Contribution of Durkheim to Sociology

by India in Sociology, February 28, 2011

Durkheim is pioneer of modern sociology.

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Durkheim gave clear answers to the problems in sociological theory ,both for theory and method. Durkheim faced up to complex methodological problems and demonstrated by

implementing in his works, the necessity of empirical research for a science of society. Durkheim defined sociology as the science of social facts and of social institutions. Social facts, in turn, are analyzed in their capacity as constraining forces in the determination of human conduct-or in more modern terms, as part, on apparatus of social control. For Durkheim, the reality of society preceded the individual life. Durkheim frequently, especially in discussions on the collective conscience, reached a degree of sociological realism that seemed to deny altogether the social significance of individual volition or decision. Society is real, to be sure, but so is the individual. And the two, it should be remembered, are always in interaction. Giving priority to one or the other is misleading in the long run. Read more in Sociology Sociology and Feminism The Filipino Diaspora (TFD) Invites Everyone to Join The TFD Forum Durkheim showed convincingly that social facts are facts sue generis. He brought out vividly the social and cultural importance of division of labour. He analyzed the nature and many of the consequences of social solidarity. He indicated the role of social pressure in areas of human activity where it had previously escaped detection. Along with Max Weber he brought the attention of sociologists to the significance of values and ideals in social life. Durkheim believed in formulation of causal explanations. It is argued by him that it is the business of the sociologists to establish causal connections and causal laws. Although many are skeptical about this approach, a great number of causal connections and functional correlations have been established by sociology with a reasonable degree of probability. Moreover, those who are skeptical about finding causal relations concede the existence of such trends in sociology.

While pleading on behalf of causal explanations, Durkheim argued that since experiment is impossible in sociology we should go in for indirect experiment, that is the comparative method. This particular method continues to be used by sociologists. Durkheim is the pioneer of functional approach in sociology. A great number of times he simply explained social phenomena by their functions. This approach was later picked up and enriched by Radcliffe-Brown. More clearly than Durkheim the latter identified the different kinds of problems in functional approach; what kinds of social structure are there? How do social structures function? And how do new types of social structure come into existence? Durkheim established relationship between certain suicide rates and the degree of integration of individuals in a social group. This part of the work of Durkheim has been found to be useful, and it has been confirmed by later studies like those of Douglas and Giddens. One of the important contributions of Durkheim is in distinguishing the phenomena studied by psychology and sociology. According to him sociology must study social facts, those which are external to individual minds and which exercise coercive action on them. Durkheim made population size an important factor in the study of sociology. He thought that increase in volume generally brought about increase in density and the two together produced variations in social structure. Durkheim did contribute to the typology of societies. He distinguished between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. Besides, Durkheim was aware that societies might be classified in other ways also. He classified them as simple societies, simple poly-segmentary societies, and doubly compounded poly segmentary societies. Moret and Davy further elaborated this attempt of Durkheim in terms of scale and internal differentiation. Durkheim argued that division of labour was the primary source of social solidarity. In mechanical solidarity law would be repressive, while in organic solidarity law would be restrictive. Durkheim also discussed abnormal forms of division of labour that is those, which go against the promotion of social cohesion. In the abnormal forms he found two, the anomic and the forced. By the first he meant examining specialization of labour in which the individual becomes isolated in his specialization.

Durkheim, mile
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Durkheim, mile

WORKS BY DURKHEIM WORKS ABOUT DURKHEIM mile Durkheim (18581917) may be called one of the two principal founders of the modern phase of sociological theory, the other being his somewhat younger contemporary Max Weber. In his four major works, starting with The Division of Labor in Society of 1893 and ending with The Elementary Forms

