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Introduction

During the nineteenth century, the concepts of art, culture and morality were used to condemn the evolving marketplace and the kind of civilization that it produced. Because the nineteenth century was characterized not only by the hegemony of the market, but also by the machine, a particular criticism of industrial society emerged. The new era was condemned by referring to an image that is now iconic in any discussion of individual and social relations — the notion of the organic was contrasted with the mechanical. Whereas the former was characterized by completeness, naturalness and harmony, the latter was constrictive, restrictive and contorted by the machine and its relentless division of labour.

A new definition of the intellectual and the artist emerged as the critic of industrial society. Typically, these sensitive individuals were alienated from the mechanical universe that they inhabited. They constructed a concept of culture as an antonym and antidote, not only to the most negative aspects of industrialization, but also to the artificial society that industrial capitalism had created. The word culture was transposed from the realm of horticulture where it referred to natural growth and the cultivation of the soil. By the early nineteenth century, it denoted the natural nurturing of the human soul that was eclipsed by the triumph of the machine. It also affirmed the values of imagination, community and spirituality against the world of facts, fragmentation and materialism. Alienated intellectuals were more at home in the medieval past and in their romantic fantasies than in their own societies. The literature that they produced was richly spiced with appeals to communal values.

The sentimental and romantic tradition was not completely at odds with its time and place, however. Writers also discovered a powerful anti-materialist weapon in the form of the individual and his or her consciousness. They updated and modernized the concept of love between the sexes in ways that have transformed our culture. Building on the tradition of the troubadours, those balladeers who made music the “food of love”, the romantics redefined the relationship between men and women and made sexuality an explicit and defining dimension in society. Whereas the complex emotions related to sexual attraction had been suppressed or subsumed by the societies of the past, they were heightened and refined by the romantics. Love became a highly personal refuge from material civilization.

Not all nineteenth-century intellectuals were opposed to the brave new world. Some of the most profound writers of the age even welcomed it. One of these was E-mile Durkheim, whose work The Division of Labour in Society constituted a new departure for the analysis of love and community. Durkheim attacked the school of thinkers who condemned the unnaturalness of industrial civilization and its emphasis on specialization. He suggested that the romantics and others invariably mistook their own prejudices for ethics and stupidly stereotyped the division of labour in social affairs. Before any hasty judgements could be made, Durkheim argued, it was necessary to closely examine the concept of the division of labour and to assess its function in modern society.

Durkheim suggested that the division of labour, as distinct from the machine, was the most remarkable phenomenon in modern society. This development, however, should not be artificially separated from the concepts of culture or community. For the first time in history, men and women could escape from the constrictions of tradition and the imperatives of survival to form truly complex and intimate relationships with one another. Without the division of labour, there would be no possibility of a genuine community as distinct from societies that were based on authority, repression, and the subservience of imagination, fantasy and love. The community, and not the individual, was the key to understanding, and appreciating, the function of specialization. The modern community was not simply an economic fact; it was an ethical entity. Morals, not materialism, governed modern social life.

Durkheim was the Father of Sociology

Durkheim advanced a paradigmatic shift in thinking about the relationship between the individual and society. He argued that society created the individual rather than the other way around. His perspective on society was the fundamental step in the creation of the discipline of sociology.

The Division of Labour

Durkheim acknowledged an enormous debt to Adam Smith, who identified the division of labour as the most dynamic change in modern society in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Durkheim did object, however, to Smith’s belief that agriculture was relatively immune to specialization. Writing in 1893, Durkheim noted that the division of labour was a feature of all of modern life, including agriculture. And yet, Durkheim complained, no one had attempted to go beyond Smith in order to objectively analyze a phenomenon that had so remarkably changed everyone’s life. With the exception of Marx, those who talked about the division of labour, pro or con, simply assumed that the concept was intuitive. None had attempted to examine it as a social fact that needed to be carefully dissection before it could be understood.

However superficial their analyses, the critics of specialization were correct in a fundamental sense, Durkheim argued. Unless it could be shown that specialization served more human needs than simply economic ones, its function could never be justified. Human societies needed lots of things besides big factories or a higher standard of living. Without justice, without a sense of safety and stability, communal life would be disastrous. Without communal morality, all the wealth in the world was a dubious blessing. But the defenders of the division of labour suggested that it brought in its train other blessings, including great art, civilization and scientific discovery.

