Interview by Gregor Fitzi and Nicola Marcucci with Hans Joas on the reception of Émile Durkheim in Germany. Berlin: Humboldt University of Berlin,6 October 2014

The reception of Durkheim in Germany was complex and mostly critical. Canonically, three threads of reception can be distinguished from each other: the thread of René König, the reception of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and the structural functionalist thread. Since the beginning of the 1980s, however, there has been a shift among others due to the impetus of Habermas’ Durkheim interpretation. How do you perceive this background and has it influenced your reading of Durkheim and if so how?

I have to think back to the state of the Durkheim reception and the theoretical discussions taking place at the time of my studies and afterwards, namely the 1970s. From the side of Critical Theory, to start with, Habermas’ major work hadn’t been published yet but only Adorno’s afterword to the volume of Durkheim’s essays Soziologie und Philosophie (Durkheim 1976). This afterword is – with all due respect – a catastrophe. It rather has the gesture of the critique of ideology. I didn’t have confidence in the judgments of Adorno anyway because in this gesture, he talked about many things and made many misleading claims. In this respect, I can’t say that the Frankfurt School had particularly influenced my picture of Durkheim.

You have mentioned three threads, and I will briefly review them all. What you called structural functionalism, the crucial aspect also for my personal development is not so much the structural functionalism of Parsons in the 1950s and 1960s but rather Parsons’ first major work The Structure of Social Action from 1937, which can’t be characterized as structural functionalist yet. Perhaps I may mention here that a circle of friends and colleagues in Berlin, in the late 1970s I believe, read this book together over years. Apart from myself, this circle included Axel Honneth, Heinz Bude, Helmut Thome, Anton Leist. Perhaps it sounds presumptuous, but like in the nineteenth century certain people had read together Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for years and by doing so, developed themselves intellectually, like this I would say about us all: together we studied extremely closely The Structure of Social Action and that had an enormous influence in shaping me personally, which applies to Parsons’ early Durkheim interpretation, too. Systematically, two things are especially important from that. First, Parsons shows that with respect to Durkheim one can’t come to terms with the simple concept of positivism and that the picture of Durkheim that is orientated towards his book on The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim 2014) is inadequate. Well, there are many shortcomings of Parsons’ Durkheim interpretation, however, one important point is that his interpretation considers Durkheim as someone who stresses the specific character of norms and values – to speak now in my terminology – or as someone who has recognized two different kinds of morals and, so to say, out of the pressure of this problem has gone beyond any simple positivism of the nineteenth century. In this respect, Parsons is really important for my understanding of Durkheim. The second reason is that in Parsons there is also a certain sensitivity for what I would call Durkheim’s ideas about human creativity. The interesting aspect in Parsons is that this motive actually doesn’t fit well into his systematic framework and that’s why it only partially occurs, mostly in the footnotes, in The Structure of Social Action and it doesn’t really determine his interpretation. But he still has identified it. That is so important for me because at that time American pragmatism was the most influential school of thought for me and, in my opinion, pragmatism is completely centered around a certain idea of human creativity. Thus, the question was important for me in what way there was also an understanding of creativity at work in Durkheim.

Thirdly, you mentioned René König. In a certain sense, he is the only one who in the 1950s and 1960s appeared as an expert of Durkheim in Germany. Whether or not he was such an expert remains an open question. Adorno certainly was not an expert. But perhaps I forget someone …

Perhaps the question would be what do you think about Luhmann’s introduction to The Division of Labor in Society?

Honestly I don’t believe at all that Luhmann’s talent was to contribute something to the hermeneutically sensitive interpretation of other thinkers, also in respect to Simmel. Luhmann’s owns theoretical interest always prevailed. In René König, it was completely different. I studied his extensive articles on Durkheim and I read his habilitation thesis and that had a considerable effect on me. König’s contribution lies in that he – whatever one thinks of the details now – established a connection between the questions of the German discussion on historicism and Durkheim’s project of sociology. This is incredibly important for me inasmuch as one doesn’t read Durkheim as a simple positivist but asks oneself the question of the relationship between history and normativity and considers Durkheim as someone who doesn’t say: forget about the philosophical questions and let us do empirical sociological research instead of philosophy, but as someone who says that the way to treat philosophical questions fruitfully is the inclusion of empirical sociological research. Durkheim doesn’t consider philosophy as senseless metaphysics, which now has to be replaced by something completely new. The questions of ethics and epistemology are to be preserved but now they should be treated in a new way beyond a stagnant philosophical discussion. This is what interests me and this is also what, in my opinion, pragmatism has attempted.