of the Religious Life of 1912, and in a large number of articles, monographs, and carefully worked out
courses of lectures (several of which have been published posthumously), Durkheim established a broad framework for the analysis of social systems that has remained central to sociology and a number of related disciplines, particularly anthropology, ever since. Even those who basically disagree with it take it as a major point of reference. This frame of analysis underwent substantial development in the course of Durkheims own career, but it focused continually on the nature of the social system and the relation of that system to the personality of the individual. Durkheim was born in the town of pinal in the Vosges, not far from Strasbourg. He was of Jewish parentage, and some of his forebears were rabbis. Indeed he was expected to be a rabbi himself until he became an agnostic. He attended the famous cole Norm ale Suprieure in Paris, together with such luminaries as Henri Bergson, Jean Jaurs, and Pierre Janet. His primary focus was on philosophy, but he already had the strong concern with political and social applications that he retained throughout his life. He was too rebellious to rank high among the agrgs of his year, and his first academic appointments were as teacher of philosophy in several provincial lyces. In 18851886 Durkheim took a years leave of absence to study in Germany, where he was particularly impressed by the work of the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. A professorship of sociology (combined with education), the first in France, was created for him in 1887 at Bordeaux, and he remained there until, in 1902, he realized the ambition of all French academics: he was called to a professorship in sociology and education at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he gathered round himself a distinguished group of younger men, including Henri Berr, Marcel Granet, Francois Simiand, Maurice Halbwachs, and, not least, his own nephew, Marcel Mauss. In the most intimate relationship to his own work, Durkheim founded and edited the very important journal, Lanne sociologique. On two significant occasions he became very much involved in political affairs: during the Dreyfus case and during World War I. And over a considerable period he was actively concerned with applied sociology, most notably perhaps in the field of education. The first three of Durkheims four books, the Division of Labor, the Rules of Sociological Method, and

Suicide, were all published during his Bordeaux period, in 1893, 1895, and 1897 respectively. Then there was an interval of 15 years before the Elementary Forms (1912) appeared. After the move to Paris,
Durkheim was deeply involved both with his teaching and with the group discussions and activities centering on Lanne sociologique. It is clear, however, that his thought was developing very rapidly and continuously during this period: witness such fundamentally important articles as The Determination of Moral Facts (1906) and Primitive Classification (Durkheim & Mauss 1903). The great book on religion, then, was the ripe harvest of a long process of intensive cultivation. There is evidence that the war was a very great blow and strain to Durkheim. Not only was the cost to France high indeed: Peyre tells us (1960) that over half the class that entered the cole Normale in 1913

was killed before the war ended; but Durkheim also lost his only son in 1916. These strains may well have helped to cause his own death from a heart attack, on November 15, 1917, at the age of 59. Intellectual background. Despite some controversy about the influence of his stay in Germany, the evidence shows that Durkheims thought was rooted overwhelmingly in French intellectual history. In the remoter background, Descartes and Rousseau were the most important, although in quite different ways. Much closer to him were Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and his own teacher, Fustel de Coulanges, as well as such others as mile Boutroux. Durkheims deep concern with the prominent contemporary intellectual currents of other countries, especially England and Germany, was authentically French: it is no disparagement of the originality of French thought on problems of man and society to say that it filled a mediating position between the two wings of the main European trends of thought, British empiricism and utilitarianism and German idealism. In a crucial sense, modern sociology is a product of the synthesis of elements that have figured most prominently in these two traditions, and it seems to have been the mediating character of his French background that gave Durkheim a distinctive place to stand, from which he contributed so effectively to this synthesis. Hence a brief sketch of both wings will help in the understanding of Durkheims own orientation and statement of problems (see also Parsons 1937; 1965). As both these traditions developed, perhaps the crucial problem was what happened as the Cartesian approach to the problem of knowledge was adapted to the analysis of action. The British position is clearest in the economic branch of utilitarian thought, although it dates from the earliest utilitarian formulation by Hobbes: man is conceived as having not only sensations or ideas, in the epistemological sense of Locke, but also what the economists called wants (and what Hobbes, speaking in a political context, went so far as to call passions). The wants define the goals of action, whereas knowledge of the situation in which action takes place provides guidance for the instrumental use of resources (including the individuals own capacities) toward the satisfaction of these wants. Mere knowledge of the situation clearly does not suffice to satisfy wants; the situation must be changed in desired ways and prevented from changing in undesirable ways. Throughout, the point of reference is the conception of an individual acting in pursuit of his own interests. This frame of reference provided the background for a most important development in the analysis of action, namely, a first technical analysis of the structuring of social means for the satisfaction of wants. The economists, by considering how a plurality of individuals, as producers and consumers, interact in the division of labor and exchange, ingeniously extended Hobbess formulationof men interdependent in their interest in powerto a conception of social systems of action coordinated by the market and the monetary mechanism rather than of action by discrete individuals. As far as it went in classical economics, this conceptual venture was brilliantly successful; but its exceedingly limited scope gradually became evident in two borderline contexts. One concerned the analysis of the bases of action of the individual. The inadequacy of classical economics here lay not only in its tendency to assume wants as given but also in its lack of a clear-cut way of establishing relationships among the different wants of a single individual, to say nothing of the different wants of several persons interacting in the same social system. Without concepts to establish these relationships, the treatment of wants as given easily shaded over into the assumption of their randomness. Likewise, shaky assumptions were made with respect to the problem of rationality, that is,

