking in common” (1902: 266–267). In Durkheim’s view, the role of primary moral education is to give the young as many occasions as possible to participate in social practices that enable them to act and think in common.

If, however, educators followed only these two pedagogical rules, they would condemn the child to “an incomplete and lower morality” (1902: 138). Moral education as social discipline can only produce a personal being who responds to authority. It is unable to produce a person in the specific modern sense of the word, that is, a being capable of taking responsibility. If Durkheim’s moral sociology ended here, it would only have replaced the ancient gods with society as an impersonal external power. The disclosure of society as such beyond the supposedly intrinsic free will of the individual must be followed by another step, directly linked to modern society, which requires a sociological redefinition of a rational free will.

Modern moral autonomy, as Durkheim conceives it, requires not only the refusal of arbitrary authority, but the creation of a new kind of authority. This is because the autonomy at the heart of the ideal of the person implies two different impersonal imperative rules. According to the first, “never, in any case, should a determinate way of thinking be imposed as obligatory, even in the name of moral authority” (1902: 123). According to the second, “It is a rule, not only logical but moral, that our reason should accept as true only what it has spontaneously recognized as such” (1902: 123). These two rules together give us a more precise idea of what the modern autonomy of the person means. To treat an individual as a person, in its peculiar modern sense, is to refuse to impose on him social rules that he could reasonably reject and let him abide by only those rules that he recognizes as justified by reasons. The moral rule of all moral rules requires, therefore, not only personally interpreted but also personally justified moral rules. ⁹

The operative definition of morality on the basis of which educators must guide their practice should incorporate this strictly modern “third element” (1902: 137). This requirement transforms the meaning of responsible action, which, in a context of morality as a modern social fact, not only requires that the individual act “intentionally”, that is, that “he has represented to himself in advance the action and its relations to the rule”: to this “first representation,” says Durkheim, “we require to add another one,” that is, “the explicative representation of the rule itself, of its causes and its reasons” (1902: 137).

Toward a new modern order

Once the autonomy of the person is understood as requiring an explanatory representation of rules, it cannot be achieved without the intervention of sociology as the source of the reasons for action that individuals are looking for. This search begins with the social ideal of autonomy, which implicitly drives the desire for reasons and grounds the imperative impersonal rules they feel compelled to follow. Sociology’s first task in modernity is to articulate the specific content of modern social ideals, in order to help individuals clarify what they are striving for.

This demanding conception of modern autonomy, which establishes an internal link between practical reason and sociological knowledge, demonstrates that the transformation introduced by modern social practices does not merely concern the move from sensory consciousness to conceptual consciousness, which is achieved as such in any kind of society. The historical novelty of modernity lies in the genesis of another kind of conceptual consciousness, rooted in the ability to make the reasons for action fully explicit and to assess them. From this point of view, it is not enough to be aware of the act itself, that is, to know the rules and the relation between rules and action. As Durkheim points out, we also have to “be aware, in the clearest and most complete way, of the reasons of our conduct,” since “it is this consciousness that gives to our action the kind of autonomy that public consciousness requires from now on from each truly and fully moral being” (1902: 137).

It is especially to historical knowledge that Durkheim gives the task of clarifying the social origin and content of modern moral consciousness in the context of moral education. Not ancient history based on individualist explanations, however, but modern social history. Only the latter can show “the influence of these collective and anonymous forces that lead peoples because they are the creation of peoples, because they come not from this or that individual, but from society as a whole” (1902: 315–316). It is from this sociohistorical perspective that modern autonomy can appear as what it is, a debt that individuals owe to a previously existing, critical tradition.

Educators should draw another consequence as well: the new rationalism that morality is supposed to realize is part of the historical transformation of individualism itself, which has opened “the moral consciousness to new ideas”: as we feel more “the rights of reason,” we also better perceive the “unreasonable and absurd” character of some “social relations whose injustice we did not formerly feel” (1902: 14). This is why “progress toward a greater rationality” in morality can be achieved only because “new moral tendencies” arise, particularly new “obscure aspirations” toward a greater “justice” (1902: 14). The expression and development of a variety of morals, and especially the expression of new conceptions of justice, is a necessary precondition for the reflective work associated with modern autonomy.