In the 1980s similar reasons led a number of persons to join together to form a working group on Durkheim. To this group belonged Hans Peter Müller, Michael Schmid, Hans Leo Krämer, Werner Gephart and I (It was a long time ago, I am not sure if I am forgetting someone). Financed by the Werner Reimers Foundation in Bad Homburg, we were able to meet regularly and precisely then we could develop in cooperation with Friedhelm Herborth from the Suhrkamp publishing house the plan to finally publish Durkheim’s most important works in German. We divided up the work among us, so Hans Peter Müller took care of the Leçons de Sociologie, Hans Leo Krämer the Socialisme and I edited the lectures about pragmatism and the essay about the primitive systems of classifications.

Is there a link between the division of the Durkheim reception into three strands at that time and a divergent stylization of Durkheim’s contribution to sociological theory and the crisis of modernity respectively?

First I have to mention two aspects that in my memory of the state of theory of the 1970s deviate from the implications of your question. First, I wouldn’t say that – you have supposed it in both questions – there were these three strands. In fact, there were only two. On the one side, there were Adorno and Critical Theory. Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action was published only in 1981. On the other side, there was, so to say, a fusion of the Cologne school and structural functionalism, above all in the figure of René König. In my perception, he at first did not appear as the complex thinker who knew also about the philosophy of life (“Lebensphilosophie”). This is strongly linked to the fact that König appeared in his work in post-war Germany as the propagator of an exclusive focus on empirical social research and only in his advanced age did he distance himself from it. I can recall a lecture he gave at the Technical University in Berlin, at this time he was already a very old man, in which he called the empirical social research an “epidemic.” Beforehand he was a figure, like for example the recently deceased Rainer Lepsius, too, who – now in my slightly critical perception – demanded from everyone else to do only empirical social research. They, in comparison, reserved for themselves the role to act according to the profiles of the classics. No younger person was allowed to do that. I say that with a certain disapproval because in my personal development I experienced this attitude often as restricting and as somehow a trick: to reserve for oneself other rights than those one concedes to the younger generation. But René König changed, as I said, and at this point perhaps I also could say briefly that he helped me at a certain point, namely when I wrote the essay on Durkheim and pragmatism (Joas, 1984). I can’t remember exactly how that was but I am sure that at first the Kölner Zeitschrift didn’t want it and that’s why I published it in the Revue française de sociologie. As a result, René König wrote me a letter and said: it doesn’t work that your essay is only published in French, it as well must be published in the Kölner Zeitschrift. Then I said: that is what I always wanted, and in this way it came out there, too (Joas, 1985).

First, I wanted to call into question the belief that there was a division of the Durkheim reception into three parts in Germany at that time. For there was no reception of Parsons’ Structure of Social Action before the 1970s in Germany. I don’t believe that the people, who at that time referred strongly to Parsons, really had studied the Structure of Social Action. It has never been translated, not until today. But the second implication of your question has to do with the discussion about modernity. In fact, it didn’t exist either. It is a projection backwards to think that the classics analyzed “modernity.” They didn’t use this word. In postwar sociology there was the theory of modernization and a critical examination of it. In modernization theory from time to time the concept of modernity can be found, but in fact rarely. It would be interesting to investigate in what way the concept of modernity is a pushing back from the concept of post-modernity. But in any case this wasn’t the category of questions in the 1970 and for that reason, neither was the question of what Durkheim contributes to a theory of modernity.