of the relation between means and wants conceived as ends. In this context, the empiricist-utilitarian tradition tended to a reductionism that is still very much with us: it moves from consideration of the characteristics of the social system (in the economic case, a market system) to the consideration of the properties of constituent units (i.e., individuals rationally engaged in want-satisfaction), then to the wants, next to the psychological determinants of the wants, and eventually to their biological conditions. The second problematic context bordering on classical economic analysis concerned what we now call the problem of order. How could the relational structure of a market economy be expected to have even a minimum level of stability when the individual participants were in the first instance bound to that structure only by self-interest, i.e., by their interest in the effective satisfaction of their several wants? Hobbes had presented a radical solution to this problemthe establishment of an absolute sovereign authorityin

Leviathan, but, as Halvy made clear (Halevy 19011904), Hobbess influence was pushed aside by that
of the Lockean wing of the utilitarian tradition, which assumed a natural identity of interests. The Lockean tradition did not really attempt to solve the problem of order but instead tried to justify the refusal to consider it. Although the Lockean approach facilitated certain valuable developments in economic analysis and in some forms of political analysis, it failed to provide that solution to the problem of order which was needed before a generalized interpretation of modern economic individualism could be developed. A notable version of the problem, which greatly influenced Ricardo and indirectly influenced Marx, was advanced by Malthus, but it remained for Durkheim to make a fundamental direct attack on the problem. In terms of substantive sociology, this is the main starting point of his more technical theory. Before taking this up, however, a few words must be said about the other current of thought converging on the French middle ground, namely German idealism and the movements stemming from it. The problems that social science must explain, in Durkheims view, lie on the subjective side of the Cartesian dichotomy, since the entire main tradition of epistemology, of which Descartess work was the focal point, virtually limited the external world to the world of objects as understood in terms of the new physical science. (It was, of course, possiblewitness biologically based psychology and anthropology to move into social science from the base of the object world, but this path was relatively unimportant to Durkheim.) Whereas the empiricist utilitarians had used this subjective element merely as a reference point for the study of behavior, failing conspicuously to structure it on its own terms, the idealists increasingly focused upon it and tended to treat it as a category of objects. In this respect Kants philosophy seems to have been transitional, while the Hegelian objective spirit (objektiver Geist) is the focal idealistic conception relevant here. This conception of Geist was primarily cultural, somewhat in the tradition of Platonic Ideas. As such it was transindividual, on quite a different level from the discrete wants of utilitarianism. The Hegelian conception underwent various changes, only two aspects of which require mention here. One was the abandonment of the grandiose Hegelian Weltgeist in favor of the more restricted spirits of what many late nineteenth-century German scholars called discrete historical individuals, such as particular cultures or civilizations in particular epochs. This modification was perhaps most consistently expounded by Wilhelm Dilthey. The other was that developed by Marx. As the one who set Hegel on his head, Marx was ostensibly a materialist rather than an idealist. Nevertheless, his materialism belongs to the idealist tradition in that it treats human culture and motivated action as objects, and it tends to be