A politics of association

The task of reshaping morality is especially urgent during the “critical phases” that characterize modern societies. According to Durkheim, the “crisis” that “European societies” were going through in his time was one of the most “serious” in their whole “history” (1902: 116). Traditional collective discipline “has lost its authority,” he says, and, as a consequence, even if the educator must give an idea of “the necessity of moral rules,” he cannot and should not try to build a whole and complete moral discipline, since this discipline is “useful” only when a morality is already “constituted” (1902: 116–117). In a time of moral crises, when morality has to be “constituted,” educators should resort not to “conservative forces, since there is nothing to conserve, but to the active and creative forces of consciousness” (1902: 117). It is “moral energy” (1902: 117), as the capacity of creating new moral rules, that should be cultivated.

The very existence of a new social order is at stake in this kind of moral education. For if a modern society must have some kind of “unity,” this must come, as Durkheim points out, either from the fact that “the relations between its parts are exactly regulated,” through a “good discipline” capable of ensuring “the harmonious cooperation of the functions,” or from the fact that “all wills are attracted towards a common goal” (1902: 117). Thus, in the conditions of the modern moral crisis, the new social relations that are due to the division of labor can be regulated by a new discipline only if “faith in a common ideal” is first awakened: moral education must start articulating the “new ideas of justice” to prepare for their full future realization in “appropriate institutions” (1902: 117).

We see here how Durkheim progressively developed, without ever abandoning it, the sociological perspective of The Division. The progressive differentiation of labor remains in his later work the source of modern social relations. The need for justice, which Durkheim had established in Book III of The Division as the foundational need of modern societies, is later seen to require a deeper moral commitment toward a common ideal. ¹⁰ This ideal, considered as a progressive development of modern individualism toward greater justice, is the ideal of the person. This ideal requires developing a new social order, capable of overcoming the contradiction commonly felt between individual freedom and social order, in and through the development of the full autonomy of individuals, considered as the capacity of working out in common, in the context of appropriate institutions, the rules that will realize the common ideal of justice.

In his lectures on moral education, Durkheim is clear about the urgent need for a new social order and the indispensable role of moral education in its development. Indeed, in European societies, and especially in France, social organization had progressively eliminated any “intermediate society between the family and the State,” due to a narrow, pre-sociological conception of modern autonomy (1902: 265). For this reason, there are fewer opportunities for individuals to “act and think in common,” and this has weakened the “spirit of association” (1902: 267–268). Thus, the new moral aspirations toward justice, which are potentially reshaping the meaning of modern autonomy, could not be cultivated and satisfied in the Europe of Durkheim’s day. In order to realize the ideal of the person, modern societies needed to develop new associations at a level between the family and the state.

According to Durkheim, modern societies should not “revive the groups of the past,” but rather “try to create new groups, which are in harmony with the existing social order and with the principle on which it rests” (1902: 269). The new associations need to express the social order based on the division of labor and help realize the autonomy of the person, emerging from new aspirations to justice. This is the sociological project Durkheim explained and justified in the second preface of The Division. New occupational groups represent the institutional transformation that will finally realize the modern ideal of the person. The new associations cannot be “created by force,” but must be “called for by opinion” (1902: 269). This spontaneous social condition implies an apparently insoluble difficulty. As Durkheim himself acknowledges, we “seem to be trapped in a circle”: the new “associations” can be created only if “the spirit of association” revives spontaneously in society, yet this spirit can be developed only “through the practice, within already constituted associations” (1902: 269). For Durkheim, moral education is “a way, perhaps the only one,” to “get out of this circle” (1902: 269).

Durkheim’s sociological intervention in the moral domain clarifies sociology’s place and role in modernity. In the context of a comprehensive political project, sociology is the indispensable intellectual force capable of understanding and driving the transformation of social institutions to make room for the individual autonomy required by the ideal of the person.

Sociology in context

Just as morality represents the practical expression of modern autonomy, science represents its intellectual equivalent. The development of scientific knowledge and practice, like the development of morality, presupposes a previous emancipation of human autonomy from practical imperatives of religious origin. If these practical imperatives prevent individuals from posing the problem of the justification of moral rules, they also prevent them from asking questions about the truth of the social beliefs that underlie those rules. Science cannot attest to the potential truth of social beliefs, unless beliefs cease to be the indisputable source of action and become instead the object of a potential inquiry. Thus, the dissociation between theory and practice, which defines science as such, presupposes that religion is no longer the foundation of social thought.