While Durkheim appreciated all of these advances, particularly science, he did not consider these necessarily to be social goods. They were analytically neutral. Art did not reinforce the bonds of community; science could be used to harm as well as for good; civilization could alienate the less fortunate and engender artificial distinctions.

Durkheim certainly was no naïve apostle of progress, although he did believe that societies could evolve into more sophisticated and advanced entities. Thus, when he set out to defend the division of labour, it was not simply on the grounds of its economic utility or its contribution to an advanced civilization. He wanted to assess its moral character. This is an important point to which we will return momentarily.

The division of labour, Durkheim argued, was neither an economic nor a modern notion. It was the search for complimentarity that had being going on since the dawn of human society. It involved an exchange of services that was perhaps more clearly represented in friendship and love than in the crudely economic arena. Friendship was a fascinating relationship. How do we choose our friends anyway? Durkheim allowed that we must have some things in common with our friends to develop the relationship. But friendship is more about difference than homogeneity. Our friends offer us something that we lack; and we, in turn, provide them with something that they need. I may be talkative; my friend may be quiet. I may be gregarious; my friend may be shy. I might be a reader of books; my friend could be an artist. In any case, it’s clear what we gain from one another’s company. Together, we form a more unified whole.

This is especially true of love. The attraction between the sexes is rarely like reaching out to like. What make for spice, interest and a lasting relationship are the differences. The old adage opposites attract perhaps goes to far, but it does suggest a fundamental social fact. Sympathetic harmony and sexual connection depend upon diversity rather than agglutination. If a couple are too similar in their tastes and outlook, they soon become bored with one another. There is less to tweak their interest.

All of this may sound a bit like pop psychology. But Durkheim develops his argument in a fascinating direction. He suggests that we have witnessed an historical shift from past societies, which were based on a crude form of clannish empathy, towards more modern societies, where genuine friendships and love are more common. In contemporary life, men and women place much more value on their private friendships than ever they did in the past. And, in the modern world, sexual attraction is much more powerful, specialized and refined than it was in the world we have lost.

Durkheim’s account of the specialization of the sexes can be annoying. Much of it is anthropologically dated, ethnocentric and even racist. Thus, Durkheim suggests that, in primitive societies, men and women were not specialized in their functions, and women were often as physically strong and mentally intelligent as the men were. Over the course of the development of the West, the cultural and biological functions of the sexes became increasingly specialized. Durkheim goes so far as to argue that the brain of a Parisian male is the largest in the history of civilization, while the brain of his wife is among the smallest. He concludes that the appropriate function of women is to remain in their separate sphere, to practice the art of sexual seduction, and to perform acts of gentleness. Their function is to act as emotional supports for the men, who carry out most of the thinking and planning functions. For Durkheim, this was supposed to be a healthy functioning modern society. Not many women, or thinking males, would agree with this today.

The Moral Community

Durkheim’s primary insight still stands. In any society, concepts such as love, marriage and friendship have an ethical character. Morality refers to the higher order norms of a given society. Social norms are the main foundation of social solidarity. Without them, society would dissolve or disintegrate. If the division of labour can be shown to contribute to social solidarity, it is positive. If it doesn’t enable the smooth functioning of the moral community, it is a very mixed blessing.

Some theorists simplify Durkheim by suggesting that he simply has taken a basically economic principle — i.e. the division of labour — and transformed it into a social construct. To say this, however, is to underestimate the significance of the Durkheimian revolution. For Durkheim, the economy is only a part of society that needs to be subsumed within social relations generally. The operative concept in Durkheim’s thought is community, and community is defined in terms that are pre-eminently ethical.

The values or norms of this community are expressed in its collective consciousness. This consciousness is not the sum of particular consciousness. In other words, society can never be reduced to a social contract between individuals. It is the sum total of the values that a society holds dear. These values may be the products of particular historical experiences, or they may reflect unique expressions of belief, but they will invariably have the religious character of the sacred attached to them. As sacred norms, they are continuously internalized and reconstituted by new members of society. That is precisely why we should expect them to change slowly. Radical change leaves people rootless and empty — victims of what Durkheim calls anomie or the loss of meaning.