historical in the special sense of handling history as a series of ideographic exemptions from treatment in terms of generalized analytical categories. Durkheim accepted the crucial Cartesian statement of the problem of knowledge in terms of the relation between the knowing subject and the known world of external objects. In his initial orientation he was a Cartesian rationalist, in the sense that he approached the sociological problem as a problem of knowing social facts in terms of their place in the object world. However, as he shifted from the problem of knowledge to that of action, he became concurrently concerned with social facts as both the social scientist and the actor in society, as subjects, know them. The problem of the relation between the two references was the core problem of Durkheims scheme. Thus, although basically Cartesian, this scheme could not be developed without going beyond a Cartesian position in several respects. Rousseau, as the primary philosopher of democratic individualism in his time, influenced Durkheim by his special point of view about the characteristics of social phenomena. While Rousseau shared the frame of reference of natural law and natural rights that was so prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and which, in important respects, came to France from England through Locke), he handled the problem of the social integration of those born free into a society without invoking the predominantly coercive sovereign of Hobbes or assuming the natural identity of interests, as did Locke. Rather, he postulated a resolution of interests at the level of integrative action processes in terms of the concept of will. More than any other, Rousseaus famous concept of the volont gnrate provided a conception of social solidarity that was neither economic in the sense of classical economics nor political in the sense of Hobbes or Austin. It was not a given identity of interests, but one achieved and institutionalized in the course of social process. Comtes concept of consensus, which stood more immediately in Durkheims background and was explicitly defined as sociological, was transitional between Rousseaus general will and Durkheims conception of solidarity, which lay at the core of his sociology. The problem of order. Durkheims initial orientation to the study of society was twofold. The substantive aspect was developed in the Division of Labor and concerned the problem of order in a type of system we might call economic individualism. The methodological frame of reference was developed more fully in the Rules of Sociological Method, published two years later. The critical starting point of the Division of Labor is its discussion of Herbert Spencers conception of a system of contractual relations (Division of Labor, book I, chapter 7). Durkheim clearly understood that

order in a concrete system of contractual relationsin which the market figured prominentlycould not
be accounted for in the terms set forth by Spencer, whom Durkheim treated as a representative utilitarian. Unless controlled by other factors, a society dominated by the pure pursuit of self-interest would dissolve into a Hobbesian state of nature, a complete breakdown of order. The other factor or set of factors Durkheim formulated in two different ways, and on different levels. Closest to Spencers analysis was the conception of the non-contractual elements of contract, the important idea that contracts, i.e., the ad

hoc agreements between parties, are always subject to generalized norms. These norms are not open to
negotiation between parties; they exist prior to any such agreements, having evolved over time. In more comprehensive systems, these rules or norms are part of the formal law and are enforced by the legal sanctions of public authority. Their subject matter is the definition of the interests for which contracts may be entered into (for example, a man may not contract away his basic civil rights), the means by which such interests may legitimately be pursued (in general terms, coercion and fraud are excluded), and the

bearing on contracts of interests other than those of the contracting parties (both the public interest and those of third private parties must be protected). As noted, at one level the institution of contract is a prominent part of the legal system. Durkheim, however, wanted to go behind the establishment of norms by political authority to societal structures that may be said to underlie the mobilization of political authority for the enforcement of contracts. He introduced the concept of organic solidarity essentially to designate the capacity of a social system to integrate the diverse interests inherent in qualitative structural differentiation. Durkheim related solidarity, in turn, to a conception of its underlying ground, which he called conscience collectivetranslatable as either collective conscience or collective consciousness. The normative emphasis of the first translation was important to Durkheim himself: the conscience collective was a system of beliefs and sentiments held in common by the members of a society and defining what their mutual relations ought to be. Clearly the conscience collective is a derivative of Rousseaus general will and Comtek consensus. Equally clearly, it is not purely cognitive in reference. The most important step that Durkheim took beyond his predecessors, however, was to treat solidarity and with it, presumably, the conscience collective, not simply as given, but as variable entities. He made a distinction, therefore, between organic solidarity and mechanical solidarity. Organic solidarity is the analytical type characterized by the structural differentiation of the division of labor; modern society represents a case of predominantly organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity, by contrast, is characterized by uniformity and lack of differentiation. With this distinction, Durkheim from the beginning built both historicalindeed, evolutionaryand comparative dimensions into his sociological analysis (Bellah 1959). There is an initial difficulty in interpreting the relation between Durkheims two types of solidarity, on the one hand, and the concept of the conscience collective, on the other. Since the conscience collective stresses the commonness of the beliefs and sentiments that constitute it, this seems to identify it with mechanical solidarity and suggests that organic solidarity, associated as it is with differentiation in the social structure, must develop at the expense of the conscience collective. The broad solution to this difficulty, which becomes clearer in Durkheims later work, hinges on the functions attributed to values and norms in social systems of different degrees of differentiation. The focus of the conscience