When we now come to the beginning of the 1980s and with that to the publication of Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action it is about the way in which you, in difference to Habermas, make Durkheim fruitful for your research program. One could say that you focused more on the question of the moral order of society, like Durkheim, too, with regard to the crisis of the Third Republic during the Dreyfus affair, whereas Habermas rather focused on the transition to the theoretical importance of communicative action. Can we understand this difference as a difference between generations in the way one deals with the question of Germany as a belated nation (Plessner, 1959)?

This question is complex. Let me start with Habermas and leave aside in what way the theoretical difference between Habermas and myself expresses a difference between generations. Certainly there exists an unambiguous theoretical difference, which one can characterize quite easily. In Habermas everything leads to the specificity of communicative action. My driving motive is another one, namely the question of an understanding of human creativity that is compatible with democracy. This can be illustrated quickly on the basis of types of action that are of particular interest – and that is what I sometimes do in discussions with students, also a little bit misleadingly, but to illustrate it. For Habermas the academic and the political discussion is a type of action of the utmost importance. The two types of action, which play for me the central role and which always made clear to me that Habermas’ theory contributes little to their understanding, are the religious ritual and the play of children. I also approached the reading of Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action with the question whether his theory helps me to understand play and religious ritual. Play demonstrates to us a non-instrumental relationship to objects and that doesn’t appear in Habermas at all. Religious ritual appears in Habermas, but in fact only in the Durkheim interpretation and there, it is pressed in a radical secularization-theoretical framework, namely as something primitive that through the development, the linguistification of the sacred, is left behind or as a danger that still exists in a later historical phase. This is for me with my very strong Catholic background completely absurd.

I don’t believe that the ritual is something which belongs only to earlier phases of human history and which won’t play any role in the future. Even if one accepts the theory of secularization and thinks that in the future there won’t be any religion, this doesn’t mean that in the future there won’t be any rituals. For there probably will be strong rituals for the stabilization of secular values. Thus, one has to very clearly separate both from each other. Against this background, I was enthusiastic that Habermas not only introduces George Herbert Mead, about whom I had done my doctorate, but also Durkheim as a central figure of the transition, the paradigm shift as he says, from purposive to communicative action. This is something quite innovative, because he really looks at in what way Durkheim’s book on religion contains ideas of interaction mediated by symbols, if one puts it in Mead-like terminology. But as a whole this scheme of interpretation is wrong. At that time I not only wrote the previously mentioned essay on “Durkheim and pragmatism” but I published together with Axel Honneth a discussion volume about Habermas’ theory of communicative action (Honneth and Joas, 1991; German original 1986). In my own contribution to this volume, I tried to show that Habermas acts as if Durkheim had actually undergone a development in the direction of pragmatism. But the lectures on pragmatism, as we have them, show – and they were given after the publication of Durkheim’s book on religion, that one cannot simply verify this philologically. It is not true that Durkheim was on a way leading to pragmatism. Again in Habermas’ language: to overcome the philosophy of consciousness. Although Habermas didn’t concede this in his reply, he later admitted it in conversation. And about five years ago he suddenly asked me in an entirely different context if I was actually thinking about religious rituals while writing my book on the creativity of action. My answer: Yes, what else other than play and religious ritual? And at that point I had the impression that he suddenly understood my basic impulse because now he is interested in these subjects, whereas in 1981 he was only marginally interested in them and only in the secularization-theoretical framework.

Concerning the question if this has something to do with a difference between generations, I hesitate. Perhaps I hesitate because I don’t want to make myself out to be the representative of my generation and, actually, nor do I want to make Habermas out to be the representative of his generation. We better speak of two individuals. I always defended myself against all ideas that Germany would have had a special path or would be a belated nation because the pattern is France. I always found this absurd because we only have to shift a little bit further east in Europe and the idea of belatedness vanishes. And for many other reasons I never have considered this line, which has played such a central role in the writings of many German historians, correct.

The question partly was aimed at if your insisting on the question of a moral and normative renewal of society was linked to socio-political debates at that time, like for example the dispute of the generation of 1968 with the “generation of the fathers” about the question of coping with the past.