Durkheim argues that society is much more than a utilitarian relationship. It is a moral entity that connects the past with the present. There is no such thing as an isolated individual because, from birth, all members of a society are nourished by its values. While these values might appear ridiculous to an outsider, they are part of the moral fabric of that society, and any interference with those values puts the society at risk. Once values have become internalize and constitute a part of one’s identity, any attack on them is perceived as an attack on the self.

Man is a social animal and much more so for Durkheim than for more individualistic thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, or Jeremy Bentham. The study of human solidarity is the domain of sociology and, not surprisingly, Durkheim was one of the inventors of that discipline. He argued that many, if not most, of the attributes of personality derive from community and that the study of society should take precedence over that of the individual. In roughly the same time period as Sigmund Freud, therefore, Durkheim made a strong case that the individual could not be understood unless one took into account all the social facts that incorporated his/her existence. Even suicide, seemingly the most individual of all actions, could not be explained unless it was understood that certain kinds of societies give rise to certain types of suicide. Durkheim’s provocative study Suicide remains one of the primary texts of the nineteenth century. In that substantial work, he argued that so-called primitive societies had far fewer suicides than more civilized nations because of the tenacity of collective solidarity in small-scale societies.

Utilitarian philosophy or psychological theory could not explain the nature of the collective consciousness or social solidarity. It derived from the operation of human sentiment in particular situations. These sentiments became deeply rooted as they were transferred from generation to generation, acquiring the status of the sacred. Durkheim’s emphasis on social norms took him in interesting directions. He suggested that these norms were fundamentally religious in nature, so we should not be surprised that the earliest social codes had a theological base. Moreover, he attacked rationalism in ways that, arguably, were more profound than Freud and the defenders of the sub-conscious. While Freud attacked nineteenth-century rationalism by arguing that the individual’s thoughts and actions owed a huge debt to the irrational forces of the unconscious mind, the individual was still at the epicentre of his analysis. Durkheim made a frontal attack on all forms of analysis based upon the calculating individual by showing how the pre-individual attributes of society impinged upon human behaviour. Whereas Freud’s analysis emphasized the sex drive and had limited applicability, Durkheim’s analysis offered a wider scope, even to the extent of explaining the cultural genesis of sexual attraction. Durkheim’s methodological focus on community allowed him to move easily between topics as diverse as crime, insanity, religion, morality, economic competition, and suicide. Last, and most important, Durkheim attempted to explain the individual himself as a social and cultural product of the division of labour.

Here then was a thinker who praised individualism, specialization and modern civilization. Yet this same thinker coordinated a devastating attack on some of rationalism’s most cherished principles. He elevated community over the individual, morals above economics, and communal sentiment against excessive rationalism. He went against the intellectual grain of his and our age. What has made individual rationalism so popular and lasting is that it is such an easy philosophy to grasp. In an era characterized by an obsession with the individual, the concept of the self is the most intuitive unit for analysis. The concept of community is more complex and amorphous, which explains why more university students opt for psychological than sociological study.

Law, Punishment and the Collective Consciousness

Durkheim admitted that the concept of community was slippery. Although it has a longer history than the concept of the individual, it might appear counter-intuitive to our obsession with the self. Therefore, Durkheim took considerable pains to demonstrate the validity of community. In particular, he focused on the development and function of law.

The collective consciousness of any society, according to Durkheim, must be reflected in its normative structure. Conceivably, norms could be studied by looking at tradition, customs, religious values and the like. But they will always be reflected in the laws. The laws of any given society consistently reflect its values. In particular, criminal law illuminates those cases where a society’s values are challenged and that seem to deserve punishment. The cases deemed criminal, therefore, are the ones that reveal a society’s totems and taboos. Moreover, criminal law exists in all societies, whether or not it is codified.