collective seems to be what we have come to call the values common to the members of any relatively
well integrated social system; the sharing of common values is a constant feature of all such systemsat whatever level of differentiation. In the case of mechanical solidarity, these values are not clearly differentiated from the norms through which they are implemented, but in the organic case the norms come to have independent salience. In the relatively less differentiated social systems characterized by mechanical solidarity, common, in the sense of uniform, sentiments tend to be implemented directly in collective action, while in the case of organic solidarity the common element lies at a more general level and must be implemented in relation to different functions in the system through norms that are not identical for different sections of the collectivity. Sociological method. The second main line of development of Durkheims analysis has to do with the fitting of these broad empirical considerations into what I have called his Cartesian frame of reference. The starting point is the conception of the actor as member of a social system and as oriented to the environment in which he acts. This actor, conceived on the model of the philosopher-scientist, observes

and interprets the facts of the external world: the distinctive problem is not their status as facts (of the environment), but as social facts. Here Durkheim self-consciously and explicitly denied the physical environment its unique reality. The milieu socialfor him the relevant environmentis, as part of society, a reality sui generis, to be studied in its own right. The central problem concerns the properties of this category of reality. This problem in turn has two principal aspects. From the viewpoint of the scientific observer, this reality is clearly factual, or as we would say, empirical. But what was it from the viewpoint of the actor, in the second sense in which Durkheim was using the Cartesian scheme? A society is a given reality (it has exteriority) from the point of view of its own members, but it also regulates (constrains) their action. This it does not only in the sense in which the physical environment sets conditions that action must take into account but also by denning goals and normative standards for action. Durkheim quite early conceived of this constraint as more than a matter of given conditions; he saw it rather as a system of rules enforced by humanly imposed sanctions. In this theoretical development, Durkheim was evidently following up his previous analysis of the law (in the Division of Labor) as both an index of the structure of the society (e.g., of the nature and extent of its differentiation) and, when it is considered together with the beliefs and sentiments of the conscience collective, as a very important normative component of all societies. There is, however, a still deeper aspect of the problem. A scientific observer of physical events is not in quite the same sense a member of the system he observes as is the social actor, although it is not acceptable to suggest that there is no sense in which they are similarly members. It was necessary, therefore, to relativize the sense in which the system that Durkheim calls society constitutes only an environment to the individual actor-members that compose it. This problem, then, came to be intertwined with that of the status of the normative aspects of a society. The essential conclusion of Durkheims thinking is that for the sociologist the boundary between individual and society cannot be that of common sense. If we interpret the former concept as something like the human personality, it must include a sector of the social system, most specifically, the normative aspect of that system, the shared beliefs and sentiments that constitute the conscience

collective. By this path Durkheim arrived at the crucially important view that essential elements of culture and social structure are internalized as part of the personality of the individual. In this he converged
notably with Freud and with the movement in American social psychology from Charles H. Cooley to George Herbert Mead and W. I. Thomas. Durkheims quite revolutionary conclusion now seems to follow more or less inevitably from his premises, once he tried seriously to fit into the Cartesian frame of reference a distinctive normative level of the social system both as a reality sui generis, for the actor as well as for the observer, and as an environment that is much more than just an environment. This meant a radical reinterpretation of Durk-heims original criteria of social factsconstraint and exteriority. The concept of social facts was developed, then, through three phases: first, exteriority, or the givenness of empirical existence, as in the case of the physical environment; second, constraint, or the effect of a normative rule to which sanctions are attached; and now, third, what Durkheim called the moral authority of internalized values and norms, which constrain the individual to conform by arousing guilt in his own conscience if he does not conform. An element of exteriority is involved in moral authority

because, although internalized, the normative system must also objectively be part of a system extending beyond the individual. It is not subjective in the sense of being purely private to the individual, for it is also a cultural object in a sense relevant to the idealistic tradition. The theoretical development at this highest level of generalityDurkheims decisively new conception of individuals interacting in a social systemdid not fully crystallize until the early years of the present century, when Durkheim gave primary attention to the relations between moral norms and the process of education (19021906). Some of its roots in the more empirical emphases of the Division of Labor have already been indicated. Certainly the most notable transitional formulation of the concept of social fact is in his study of suicide. Durkheims sensitivity to the major problems of suicide went back to the Division