Well, I consider myself as being part of this. Here one can see as well how complicated it is to speak of generations. For one thing, it is complicated to say in what way I belonged to this generation of 1968 at all. When I speak about myself as an individual, the things that decisively influenced me were quite different. I myself experienced 1968 and the consequences but I was too young to actually play a big role in the movements of the time. I did my Abitur in 1968, thus, I was not a student at the peak of the student movement. For another thing, the things that decisively influenced me are the just mentioned Catholic Christianity and my personal biography, about which I hesitate to speak now. But they don’t have anything to do with 1968. In this respect, I regard myself more like the older ones because I am deeply influenced by the fact that I had a national-socialist father. This is indeed a frequent subject of the older ones. I myself didn’t experience the Third Reich like these older ones but this constant thorn of dealing with the question: how was it possible that your own father didn’t become a national-socialist for opportunistic reasons but for an authentic belief. I would consider that a central question for me and it is rather similar to the questions of people that are older than I am.

So one could say that the question of the moral renewal of society followed from this motivational background.

Yes, but careful, this question is only one…I claim in the chapter on Durkheim in The Creativity of Action (Joas, 1996) that this was the key question of Durkheim but I wouldn’t say that this is my central question. In Durkheim, one can see that the motive of morals and the motive of creativity don’t have to be torn apart. In my book on human rights, I called the methodological chapter “Neither Kant nor Nietzsche” (Joas, 2013: 97 ff.). In a certain sense one can apply this here and state: in Germany there exists an inclination to pull apart Kant and Nietzsche: those who are interested in morals refer to Kant and those who are interested in creativity to Nietzsche. Who, however, asks the question of the conditions of the genesis of new morals can’t simply be satisfied with either Kant or Nietzsche but her/his attention, in my opinion, is led to German thinkers like Ernst Troeltsch, who formulated a synthesis in this direction, to the American pragmatists and to Émile Durkheim. I would situate all three, who I just have mentioned, in this area of tension between Kant and Nietzsche. That’s why I don’t accept Wolfgang Schluchter’s inclination to interpret Durkheim’s thinking as sociological Kantianism (Schluchter, 2015: 107 f.). This doesn’t do justice to the really exciting aspect in Durkheim, in fact, this reduces him to a mere continuation of a philosophical conflict that existed before him.

With that you already have anticipated quite a lot of which we wanted to address with our next question. Now one could say that there are also other action theorists among the sociological classics, why didn’t for example Simmel or Weber play the same role as Durkheim for your research program of the 1980s?

My project in the 1980s was to develop a non-rationalist action theory, which is different from rational choice but also from the rational-normativistic conceptions, to which I would assign Parsons’ Structure of Social Action just as well as Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, which is orientated at the guiding thread of a communicative understanding of rationality. This is better than a monological understanding of rationality, but the guiding thread remains rationality. I continually hold the opinion that in all of these theories the questions of a theory of rationality and the questions of an action theory are too narrowly connected. We need both but not one and the same theory for both. When we attempt this, then the rational forms of action necessarily get to the foreground and everything else is registered only phenomenally in its difference to the rational forms of action. That is quite obviously the case in rational choice. There exists no phenomenological interest at all in what deviates from the standard. In Parsons, this is much more complicated and better than in rational choice, and in Habermas all the more. But this orientation remains the guiding principle, which just is infertile for our action-theoretical analysis of play or religious ritual, to stick to these examples, because it doesn’t make sense to measure play on the scale of rationality, nor does it make sense in the case of religious ritual and in a lot of other cases too.

These are only two examples but that’s why I had the ambition to develop out of the thinking of the pragmatists such a non-rationalist theory of action and to incorporate in this theory everything from other traditions pointing in the same direction. In my book, these traditions are: from Herder to Dilthey or Troeltsch as the German hermeneutical tradition and elements of the philosophical anthropology in Germany as well as elements from a transformed Husserlian phenomenology like, for example, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others in the French tradition. On that I constructively based myself and from there I then took a look at in what way others do justice to the phenomena of creativity. In Weber, for instance, to name one now whom you have mentioned, there are clear ideas about human creativity in his thoughts about charisma, but – and this was the point of my brief chapter on Weber in The Creativity of Action – his action theory doesn’t have any space for his own conception of charisma. His typology of action isn’t appropriate to his own insight. In Durkheim it is even more complicated because Durkheim indeed had a sense for these questions of creativity, above all in the field of the genesis of new morals but also certainly in the field of sociologie de la connaissance in the sense of the constitution of fundamental categories of human knowledge of the world. In Simmel, there is in different phases of the development of his work a sensitivity for aesthetical creativity. While I was writing The Creativity of Action, I didn’t yet know Simmel’s last book The View of Life (Simmel, 2010), which later became very important for me. It essentially has changed my views about Simmel and it essentially has increased my respect for him.