This is a constant idea within Durkheimian sociology. While we find it at the end of The Elementary Forms, it was already a major theme in The Division. Describing social evolution as a gradual emancipation of social spheres and individual freedom from religious tutelage, Durkheim says, at “the beginning … everything social is religious.... Then, little by little, political, economic, scientific functions free themselves from religious functions” (1893: 143, emphasis added). If there is no science when religion organizes the whole of society, he says, this is because religion “absorbs originally all representative functions along with practical functions” (1893: 269–270). Theoretical activity cannot be deployed freely. For this reason, it cannot even be constituted as such.

Durkheim saw in philosophy the first step toward the dissociation of theory and practice. But, philosophy, especially moral and political philosophy, was not yet capable, according to Durkheim, of freeing itself from the uncontrolled influence of social beliefs. The dissociation of theory and practice required an entirely new conception of the objective world and natural law. It is only in modern science that we can finally find what Durkheim called “free thinking” (1893: 270). Modern societies add a new ideal requiring the unconstrained yet methodical use of reflexive reasoning.

For Durkheim, sociology has a special place within the modern emergence of science as a full expression of free thinking. If sociology requires, like any other form of science, the emancipation of autonomy in the intellectual sphere, it also explains at the same time the sociohistorical transformations presupposed by the other sciences, substituting for the symbolic understanding of human nature a scientific understanding. Thus, sociology is linked twice over with the modern ideal: it not only presupposes it, like any other science, it also makes it explicit. Sociology is the self-understanding of the modern project.

Defining sociology through an explanation of its origins is the aim of one of the many texts in which Durkheim reconstructs the development of sociology: La sociologie en France au XIX siècle. There, Durkheim adds an important dimension to the purely epistemological reconstruction of the conditions of sociology. ¹¹ As intellectual history is set against social and political history, sociology gradually appears as a new kind of practical answer to the social crises produced by the modern break. If sociology only appeared “at the end of the last century,” Durkheim says, this is because “the disruption of the old social system, by inducing reflection to look for a remedy to the troubles from which society suffered, incited it for this very reason to apply itself to social matters” (1900: 114). This is the heart of Durkheim’s sociological understanding of sociology, as a science having a sui generis status due to its constitutive relation to practice. If sociology follows, like other sciences, the paths of socially unconstrained yet methodical reasoning to discover truth, theoretical inquiry is nevertheless constituted as such by a practical interest. ¹²

Durkheim explains and develops this idea further by advancing a seemingly surprising thesis: sociology is an “essentially French science” (1900: 111). Durkheim is less giving in to a kind of annoying chauvinism, however, than indicating what he takes as “the profound causes” that “gave birth to sociology” (1900: 121). The first social cause is “the marked weakening of traditionalism” (1900: 134). All science presupposes is a break with inherited traditions. But, sociology cannot content itself with this emancipation, since society is its very object. Sociology arises only when society becomes a practical problem, that is, when social disorganization raises the political question of what society should become such that a desire to know the factual and essential functioning of society emerges. Thus, according to Durkheim, if in primitive and traditional societies, there is no room for sociology, that is because “when we have been raised to believe that things have to remain as they are, we have no reason to ask ourselves how they should be, nor, as a consequence, how they are” (1900: 135).

In France, the modern break has not manifested itself as the smooth, mechanical effect of structural changes, but as a goal that was pursued and partially achieved through a political revolution. That is why France is, for Durkheim, the place where modern crisis manifested itself more radically:

Of all European countries, it is the one in which the old social organization has been most completely eradicated; we made of it a tabula rasa and, on the ground thus laid bare, we must raise from scratch an entirely new edifice.

Yet, if sociological knowledge has an inevitable political dimension, it differs from politics in the way it looks for answers to the modern problem of a new social order.

And hence the second cause giving birth to sociology: the development of a “rationalist turn of mind” (1900: 135). Sociology, according to Durkheim, presupposes the conviction that it is “from reason, that is to say, from science” that the new “moral organization” (1900: 121) will come. Once again, France was fertile ground for the outbreak of this rationalist enthusiasm: “Descartes’ country,” the French have, according to Durkheim, an “irresistible need” for “definite notions” (1900: 135). If Cartesianism is an “archaic and narrow form of rationalism,” it represents a “principle” which “is the very root of the French mind as it is the basis of each science” (1900: 135).