of Labor and its critique of utilitarianism, more specifically the utilitarian claim that an increasing division
of labor and the resultant economic progress would be accompanied by increasing happiness. Durkheim was struck by the fact that the economic progress of newly industrialized societies was everywhere accompanied by a rise in suicide rates. This was clearly an anomaly from the point of view of utilitarian theory and stimulated Durkheim to a major, if not complete, theoretical reconstruction in his classic monograph Suicide (1897). Very advanced for its time as an empirical study, Suicide established a most important link between Durkheims theoretical work and the traditions of empirical research that have since become prominent, especially in the United States. Durkheims essential method was systematically to mobilize available statistical information on suicide rates and to relate their variations to a whole series of characteristics of the populations involved. In the nature of the case, he was limited to the modern Western world, which alone provided the kind of information he sought. With this limitation, he studied nationality, religion, age, sex, marital status, family size, place of residence, economic status, and variations in economic conditions, as well as the seasons of the year and even the times of day when suicides occurred. He showed great ingenuity and a capacity to take painsfor example, in breaking down the data published for France by departements into arrondissements, in order to reveal important variations masked in the larger units. As Bell ah points out (Bellah 1959), Durkheim brought together what information he could find from the broadest possible comparative range, even when it could not be stated quantitatively. For instance, he cited voluntary self-immolation on the part of Buddhist zealots as an example of what he called altruistic suicide. Durkheim found the conventional classification of the causes of suicide, in terms of which the data were generally reported, quite unhelpful for his purposes. He introduced a highly original scheme of his own, built about the problem of the individuals relations to the normative structuring of the social system in which he is involved. This scheme embodies two pairs of polar extremes, at which suicide rates are relatively high, and median continua between the poles, in which suicide rates are relatively low. The first pair of poles has altruisme and gosme at the extremes, the second anomie and fatalisme. That Durkheim was no mere extoller of the virtues of solidarity (as is sometimes alleged) is shown by his conception of the first polar pair in general and of the concept of altruistic suicide in particular. In this type the claims of the collectivity are so strong that there is a repeated tendency to subordinate personal interests to them to the extent of sacrificing life, even when there does not appear to be a practical emergency that requires such sacrifice. Durkheim found military officers most prone to this in modern societies, but adduced numerous other examples from other societies. The antithesis of this type is

egoistic suicide, which, for example, results in a higher rate of suicide among Protestants than among Catholics. This Durkheim explained by the social pressure inherent in Protestant norms toward a higher order of individual religious responsibility. It is a remarkable interpretation, both in itself and because it converges with the theme developed a few years later by Max Weber concerning the importance of the Protestant ethic in modern society. There is also, interestingly, an echo of Rousseau, in that Durkheim seemed to be citing an instance of the famous paradoxical formula about a man being forced to be free, adding that this enforced freedom may become too hard to bear. The second pair of polar concepts that Durkheim advanced in this connection was that of anomie and

fatalisme (the latter concept not being developed). Anomie has become one of the small number of truly
central concepts of contemporary social science. It is best interpreted in terms of Durkheims Cartesian reference. The observer as actor is naturally concerned with the definiteness of the reality with which he is confronted. In a purely cognitive context, this is a matter of the adequacy of his information and analysis. Insofar, however, as the reality is man-made and, in one aspect, is normative for the actor, the problem of definiteness becomes that of definition of the situation in the sense established by W. I. Thomas and by reference-group theory more generally [seeReference groups]. The focus, then, is on what is expected of the actor and on the problem of the definiteness of expectations. In the case of the physical conditions of, for example, technological procedures, expectations can reasonably be defined in terms of the goals of the actors; they do not pertain to the external processes and technically defined probabilities concerning the environment itself, since it does not act. In a system of social interaction, on the other hand, success cannot simply be a function of control over the environment, but necessarily involves also the sense it makes to exert effort and, generally, to expend resources, unless the outcome to which the actor is committed is clearly desirable. The sense to ego of his goal-striving is thus a function both of alters action and of egos expectation concerning it. The meaning of success cannot be established without understanding the interplay between the motivation of the actor and the normative claims impinging upon him from his social environment. At the same time, the social environment of any given actor of reference is composed of