This brings us to the core of your project of the 1980s, namely to the idea that there is a significant proximity between Durkheim and pragmatism, without Durkheim carrying out the last step in the direction of pragmatism. Can you explain that further?

Now you have to be careful inasmuch as I in fact have written all kinds of things about Durkheim and this in different phases of my development. It has been thirty years since my first essay on Durkheim and pragmatism (Joas, 1984, 1985) My knowledge of Durkheim has increased in these thirty years considerably. In this essay, I portrayed what you just mentioned. At that time I had the assumption that there existed a closer proximity of Durkheim’s project to pragmatism than he wanted to admit. In Durkheim, a national-political motive played a role for sure, also in his comments on German thinkers. He defended the French national identity and Descartes belongs to that. Whoever attacks Descartes like the pragmatists, consequently attacks the French national identity, for him. That is distorted because the pragmatist attack on Cartesianism was not an irrationalist attack but – I would have to speak longer about it now – had a completely different character. In the 1980s, I thought that all that has to do with the age of nationalism as well as with struggles within France. René König claimed that one couldn’t understand all that if one doesn’t read it as a latent dialogue with Georges Sorel. But there exists no hard evidence for that claim and I myself had the idea that one should rather think of a latent dialogue with Henri Bergson. What was not so clear to me at that time: that the fact probably played a role, too, that Catholic modernism in France was interested in pragmatism. Durkheim, it is clear, didn’t welcome Catholic modernism but opposed it. He opposed Catholicism in all its forms, hence, also the sources of this internal modernization of Catholicism. That is indeed a little bit speculative. Later I started to see more strongly the precise character of Durkheim’s own project and not to judge him by how he does justice to my preference for such an action theory that is orientated towards creativity.

I can only explain that if I may refer to my work after The Creativity of Action. At that time, there existed a certain benevolent recognition of my argument that the action theory of Weber, Parsons and Habermas is inferior to the action theory of the pragmatists. This recognition was, however, accompanied by the question of what this means in respect to moral philosophy. With that, weren’t the gates open to moral-philosophical relativism? One could say, for example, that fascism was a new morality, too. That’s how one put the question to me: what can you contribute with your modified action theory to the debate on the theory of rationality? When you say that one has to separate theory of action and theory of rationality more from each other than it is the case in Parsons or Habermas, how do you relate them to each other? This was the motive for why I wrote The Genesis of Values (Joas, 2000), namely to show that from such a revised understanding of human action and human experience a completely new understanding follows of the processes in which values and norms are created. Here Durkheim gets highly relevant again, above all, of course, his theory of religion. But one has to understand it correctly and not just as a theory of social integration through norms but as a theory of the eruptive new emergence of inspirational value-contents. This is why certain chapters in the middle of Durkheim’s book on religion are crucial. One has to go beyond Durkheim and overcome the one-sidedness of his idea that ideals could only emerge in collective effervescence. With that I now need to speak more about The Genesis of Values. Its structure is that I start with Nietzsche who was the first thinker to pose this question but who gave an absurd answer to it. William James and Emile Durkheim asked the same question but James only in terms of individual experience and Durkheim only in terms of collective experience. A good theory has to go beyond Nietzsche, James and Durkheim in two regards. First, it has to contain a very rich phenomenology of possible experiences from which value commitments can arise and second, it has to grasp much more than Durkheim (and James) ever did the relative independence of the processes of articulation and interpretation from these extraordinary experiences. In Durkheim as in James, there exists at this point, in my opinion, a hermeneutical deficit. It looks as if the human beings who share an experience of ecstasy naturally interpret this experience together. But this is not true. Human beings may have been merged in the experience but when they step back in their everyday life and attempt to understand which experience that was, then they often do this being separated from each other. Thus, there exist independent processes of articulation and not merely emanations of the interpretation out of the experience. Because of this, I brought in Simmel and others at this point in order to conceptualize the questions of articulation of ecstatic experiences, which weren’t treated in Durkheim.

