Durkheimian Studies

These are lectures on morality, attributed to Durkheim by Raymond Lenoir and given to Steven Lukes, who reproduced them in his doctoral thesis on Durkheim. They are published, here, together and in full for the first time. The first group of lectures covers the family, as well as general issues in morality and moral education. The second group of lectures, on civic ethics, covers citizenship, democracy, the state, occupational groups, law, and the idea of la patrie. The lectures conclude with a familiar discussion of discipline, and a more original discussion of duties to oneself. The editorial introduction to the lectures explains the circumstances in which they came to light, and discusses issues of authenticity but also of the general role, in Durkheimian studies, of texts variously attributed to Durkheim or based on notes by his students.

Contents: L’enseignement de la morale Les raisons d’être: morale de la société en général La famille Morale civique De la société politique en général L’Etat La patrie La Démocratie Les devoirs professionels Le droit et le devoir de voter L’autorité de la loi La discipline Des devoirs de l’homme envers lui-même

This essay asks why Durkheim was so opposed to free consensual unions, in a support for marriage and the family. But it is above all an attempt to explore the theoretical sources of his insistent and even dogmatic opposition to 'free unions'. Accordingly, it involves Durkheim's thinking about the sacred in two key areas. One centres round issues of filiation, and involves his account of totems, clans and the individual's social identity. The other centres round his view that individualism grows along with the increasing activity of the state, and involves interrelated questions of property, inheritance, the contract and the role of civil law. The result is a tension in his thought between an emphasis on the sacred as the origin of things and a more secular concern with the importance in modern life of moral relations expressed and regulated by civil law. Although his opposition to free unions has roots in 'children of the totem', it is suggested it is above all a modern concern with 'children of the law'.

This essay examines Durkheim's functionalism, to argue that it cannot be adequately understood through later movements of structural functionalism, especially Parsonian functionalism. Concretely, for Durkheim, the function of the division of labour is to create solidarity but this runs into the problem of modern pathologies. More abstractly, his functionalism has two essential sets of components, and it is only through the relation between these that it is possible to grasp his argument and its full significance. One involves ideas of correspondence, tendency and action, so that function has to do with a set of 'living movements' and how it corresponds with social needs. The other involves a functionalism of mind, and above all centres round the idea of conscience as a set of epistemological, representative and practical functions. Durkheim's functionalism relates these two components in a concern with the power of critical reflection on existing patterns of society, and with how conscience releases the force of agency, to have a transformative potential on the ills of society.

Durkheim's 'second program of research' above all refers to his project as developed in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. This essay examines how it has in turn been developed and taken up nowadays in the work of Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey Alexander. Both of them are concerned with the centrality of ritual and the sacred as active, constitutive elements not just of religion but of all social life, not least modern social life. However, a key difference between them can be found in the issue of the internal dimension of ritual and of the individual's participation in public performance of this. Rappaport emphasizes some sort of general notion of acceptance, in an effort to open up things and get away from the particular epistemological as well as theological commitments of the idea of belief. Alexander still appears to work with the modernist epistemology and 'Protestant' theology of belief. His project of a new Durkheimian cultural sociology has nonetheless itself opened up all kinds of things, and is one of the most creative and dynamic research programs in sociology nowadays.

Raymond Boudon, ‘Nouveau Durkheim? Vrai Durkheim?’, Durkheimian Studies / Etudes durkheimiennes (n.s.) 12, 2006: 137–148.

Frank Pearce, ‘A Modest Companion to Durkheim’, Durkheimian Studies / Etudes durkheimiennes (n.s.) 12, 2006: 149–160.

Ivan Strenski, The New Durkheim. New Brunswick (NJ) and London: Rutgers University Press, 2006, pp. 376.

Mike Gane, Auguste Comte. London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 158.

Donald Nielsen, Horrible Workers: Max Stirner, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Johnson, and the Charles Manson Circle: Studies in Moral Experience and Cultural Expression. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005, pp. 134.

Philip Smith, Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War and Suez. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005, pp. 256.

Rodney Needham died on 3 December, 2006, at the age of 83 after a longish illness. Influenced by Evans-Pritchard, he has been called the foremost British anthropologist of his day. He was Professor of Social Anthropology in Oxford from 1976 to 1990. Although far from being enamoured with the work of Durkheim, he showed a strong sympathy for the work of some of his disciples and was instrumental in bringing their work to the notice of English-speaking scholars. Amongst his great output of books and articles – about four hundred – there appeared in 1960 a translation of two essays by Robert Hertz with the title, Death and the Right Hand.