Peter Emmerson

 4.2.3 Durkheim

The increased awareness of relative uncertainty evidenced in Marx’s analysis was given further impetus by Emile Durkheim’s more sociological account of the damage done to social cohesion by the industrial exploitation of the division of labour, so lauded by Adam Smith. Like Marx, Durkheim recognised the significance of work experiences in the formation of human togetherness or social solidarity. Such work experiences bring about codes of thinking and behaviour which extend beyond the labour process into wider social life. Industrial capitalism was successful at producing large numbers of cheap goods by breaking down work into simple, specialised tasks suitable for machines gathered together in factories and towns, serviced by people. Work that was too difficult for mechanization was again simplified as much as possible to remove its skill so that it could be done quickly by people with little or no training who were cheap and easy to replace.

These changes that took place during the Industrial Revolution had been so significant and so rapid, that they had, according to Durkheim, caused a rupture in the social landscape, leaving the pre-industrial, rural moral codes trailing behind in their wake and for a growing number of people, obsolete. In Durkheim’s view, a new set of moral codes suitable for urban, industrial society would take time to evolve, perhaps always lagging behind due to the relentless and ceaseless pace of change endemic to market capitalism. The moral ferment caused by these forces left people in permanent states of uncertainty about how to behave and think in the new industrial, urban world, where intense deregulation demanded much more flexibility.

The discomfort experienced by people was recognised by Durkheim who ingeniously modified the theometaphysical concept of anarchy, translating it into a social scientific term that related such change to measurable social events – ‘anomie’. Anomie is the result of social dislocation and the loss of common sense knowledge on what to do for the best, leaving people perpetually unsure, confused and even suicidal. Even though Marx used alienation to explain similar things, his analysis was more idealistic: alienation will be ended by the demise of capitalism and a return to a state of true nature. In contrast, Durkheim portrayed anomie as a socio-pathological condition requiring coping strategies until rules emerge to regulate the new system such as professional ethics.

In developing the concept of anomie, Durkheim moved sociology away from the traditional truth-finders by reducing some of the idealism in our understanding. Anomie is a more reality-oriented, more scientific concept, that increases the distance of sociological understanding from theometaphysics by focussing on specific social experiences and their connection to moral understanding. Interrelatedly, and more importantly for my analysis, Durkheim points directly to the issue of moral uncertainty and its causes. The arrival of capitalism and the need to drive down costs by exploiting the division of labour through greater levels of specialisation of job function has the effect, he believed, of distancing people from one another because there is less commonality of experience. Most cultures have family names that speak of job function that spanned generations of people: in the UK we have people called Baker, Taylor, Smith, Cooper whose names speak of ancestral jobs. In capitalism the rate of change of employment function is comparatively so high that relatively new occupations become redundant within four generations; an instance being the bank clerk. Durkheim argued that this process of diversification and permanent deregulation has led to increased individualism causing tensions and social problems such as rising levels of crime and, most notably, suicide. By introducing the concept of anomie, Durkheim prioritized social experience over that of idealism and at the same time brought attention to our need to explore the uncertainty of modern experience driven by capitalist’ thirst for innovation. In this model, morals are social rules that form the very fabric of human social experience because they bond people together by imposing obligation on one another. Morals are therefore subject to social change, the are not absolutes given on tablets of stone from on high. The social scientific style of analysis is suggestive of ‘relative uncertainty’.

Traditionally the analysis of morals has been the home ground of idealism and its experts the theometaphysicists, no doubt because of the importance of values for social order: see Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. This approach argues that the source of our moral thinking is on the one hand religious and on the other metaphysical: the Ten Commandments are a very influential example of the former; Aristotle’s search for the good life exemplifies the latter. Durkheim challenged this approach, by exploring the formation of morals in relation to their social function as the glue that holds us together. From this point of view morals are emotional and symbolic representations of human bonding, so pivotal to human identity and survival that they are translated into sacred texts and rituals. Morals, for Durkheim, are the shared values that structure our social existence by providing a consensus on how to think and behave.

Even though Durkheim does go some way to demolishing the idealistic theometaphysical monolith upon which rights and wrongs are written, he is not fully immune to idealistic fancy. In developing Comte’s message, he builds idealistic patterns of analysis into his model by employing the approach of Immanuel Kant. Kant attempted an unsuccessful repair of the fissure that emerged in metaphysics with the disagreement between the rationalists such as Descartes and the empiricists such as Locke and Hume. On the one hand the Cartesians were convinced that the truthfulness of mathematics allowed them access to a method of finding absolute truths such as the existence of God, without any reference to the uncertain world of sensory experience. On the other hand there were people like Locke who argued that the mind cannot think mathematically until it synthesizes ideas from sensory experience. In trying to bridge the gap Kant, as far as I can see, simply reformulated it producing what Michel Foucault later called the ’empirico-transendental double’. Even though Kant argued that our powers of reason were useless unless they were made to address factual problems, he could not integrate pure reason with sensory experience. Thus, the Kantian perspective is just another version of the dichotomous, fractured world according to Homo clausus, who looks out on a universe fashioned by his mental apparatus, rather than a full amalgamation of mind and sensory experience. Thus, Hume’s worrying conclusion that the absolute truth could not be explained by collecting empirical evidence, remains unassailable. Consequently, Kant’s re-evaluation still gives pride of place to ideals (noumena) because they can be fully understood by the human mind rather than just experienced as mere appearance (phenomena): Homo clausus is fully reinstated.

From this point of view, the laws of nature are statements of a general kind which are the results of the pure reason; they are ideals. Our day to day experience is structured according to their governance. For Kant a moral problem is resolved by comparison with the general proposition or ‘categorical imperative’: it is wrong for you to disobey the law because if everyone did there would be chaos: pure Hobbes. Durkheim translated this position into sociological language. For Durkheim there has to be a general moral stance for consensus to exist otherwise anomie will result and potentially, social breakdown. Even though Durkheim points to the social nature of morals he cannot distance himself sufficiently from idealism to offer an explanation which can fully embrace relative moral uncertainty, a properly social scientific conclusion.