What hasn’t become clear to me in this context yet is how the normative criterion is created to answer also the questions, as they should.

Absolutely correct. I treated that in the tenth chapter of The Genesis of Values where I said: For judging normative validity claims, I am and I remain a discourse-theorist, so I don’t refute the thought going from Peirce to Habermas, Apel and their students – like Matthias Kettner, whom I consider interesting – that the justification of normative validity claims takes place in discourses. In contrast to Habermas and Apel, I, however, claim with Peirce that the question of justification is not the only question. One can illustrate that even better in epistemology than in the area of moral philosophy. When one only looks at justification, one thinks that the hypotheses of science can originate anywhere and only the question of their justifiability is important. Peirce, however, says: It is interesting to take also a look at the processes of the genesis of the hypothesis. Not every nonsense is worthy of an empirical examination. And the scientist is not one who examines any nonsense but the better scientist is the one who creates an interesting hypothesis in the first place which is worthy of an examination by him and others. I now transfer this to the area of moral philosophy. First there must be, so to say, substantial suggestions for something that can be called good. This doesn’t emerge from the discourse. The discourse doesn’t produce new values. The discourse is just the instance of justification for the intuition of what should be proposed as a new value. Because of that I need a model of the interaction between the creative processes, the creative articulation of new human experiences and their justification in discourses. In this respect, my approach is not an alternative to discourse theory but a more comprehensive embedding of discourse theory.

In your work, there is an exciting reflection about war (Joas 2003, Joas/Knoebl 2013) and that of course has a special importance one hundred years after the First World War. In this context, there is also a discussion of Durkheim. One has the impression that although you sympathize with Durkheim’s idea of another form of patriotism, which is not aggressive and enriched with values of cosmopolitanism, you seem to assess Durkheim’s position as a little naïve, too, as it remains connected with a progressive philosophy of history. Can you say something about that?

You already know from what I wrote in my book about human rights that I very strongly embrace Durkheim’s idea of the sacralization of the person in order to conceptually grasp a certain part of modern development. In Durkheim, I believe, however, there was not only the sacralization of the person but also the sacralization of the French nation. I say that without polemic because I hold the opinion that everyone, including me, lives not from one sacralization only. This means, however, that the two different sacralizations must be set in relation to each other if they possibly point in different directions. From the sacralization of the person follows his enthusiastic commitment to human rights and his cosmopolitanism. From the sacralization of the French nation, however, follows his French nationalism, which he undoubtedly also represented. Durkheim thought that he could combine both by, and this actually was not so unusual in France, simply declaring France the nation of human rights. One can again have a serious historical debate about this move. What is the role of France in the history of human rights? It is always dangerous to ask the question that way because there in fact exists a tension between a universal point of reference and a particular social entity. I believe that, especially in the war, Durkheim then went too far and simply declared the French cause the good cause. This didn’t do complete justice to the realities of the First World War. How it would have been if he had experienced the negotiations at Versailles, what he would have said about it, that would have been interesting. We don’t know, but the fact that this was going on with him draws our attention to the fact that he actually analytically didn’t have anything crucial to say about the war but that he only answered the First World War with a quasi-diplomatic-historical, but very superficial, analysis. This means that there is nothing from him that contains a comparative sociology of modern nationalism or a sociology of warfare and the state. One also can relativize this again by saying: but no one of the well-known sociologists had a serious theory of that kind. The only exception, as I tried to show in my two books on war, was the nowadays largely forgotten Emil Lederer. Durkheim’s examination of the First World War shows that he didn’t have any real comprehensive sociology of the state, with the result that there was a surplus of the normative over the analytic.