other actors whose action must be analyzed in the same terms as the first. In this interactive framework
anomie may be considered that state of a social system which makes a particular class of members consider exertion for success meaningless, not because they lack capacity or opportunity to achieve what is wanted, but because they lack a clear definition of what is desirable. It is a pathology not of the instrumental system but of the collective normative system. Spelling out this concept leads to many refinements. In more contemporary terms, what is ill-defined may be ultimate beliefs, values, norms, or goals. Anomic uncertainty may affect either very generalized orientations or relatively specific goals; or the difficulties may arise from conflicting expectations, as in the classic instance of cross-pressures. The two concepts of gosme and anomie epitomize Durkheims concern over the state of modern society. Because of the current preoccupation with problems of meaning in contemporary life, it is not surprising that anomie has attracted far more attention than gosme. It is my own view that the balance is in need of being redressed. gosme, in Durkheims special sense, is a designation for one aspect of a prominent feature of modern social structure that can be called, more generally, institutionalized

individualism. Another context in which Durkheim emphasized gosme was his discussion of the cult of individual personality (Neyer 1960). At least some aspects of the subject of alienation (discussed so often and with so much confusion) may also be interpreted in terms of gosme and altruisme. Thus, alienation appears to be the pathological extreme (anomic in certain aspects, cf. Tiryakian 1962) of institutionalized individualism at which conformism becomes associated with the altruistic tendencies, in Durkheims sense. The alienated person, then, is under such pressure to establish his independence from pressures to conform that he becomes unable to accept the essential normative conditions of a stable system of organized individual freedom. Theory of culture. In the last major phase of his intellectual career, Durkheim dealt mainly with another set of themes that grew out of, but were distinct from, those outlined so far. These concerned religion, symbolic systems, and his somewhat new conception, collective representations. In short, he emphasized the theory of culture in relation to that of the social system. As early as the Preface to Volume 2 of Lanne sociologique (1899), Durkheim acknowledged the strong emphasis on religion in that publication and outlined his conception of religion as the primordial matrix, out of which the principal elements of culture emerged by the process of differentiation. His concern with primitive religion, as well as with an articulated evolutionary perspective, was already clear in this statement. It is important for these later developments in Durkheims thought that the relatively new science of anthropology had arisen as a kind of mediator between utilitarianism and Darwinian biology. Anthropology became the study of man as part of the organic world, concerned especially with primitive societies, particularly with their magic and religion. We have noted that Durkheims conception of society as a reality sui generis steadily changed; he placed an increasing emphasis on the normative components. While the legal norms constituted his initial prototype, he gradually focused upon more general aspects, moving toward the conception of what we would now call institutionalized values. He particularly stressed the attitude of moral respect as a component of internalized norms. What is perhaps Durkheims most important single step in extending this perspective was stated as one of the primary orienting perspectives of the Elementary Forms. This was a double proposition: first, that the attitudinal distinction between treating things as sacred and as profane is basically the same as that between moral obligations and expediency or utility; and second, that the quality of sacredness does not reside in the intrinsic properties of the object treated as sacred, but in its properties as a symbol. From this it was a short step to relate sacred physical and social objects to the whole world of cultural objects, which, Although very close to Durkheims early category of beliefs and sentiments, he increasingly formulated as representations. We may certainly interpret them as symbolic systems, leaving open the question of the meaning references of various categories of symbols. Durkheim was greatly impressed by the closeness of integration between the religious system of representations and the structure of the society itself, the attitude of moral respect being, as noted, the main connecting link. This integration seems particularly close in the case of primitive religion but it also exists in others. It justifies Durkheims emphasis on collective representations. Indeed, we can say that any symbolic system that can justifiably be called cultural must have a collective aspect; symbolization that is autisticin the sense of being wholly private to one individual (the limiting case)is no longer cultural, if indeed it can be truly symbolic. Language is perhaps the prototype here.

