Abstract
This Special Issue is the second of two highlighting recent efforts in France to reassess the relevance of Durkheim’s social theory. The first issue re-examined his overall argument with a particular focus on The Division of Social Labor (1893) and its relevance to contemporary social theory and philosophy. This second issue focuses on Durkheim’s theory of social facts, sociology of knowledge, and the sacred with a focus on The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). The articles reinterpret in various ways an important theory of modernity that has been lost. Durkheim was the first to advance a theory of social facts: a critical break in the development of social thought. The making of social facts requires cooperation between people using shared social expectations. Hence, questions of knowledge, mutual intelligibility, and social stability are transformed: they become the result of cooperative social interaction. Epistemological and moral questions become social questions. The arguments of Wittgenstein and Searle about “use” practices, “speech acts,” and their epistemological and moral implications are foreshadowed. The argument of Goffman and Garfinkel – that identities are social facts that must be achieved in order for cooperation in constitutive practices to produce mutually intelligible social objects – is a direct offshoot. Efforts by Garfinkel and Sacks, Brandom, and Descombes to specify interactional and speech practices, their reflexive and/or dialogic character, and relevance to issues of self, personal autonomy, mutual intelligibility, and morality are important extensions of the position.
In spite of its importance, Durkheim’s groundbreaking theory of social facts has been overlooked, “repaired,” and “integrated” into other theoretical frameworks by his most influential interpreters. His argument that social forms come in more than one configuration – traditional and modern – was truncated by anthropologists, who looked primarily at traditional societies, and sociologists who could not give up the idea that consensus remains essential to coherence in modernity. The result is the mistaken idea that Durkheim’s theory was consensus-based, homeostatic, and could not account for change. His argument that beliefs are true if they fulfill their immediate practical function became associated with the systemic and conservative functionalist approaches of Malinowski and Parsons. His argument that social practices give rise to symbolic meaning was inverted by Lévi-Strauss, resulting in the structuralist position in which symbolic logic comes first and undergirds society.
In a series of articles, this Special Issue elaborates some of the more influential misreadings and their consequences, working toward an understanding of Durkheim’s provocative and innovative theory. The articles: discuss the importance of Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge and his theory of the origin of concepts (Albert Ogien); discuss the consequences of a structuralist anthropological reading for obscuring not only Durkheim’s position, but also important affinities to contemporary philosophers like Descombes (Jing Xie); situate the importance of Durkheim’s conception of the political and reflexive character of sociology and his idea of an autonomous self in modernity in the context of the requirement that an autonomous self be able to affirm their reasons for action (Francesco Callegaro); explore the relationship between the structuralist inversion and Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, with an eye toward the consequences for cultural sociology of clarifying his notion of the ambiguity of the sacred (Dmitry Kurakin, published earlier ‘Reassembling the ambiguity of the sacred: A neglected inconsistency in readings of Durkheim’ in volume 15, issue 4, pages 377-395, by request of the author); and, finally, examine the moral character of modern social facts and the work involved in making them together, with a view toward locating the modern sacred relative to the social fact-making practices of everyday life (Rawls, Jeffrey, and Mann). Each article discusses misunderstandings that have been consequential for social thought, robbing sociology and philosophy of Durkheim’s insights. Each attempts to set a particular dilemma to rights.
In the first article, Ogien points out that while social approaches to knowledge have become increasingly important in sociology and philosophy since the 1960s, Durkheim, who authored the first and arguably most important sociology of knowledge, is rarely mentioned in that connection. Consequently, sociology of knowledge as a field operates without benefit of Durkheim’s theory of social facts and constitutive practices, leaving sociology bereft of its most important innovation. The result is an inherent individualism and structuralism in social thought that ignores practical action. Ogien suggests that Cassirer’s dynamic theory of symbolism helps to fill out the potential of Durkheim’s position and clarify its relationship to studies of practical action in the work of Garfinkel and Goffman.
