Chapter 2
Durkheim’s Other Works and the Contributions of His Students

The variety of outputs – individualism – socialism – ethics – the state – sex/gender/family/marriage – pragmatism – education – the body – punishment – classification – Mauss – Hertz – Hubert – other students in the Année team.

In our prior chapter we sketched Durkheim’s most substantial contributions. These are found in the four major books that are the core of his legacy. Yet these tomes do not exhaust his output. Indeed there seems to be a bottomless pit of smaller works. Some continue and expand the lines of thinking in the major studies. Others bring in new topics or provide the best evidence we have for his views on certain issues. In this chapter we will introduce the multiple reviews, lecture series, and commentaries that need to be acknowledged as important in their own right. We will at times connect these to themes that are perhaps subordinated or scattered in his four major books.

The chapter will also begin our move away from Durkheim and toward the Durkheimian tradition. It highlights how Durkheim was the leader of a research team. The contributions of his colleagues and students in the last two decades of his life are the first signs of an evolving Durkheimian paradigm that was beginning to take on a life of its own. This moved into ever-new territories, generally more anthropological and more concerned with symbolic and religious life. We consider these elaborations also in this chapter. The main argument: even without the four great monographs Durkheim would have been considered today a noted minor theorist, a significant intellectual networker, and the originator of one of the most productive and original scholarly groups in the history of the social thought.

If they are not full-length scholarly monographs written as such, then what exactly are the products we are going to be talking about in this chapter from Durkheim and his students? When it comes to format they are: book reviews with developed arguments; responses and rejoinders; notes; extended essays from the Année sociologique that could later be published as short, stand-alone books; and lecture series and lecture notes that could be collated and published as a book posthumously (the empirical topics for these being education, pragmatism, morality, socialism, and politics and the state). Such product in all its material forms tends to fall out into the following themes:

• reflections on the problem of social integration and the nature of morality in modernity;
• efforts to clarify epistemological foundations for a discipline or science of sociology;
• critical analyses of rival thinkers and paradigms;
• ethnologically inspired comparative studies, usually regarding the nature of religious phenomena.

Generally speaking, Durkheim’s leading students made their most significant contributions to the last of the above bullet points, the most empirical one. Durkheim’s efforts, as might be expected, involved all four. He was far stronger than all his students at abstract social thought.

This chapter is organized as follows. First we run through the remainder of Durkheim’s thought by name-checking key concepts. This is a fairly speedy “need to know” exercise. Often there are overlaps with and elaborations upon themes we introduced in the prior chapter. Still, the case could be made that the most important statements he had on many topics were outside the major monographs; hence the title for this section that is given below features the word “remaining.” We are looking here at themes that took a back seat before in chapter 1 and at minor works that express these particularly well. As we finish with Durkheim we turn to his students and look at their most significant works.

Durkheim’s Remaining Ideas and Works

Individualism struck Durkheim as a distinctive feature of modernity. In Suicide he had highlighted the dangers of excessive egoism and flagged that people needed to be connected to collectivities in meaningful ways. However, his understanding was that egoism and individualism were not one and the same. Nor did individualism necessarily challenge a valued collective life. Rather individualism was a positive thing where it was a shared, core, and appropriate social value. This was the case in the mature condition of true modernity. In the crucially important essay “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” first published in 1898, Durkheim (1970) responded to the Dreyfus case in a somewhat oblique way. He defended Dreyfus indirectly and cryptically by elaborating ideas about individualism rather then engaging in a direct discussion of the matters filling the newspapers. His argument was that a utilitarian and economistic version of individualism needed to be contrasted to a moral individualism that was a sign of social progress. These ideas about individualism are also clearly expressed in book 1, chapter 5, of the Division of Labor.

Durkheim’s most enduring meme in “Individualism and the Intellectuals” was that the human person is a sacred entity existing in a cult of the individual and that our morality demanded this sacrality be protected. He writes:

The human person … is considered sacred, in what can be called the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have accorded their gods. It is conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates a vacuum about holy objects and keeps them away from profane contacts and which separates them from ordinary life … It is a religion of which man is, at the same time, both a believer and a god. (1986c: 81)

The idea of the “vacuum” was taken up by Erving Goffman (see chapter 4). He was to discuss much later how certain prohibitions and small marks of respect surround the individual in everyday life like a protective bubble. Durkheim also indicates in the essay that individualism, within the context of a more abstract concept of common humanity, is a shared civic value. To respect the individual is to respect society more widely. True individualism is best described not as a source of anarchic self-interest but rather as a moral force that if honored can generate social integration. He writes:

A verbal similarity has made possible the belief that individualism necessarily resulted from individual, and thus egoistic sentiments. The religion of the individual is a social institution like all known religions. It is society which provides us with this ideal as the only common end which is today able to offer a focus for men’s wills. (1986c: 81)

As Durkheim expands upon such ideas in “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” he connects them with his thinking in the Division of Labor. In traditional contexts life was more collective. As society became more complex people started to develop divergent interests and ways of seeing. Society had evolved to the point where respect for these differences and for common humanity was an appropriate cultural form for our age. He further expounds that Christianity played a role in this process, with its emphasis on the individual’s choice of faith and inner sentiment over the merely formulaic observance of rites. The resulting cult of the individual was a pivotal dimension of the collective conscience or collective morality today. It saw the individual accorded respect and autonomy. When it was correctly specified, these individuals would be guided by a shared social morality and be able to combat egoism and the narrow pursuit of self-interest that were so destructive to social life.

Durkheim’s thoughts are barely sketched out but they have monumental implications. In a twist reminiscent of the gymnastics of an ENS entrance examination (discussed in chapter 1) they square the circle. Whereas common sense places individual and society in tension, Durkheim suggests that becoming a true individual can mean fulfilling a social value. Growing individualism in the right circumstances equates to growing sociality. It is a win–win situation. He was right on the money. In the world today discourses of human rights are fundamentally shaped by the assumption that freedom of expression and identity are inalienable, and that an entitlement to creativity and personal growth are universal, shared, collective values of humanity. We measure the worth of entire nations and of smaller collectivities such as universities, churches, or families by looking to whether they allow individuals to achieve, flourish, and prosper (become “truly themselves”) or whether they subject individuals to repressive group norms. The idea has proven especially fruitful as a way to understand the evolution of rights in fields such as gender equality, mental health, criminology and punishment, education, and childhood (Joas 2013; see chapter 5). Likewise Roger Cotterrell (1999) looks to the law in light of Durkheim’s remarks. He reconstructs individualism as increasingly important to Durkheim’s vision of...