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Emile Durkheim: Theories
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Emile Durkheim, as well as the theorists who will be dealt with in subsequent chapters, faced a different set of circumstances. They were all academic men but were still considered by their colleagues as intruders representing a discipline that had little claim to legitimate status. As a result, theirs was by no means an easy course. Nevertheless, they fought from within the halls of academe rather than from outside, and so their lives tended to be less embattled than those of their predecessors.
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Durkheim made several distinctions between his moral system and that of Kant, but the distinctions were minor. He said that desirability of some kind was necessary for morality and not duty alone (Durkheim 1974a: 36) and he said that if one enjoyed or benefited from one’s moral behavior this did not necessarily make the behavior in question amoral. For example, if one enjoyed dying for one’s country, so much the better. If Kant based his altruistic theory on duty without self-interest, Durkheim based his version on altruism on duty and perceived desirability of obedience to moral authority, and if the individual happened to benefit, this was acceptable though not necessary. In Durkheim’s view, what was right was what was commanded of us, and we had an obligation to desire to do what was commanded of us: moral rules were right and moral because they commanded and bent our wills (Durkheim 1995b: 30 ; Durkheim 1995a: 209). The individual’s desire to be moral came from society bending the individual’s view of the world, not from self-interest, pity, or natural inclination.
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Durkheim's positivism is understandable as an expression of his impatience with unfounded and unverified theories of his day, and as a strategic appeal for empirical observation. Yet as a general methodological program, it evidently presents serious problems. The decisive problem concerns the possibility of ridding oneself of all preconceptions and letting the real world of empirical phenomena speak for itself. How is it possible to perceive a single set of external characteristics without actively selecting from among all the possibilities?
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Throughout these publications one is struck by the breadth of vision displayed by Durkheim in his remorseless search for the social and moral bases of the emerging industrial society. He continues to be reappraised by commentators from both the left and right of the political spectrum. His label as a conservative thinker has long ago been discarded—rightly so, in the light of his contributions to the theory of equality of opportunity, evident for example in his writings on education.
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Maybury-Lewis argues Durkheim's ideas on relationship systems (e.g., consanguinity, marriage) have been generally neglected. These ideas are buried in thousands of pages of reviews and essays in L'année Sociologique and Durkheim never systematically developed them. While Durkheim is not remembered as a "kinship" theorists, he was in fact a seminal thinker in relationship systems.
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Such questions intensified Durkheim's concern with the sociology of religion, adding to the intrinsic interest he had in terms of the internal logic of his system. Basic to his theory is the stress on religious phenomena as communal rather than individual. "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." In contrast to William James, for example, Durkheim was not concerned with the variety of religious experience of individuals but rather with the communal activity and the communal bonds to which participation in religious activities gives rise.
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