Where, according to your opinion, can we find a satisfactory theory of the state in classical sociology?

Actually nowhere. But most likely in Weber. But again not in Weber’s war writings. In the American classical sociology again not at all. It contributed nothing reasonable at all to a sociology of the state, although I always think that this is connected with the specificity of the American state. It is no coincidence that the Chicago School mainly focused on the city and not on the state. Durkheim indeed focuses on the state in many respects but he has some kind of an idealized picture of the state, as far as this, for example, appears in the Leçons de sociologie. Weber is a major contributor to a sociology of the state. But I still would say that he himself was too nationalistic to carry out an analysis like Lederer, so to speak, from a distance from the phenomenon. That is why his question in the war writings is: how can the German state act reasonably in this struggle – reasonably meaning in the pursuit of the German interest. This gives him an affinity to de facto politics but at the same time it is a lack of analytical distance.

To come back to what you have explained before, there seems to be a tension between Durkheim’s conception of the sacralization of the person and his political theory, which is strongly orientated towards nationalistic thought. What is then still relevant of Durkheim’s political thinking, also with regard to his statements in the debates of the Third Republic?

This is not exactly the question that I am asking in my writings. I can reflect on it now, but even if I have an interest in the political constellations that influenced Durkheim and in taking into account his political motives, I am not interested in Durkheim as a mainly political thinker but as a sociologist of religion and a thinker of religion. For that reason please allow me to comment again on what I truly find fruitful in Durkheim. I may say in parentheses that Durkheim again plays an important role in a larger book that I am currently writing [the book appeared in the meantime (2017)]. In the preparation for this interview, I noticed in how many of my books it is actually the case that Durkheim plays a major role. Durkheim prominently occurs in Pragmatism and Social Theory (Joas, 1993), in The Creativity of Action (1996), in The Genesis of Values (2000), in Do we need religion? (Joas, 2008a), in The Sacredness of the Person (2013). Not always the same subject of his theory. Even now I am not concerned about Durkheim as a political thinker, but about an understanding of the problem if it is possible to scientifically work on religion without letting specific religious or specific antireligious positions simply leave their mark on the statements one makes about religion. I claim that William James is decisive for having created such a method of dealing with religion, but that Durkheim, despite his strongly laicist motives, also contributed to the understanding of religion in a way that is valid even if one does not share his laicist motives, and I don’t share them. Durkheim is of particular interest for me where I see his insight into the dynamic of processes of sacralization in other areas than the sacralization of the person at work. I would say that this way of thinking is also found at work in his explanations of the history of law, the history of education and the history of social movements. In fact, I regard this as a very interesting aspect. The differentiation-theoretical motive, which plays such a great role in Hans Peter Müller, is not so important to me because although on the normative level I am a big proponent of checks and balances and institutional differentiation, I don’t consider the guideline of functional differentiation as a fruitful guideline for understanding social change.

In your essay “Punishment and Respect” (Joas, 2008b), you describe three possibilities for imagining the development of penal law. You assume that one can’t advocate for a “naïve enlightenment thesis” and then you come to speak about Foucault’s problem of the disciplining of the body in order to ultimately put Durkheim’s theory about the sacralization of the person in the center. Against that, one could say that here we can find Durkheim’s theory of the development of certain links that we consider typical for our societies. Is Durkheim’s theory of the interpretation of modernity given with that – or why in this context don’t you come to an examination of Weber’s theory of the conduct of life?