Xie and Callegaro both examine the importance of Durkheim’s argument that the individual is a social fact and its implications for questions of human autonomy and morality. The epistemic individual can no longer be posited as the unit of analysis. They examine how Durkheim’s approach makes the dialogic – interactive – character of communication intrinsic to social facts, and the autonomy of human persons. The dialogic approach of Descombes, which Xie explains in some detail, has affinities to the focus on response, reflexivity, and mutual transformation of self and meaningful action developed by Goffman and Garfinkel. The importance of justification as analyzed by Brandom and Descombes is considered. As Xie points out, if we posit symbols first as Lévi-Strauss did – the sacred – the key to Durkheim’s position becomes nothing but a semiotic process. For Durkheim, the meaning of symbols is a work of social interaction and not of timeless logical systems. The coherence of personal identity, like symbols, is a matter of performance, action, interaction, confirmation, and transformation. Xie points out that for Durkheim, the person is a social fact rather than a bundle of attributes. Rawls, Jeffery, and Mann, in considering the implications of social facts on information systems, discuss the practical implications of this social fact position if “car” and identity are considered as analogous social facts. In keeping with Durkheim’s theory, social facts cannot be reduced to attributes. They exist only as performed – rendering the cooperative work involved essential to mutual understanding.
Callegaro also points out a much-overlooked aspect of Durkheim’s sociology: its political character. While Durkheim proposed sociology as a science, it was to be a science of social facts, with the purpose of helping society and citizens become increasingly reflexive so as to better understand themselves and consequently the needs of modernity. In order to achieve this reflexivity, sociology as a discipline must know itself. American sociology, in particular, in pursuing the idea of a “value-free” approach since World War II (WWII), stands in direct contradiction to Durkheim’s political vision for the French School of Sociology. The mistaken interpretation of Durkheim as positivist has ironically been a foundation of the value-free approach.
Kurakin turns attention to the importance of the sacred-profane distinction in Durkheim’s theory: reminding us that, in rejecting a positivist approach, Durkheim grounded the social generation of basic ideas on that distinction. In modern society, however, two problems have developed: first, it has become more difficult to locate the sacred-profane distinction because relatively few distinctions are sufficiently shared; and, second, social thinkers who recognize the importance of the distinction and orient their research around it tend to treat the “ambiguity of the sacred” (the sacred in its impure form) as if it were profane. Given the central importance of the sacred-profane distinction, combined with the difficulty of maintaining firm boundaries in modern society, Kurakin argues that the ambiguity of the sacred becomes more prevalent. Therefore, confusing it with the profane is more consequential for the analysis of modernity: the impure sacred as transgression is generative. Thus, in modernity, there will be many important cases of the impure sacred that are generative of new sacred forms and solidarities.
Rawls, Jeffery, and Mann take up the question of the sacred with regard to its location and character relative to the constitution of modern social facts, arguing that the reflexive processes through which constitutive practices are coordinated to create social objects in everyday life – while in many ways “ordinary” – orient their own sacred-profane boundaries. These boundaries, however, are situated and constitutive rather than instituted and consensus-based. Such “ordinary” activities are often dismissed as trivial, individual, or even profane. They argue, however, that the cooperative constitution of social facts in everyday life is inherently collective, exhibits collective “emotional” tone, generates the social facts on which collective life depends, and is morally grounded in an egalitarian working consensus, trust requirements, and reciprocity conditions. They point out that for Durkheim, it is the non-social – the individual in its original animal nature – that is profane. Overlooking the collective character of the principal way social facts are cooperatively made in modernity has obscured the location of the modern sacred. While transgression remains important, they argue, the dialogic, or reflexive, coordination of constitutive practices has become the principal form of collective action. Cooperative practices constantly create new meanings and new social facts, and always have moral implications.
Durkheim’s vision was for a discipline that would take modernity as its special focus, with a particular emphasis on the constitutive practices through which social facts and social cohesion are created in modern workplaces and sciences and the new legal and moral requirements those practices demand. Instead, his most influential interpreters focused on his characterization of consensus-based traditional society and religion. Ultimately, unless one makes Durkheim’s distinction between two kinds of society, between solidarities based on consensus and solidarities based on constitutive practices in a context of differentiation, attempts to explain innovation, coherence, and morality in modernity will be problematic. Callegaro reminds us that for Durkheim, what was needed in modernity was the development of a new type of association distinct from and standing between the family and the state in which persons could express and enact moral relationships and commitments. Durkheim hoped that the changes which emerged from cooperating in such self-organizing associations of practice would change the institutional infrastructure from the bottom up, creating a new emphasis on justice and individual freedom.
The consequences of the many and varied misunderstandings of Durkheim’s position reach much farther than what might be called Durkheim scholarship or even sociology, producing conflicts and contradictions in philosophy, anthropology, criminal justice, studies of religion, cultural studies, and through post-structuralism, the humanities in general. Recovery of the original argument, therefore, promises to have broad implications.