It seems to have been Durkheims view, a strongly defensible one, that the more primitive the society and the culture, the less differentiated they are from each other. He extensively analyzed the case of the Australian aborigines on the strength of this theory: the phenomena of the integration of culture and society could be seen there in their elementary forms. But his interest in these elementary forms does not mean that Durkheim did not have a broad understanding of the possibility and importance of differentiating conceptually between cultural and social systems, even though, as Bellah points out (Bellah 1959) he somewhat obscured this vital point by using the term social for both. Unfortunately, he never worked out a thorough analysis of the place of religion in a highly differentiated societya task that might well have led him to clarify his conception of the relations between representations and social structure. The problem of integration also arises internally to the system of collective representations, to culture itself. Durkheim presented the broad perspective on this problem several years before Elementary Forms in the monograph on primitive classification written in collaboration with Mauss (1903), although he developed it further in his book. His main point is that in primitive systems all culture is at the same time both religious and social, in a sense not true of more advanced systems. A particularly telling example is the categorization of physical space in terms directly corresponding to the arrangement of kinship groups in the camp. This conception of twofold integration, between a cultural and a social system and among the different elements of a cultural system, is particularly significant for the broad problem area we now generally call the sociology of knowledge. Undoubtedly Durkheim was at least as important a founder of this discipline as was Karl Mannheim, and in many respects his views were the clearer and better analyzed. Durkheims combined interest in cultural problems, religion, and evolutionary origins had a series of implications for the development of social science theory. Both the utilitarian tradition and that stemming from the French Enlightenment had tended not only to disparage traditional religion but even to deny its substantive importance. Evolutionary perspectives, however, focused attention on religion, partly because of the sheer empirical prominence of religion and magic in nonliterate societies, which were becoming increasingly well-known. The early Tylor-Spencer phase of social science tended strongly to consider these phenomena characteristic of the early stages of sociocultural evolution and destined to disappear with advancementa position shared by Marx. Durkheims position established a quite new order of functional significance for religion in society. Durkheim made it clear that even at the later stages of sociocultural development, every society would require the functional equivalent of a religious system (whether or not it is called religion is primarily a semantic issue). Beyond this, Durkheim established the groundwork for an exceedingly valuable conception of the morphology of social developmentthe conception of processes of structural differentiation and of attendant new, more general levels of integration. The conception of religion as the original matrix of both society and culture suggests further that society and culture themselves tend to become more completely differentiated from each other and that secular elements develop from this matrix on both the social and cultural levels. An important semantic point is that just because a relatively undifferentiated complex is called religion for an earlier stage of development and only one of its two or more differentiated derivatives retains that name for a later stage, it is not legitimate to assert that religion has declined. Thus, Durkheim viewed the secularization of education as an imperative of the stage of social

differentiation that France had reached in his time, but he denied that this meant that the function of religion in French society had therefore been downgraded. Durkheims combination of a comparative and evolutionary perspective with a special concern for cultural symbolic systems should have been connected with a theoretical analysis of the processes of social and cultural change. Durkheim did not, to be sure, give this as much explicit attention as he did problems of social morphology, but the contributions he did make to an understanding of the process of change seem not to have been under-stood as fully as his more static analysis. In any case, it is clear that Durkheim provided the groundwork for a major theory of developmental change in societies and that he made important direct contributions to it himself. His later work, in particular, tended to stress the importance of cultural creativity as a factor in change; one of the clearest statements is in his late essay Value Judgments and Judgments of Reality (1911), which stresses the incidence and salience of effervescence in periods of crisis in the development of the sociocultural system. At the same time, Durkheim was quite clearly a multi-factor theorist of social change. Conclusion. Durkheim contributed substantially and very eminently for the time in which he worked to relatively specific empirical problems in sociology. To this day, analyses of the nature of contractual systems, of suicide rates, and of primitive religions cannot ignore his contributions. Equally, he was a highly effective entrepreneur of sociologyas teacher, as editor of a distinguished periodical, and as leader of a highly talented and creative group of research scholars. These are not, however, the achievements that place him in the top rank among the founders of a scientific discipline. This higher eminence stems from the fact that Durkheim used the framework of solidly established intellectual traditionsthose of English utilitarianism, in certain respects of German idealism, and of his own French backgroundto formulate a theoretical framework that was both solidly grounded in those traditions and yet highly original. As grounded in tradition, it was capable of taking full account of established knowledge; but it also went far beyond this. It was precise and clear in its logical structures and imaginative in opening up new ways of considering social phenomena, defining problems, and developing patterns of interpretation. In his special conception of the nature of social reality, which emphasized the involvement of normative components in both social reality and, through internalization, the personality of the individual, Durkheim was following, along with a few others, the major line of the theoretical development of social science. But he went even beyond this to link the social and personality systems thus conceived with a highly sophisticated analysis of cultural symbolic systems and to set the whole action structure in a comprehensive evolutionary framework. The resulting enrichment of the theoretical resources of the field of social science, of its insight into significant problems and its capacity to deal determinately with them, is incalculable. Only a very select few among the figures in intellectual history have contributed so cruciallyat such a significant junctureto the development of scientific culture.