I’ll say two things before I answer your question. The text you mention is, as you know, also a chapter in the human rights book, that is in The Sacredness of the Person. This is the first brief preliminary remark. The second one concerns the “theory of modernity.” In my book Faith as an Option (Joas, 2014), I pleaded to abandon the concept of modernity. For I consider it in its reference to an epoch too ambiguous. Asking about the beginning of the modernity, you receive a hundred different answers: between 1492 and 1968. One can say that everyone is allowed to define for her/himself what this concept exactly identifies but then this can result very easily in misunderstanding. In addition to this, there is the overlapping of normative and chronological dimensions in the concept of modernity. In modernity as an epoch much of what existed at the same time is somehow not inherent in the nature of modernity. National socialism then is considered non-modern and anti-modern and somehow remains modern, partially modern, and so on. Frankly, I consider this an analytical fallacy, which I wouldn’t like to make and that is why you of course don’t hear this manner of speaking from me. In terms of the chronological, I prefer to speak simply chronologically, that is, instead of saying “modernity” to use an unambiguous temporal index. And in respect to normativity, we also should speak more specifically and say what we mean: societies with regulated market economy, societies with a democratic political system. Then we also become aware of how these things are really connected. Does one thing exist without the other? I believe that there exists much of it without the other and there exists no such holistic character of “modernity.” Do you understand? I simply can’t comply with a terminology that you presuppose, but that I reject for strong theoretical reasons. It is not at all that I am not interested in Weber’s conception of history. Only I have a great distance from him. I was for nine years the so-called Max Weber Professor and thereby, I got constantly into complicated situations, for instance, when I was invited to give a lecture on Weber’s “Protestant ethic” at the beginning of the school year at a gymnasium in Thuringia. The problem was that I didn’t want to confront the students with all that contradicts the famous Weber thesis. In the book I am currently writing, I attempt to present a real, that is, not a Weber-philological but a historically saturated alternative to the Weberian narrative of disenchantment. In this narrative, what happened in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century must of course play a role. You can already see from the formulation that I don’t simply speak about the Protestant ethic. You know as well as I do that because prior to the Reformation, processes of individualization and disciplining had begun which then also were characteristic of the Catholic reaction to the Reformation, that we have to deal with a complex web of changes in that time that can’t be simply brought on the denominator of Protestant ethic and whose relationships to what historically preceded and what came afterwards is again different from how Weber conceived of it. By assuming a close relationship, for example, between the prophets of the Old Testament and the Reformation, Weber just shares the typical Protestant conception of history. For him, there was a prophetic departure and then a decay and the Reformation builds on the departure again. I do not share this with him and I think that it is empirically refutable; just as the idea that the changes in the time of the Reformation are connected with later changes. Ernst Toeltsch understood all this much better and described it much more precisely than Weber did. Surprisingly, although he was a Protestant theologian, he was less influenced by confessional protestant prejudices of the time. In this respect, I have a great interest in the subject but at the same time I have great distance from Weber’s views on this subject.

What we still would like to know is that when we no longer use the concept modernity, we mean that we, live in societies in which human rights play a fundamental role, in societies in which the state holds the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, in societies in which we are confronted with a certain form of economic production. When we now theoretically connect these different aspects in some conceptual framework, we are confronted with the question of how it all came about in the first place. What role does Weber’s thesis on disciplining play in this context for you?

With regard to human rights, my thesis is not that the Protestant ethics leads to them but a specific processing of an extreme human experience, namely the experience of religious persecution leads in a certain constellation to someone having the new thought that freedom of religion is a precondition for the development of an authentic relationship to God. This thesis of Weber’s friend Georg Jellinek fits the idea of a sacralization of the person in Durkheim. In Weber’s frame of reference, this thought, however, becomes something completely different. We first have to distinguish sharply between early-modern processes of disciplining and this sacralization of the person before we relate them to one another.

Finally, is there perhaps something that is very important for your reading of Durkheim and that we haven’t addressed yet?

Two things come to mind about which one could have said more. Very briefly. One thing is: In one work of mine, I very strongly contrasted Durkheim’s breakthrough to the idea of the sacredness of the person with Charles Maurras, that is, with an a forerunner of fascism. This is important to me and this is why I now come back to this because it precisely accentuates the modernity of fascism, that there was not just one breakthrough to modernity. That would be one point that is exactly important for these questions about modernity. The second thing is: When my book The Genesis of Values was published, I was understood by opponents of Durkheim as if I had said that values are created exclusively in experiences of collective effervescence. But I didn’t mean that because for me these are only one form of the experience of self-transcendence. I somehow stand on the shoulders of Durkheim in a lot of what I do, but not only on the shoulders of him but in my work, this is always balanced with other figures of reference.

Dear Mr. Joas, thank you very much for this interview!