After the war of 1870 ended the Second Empire and its artificial solution to the modern problem, French society again “faced the same question as at the beginning of the century,” that of devising a social organization “really grounded in the nature of things”: in this context, “the urgency of a science of societies was not slow to be felt again” (1900: 122–123). The very “intellectual effervescence” of sociology itself is rooted here, in this return of the modern crisis in France at the end of the century. Durkheim was fully aware of this. If, in writing The Rules of Sociological Method, he tried to give discipline and order to the “tumultuous” vitality of sociology in his time, he shared its orientation: the new methodical science had to help seek out a new social organization.

This is why, although Durkheim acknowledged the relevance of English (Spencer), American (James), and German (Schaeffle) contributions to social theory, it is of the French sociological tradition that he considered himself the heir. Only in this tradition does sociology explicitly appear as the reflexive science of sciences whose ultimate task is to understand and help realize the modern social project. This is particularly evident in Durkheim’s presentation of Saint-Simon, the founder of the tradition Durkheim sees himself as inheriting.

Sociology as politics

If Durkheim accords Saint-Simon the “honor” of having invented the “formula” (1900: 115) of sociology, this is not only because Saint-Simon introduced the idea of society, while trying to discover its basic laws. It is also because, in doing so, Saint-Simon answered to the urgency of the century. Believing that the malaise of “European societies” was due to “their intellectual disorganization,” Saint-Simon tried to develop the scientific knowledge necessary to replace “the system of ideas upon which the ancien régime rested, and which the French Revolution had definitively destroyed, with a new system, in harmony with the new order of things” (1900: 115). As Saint-Simon’s life showed, founding sociology in order to study society was already a politics. For Saint-Simon, the practical interest is present in the development of knowledge itself, as long as the knowledge of society is guided by the desire to find a new social organization: a modern one, because it is “in harmony with the new order of things,” but also more than modern, because it is in search of a “new system,” capable of realizing the individualistic principle of modernity while overcoming the social pathologies it engenders.

Sociology, defined in this way, seems to be the higher expression of those social aspirations toward justice that were reshaping, for Durkheim, the very meaning of modern individualism. It is not surprising, therefore, to find Durkheim’s most elaborate definition of the sociological project in the concluding pages of his lectures on socialism, where he clarifies the nature of the “striking similarities” (1895–1896: 265) between Saint-Simon’s time and his own. At the beginning and at the end of the century, “three ideas,” he says, appear in conjunction: “the idea of extending to social sciences the method of positive sciences,” then “the idea of a religious renewal,” and, “finally, the socialist idea” (1895–1896: 265). According to Durkheim, the existence of a hidden “unity” of the three tendencies of the century is shown by the unity of “Saint-Simon’s system itself” (1895–1896: 266). A symptom as much as a symbol of his time, Saint-Simon’s system shows that sociology, socialism, and the new religions of humanity only “express in different forms the same social state” (1895–1896: 219). If it is the unrecognized modern form of society that can help overcome the contradiction between the three tendencies, it is from the point of view of sociology that the unity of knowledge, politics, and religion can be grasped.

This requires, however, a sociological viewpoint that is reflectively aware of its own critical conditions of genesis. This is Durkheim’s striking thesis: sociology cannot even start knowing anything at all if it does not first know itself as a new practical science whose task is to overcome the abnormal social state which is its very origin. This is the task of sociology: trying to solve the problem of the modern order by finding the ideal that can bring modern aspirations to a self-reflective level of expression. The supposed contradiction between theory and practice is therefore overcome in the peculiar nature of sociological theory. Durkheim’s foundation lies here:

Our conclusion, therefore, is that if we want to improve all these practical theories which have not advanced much since the beginning of the century, we must force ourselves methodically to take these different tendencies into account and look for their unity. This is what Saint-Simon attempted; it is his project that we must take up again.

It is because sociology is, ultimately, self-reflectively aware of being an answer to the modern crisis that it can explain why socialist and modern religious ideas appear together with it. Religious movements show the need for an “authority” capable of “making individual egoisms converge,” whereas socialist movements focus on the “economic consequences” of the “moral distress” (1895–1896: 266–267), asking for regulation. These modern social movements, once they are sociologically understood, demonstrate the need for a new imperative good, capable of animating and regulating individual desires.