Durkheim could have spent a lot of time showing us how the laws of a society reflect its values, but he wanted to get directly to something he considered much more significant — punishment. Whenever anyone offends against the collective consciousness in a serious way, they are punished, sometimes very severely. What is the reason for this punishment? Do the members of society think that it is necessary to punish wrongdoers in order to prevent them from offending again? That may be part of it, says Durkheim, but the major purpose of punishment is never prevention. The idea of prevention is the afterthought of more refined civilizations. The real reason for punishment is vengeance.

Punishment relates only indirectly to considerations of utility or the dangerousness of the offence; its primary connection is to the sentiments of social spectators. The particular sentimental reaction or intuitive response to crime is anger. Durkheim believed that anger was the natural response of the community to crime and, moreover, that this anger needed to be appeased. When the members of any community feel that their values are threatened, they will be very ill at ease. Revenge is their attempt to crush those who appear to hold contrary values. Their sense of community will only be restored once the offender is punished.

So powerful are these communal sentiments, argues Durkheim, that they are sometimes unleashed indiscriminately. In so-called primitive (today we would call them small-scale) societies, even an animal who inadvertently breaks a religious taboo — say, by wandering into a sacred space — might be destroyed. In some societies, an entire family or clan must pay the price for the actions of a single individual. Because punishment is a collective process, the collective consciousness sometimes winds up the anger and the need for vengeance to an unusually high degree. The punishment then goes well beyond what might be deemed necessary. Punishment often is indiscriminate. Trivial offences can be treated with the same ferocity as capital ones. Essentially, this is because all offences are viewed as a threat to the integrity of the collective.

What Durkheim discovers in punishment is a fascinating social fact. Society operates much more on the basis of emotion than reason. The collective emotions of a community are extremely powerful at all times, but never more so than when the community finds its values threatened, either from inside or outside. Society, not the individual, will do everything in its power to protect itself and reaffirm its identity. Punishing offenders, moreover, reasserts and reinforces this identity.

This is tantamount to saying that society actually needs criminals and crime to function smoothly. Durkheim suggests that the criminal is a necessary requirement for social stability; without him or her, a society could stagnate. That is precisely why all societies will always have criminals or those whose behaviour is targeted for punishment. Even the most perfect society has to punish to survive. A monastic order, for example, might deem things that you or I consider trivial to be serious offences. The Benedictine order punishes small acts of disobedience, or any breaking of its rules regarding silence, with ferocity that seems entirely out of proportion to the misdemeanor.

Mechanical Solidarity

While anger and punishment contribute to social solidarity, they may also put the community at risk. As sacred as social norms are, many of them will change over time. If those in authority target and punish activities that are losing their sacred character too strenuously, they can give rise to the degree of opposition that effects a radical change in their society. Durkheim did not discuss radical social change; his methodology tended towards conservatism.

Still, Durkheim was a typically nineteenth-century thinker in his belief that societies evolve to higher forms. The division of labour was much more sophisticated in nineteenth-century France than in the world we have lost or the so-called primitive societies that continued to exist in Durkheim’s times. Turning the tables on those who disavowed modern society as mechanical, Durkheim described modern society as characterized by organic solidarity and primitive societies as characterized by mechanical solidarity. In other words, he viewed modern society as a much more intricate and complicated organism than the societies of the past. For Durkheim, the modern world was a complete and complementary organism.

Primitive societies, on the other hand, were simple and cruel. The anger of the collective was aimed at individuals in a uniformly and undifferentiated way. There was little sensitivity to the rights of the individual; there was an absence of kindness; and the concepts of compassion and humanity were undeveloped. Primitive laws were epitomized in the Code of Hammurabi — “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” Don’t expect any subtlety from primitive people, Durkheim suggested.

In primitive societies, the needs of the group often take on an antagonistic and oppressive character. Those who fail to conform closely to prescribed behaviour are shunned. Love takes a back seat to kinship or clan relations. Friendship is virtually subsumed within patriotism or public duty. Every man is on a warrior footing with other societies that are regarded as evil. Aggression and conformity are required behaviour.

Durkheim’s characterization of non-western societies was biased, and it is safe to say that he often misunderstood the societies that he stereotyped as primitive. Nevertheless, it is intriguing to note that he could adopt the same pejorative language to describe sub groups within contemporary French society. The military, for example, struck Durkheim as a type of mechanical society. In the military, obedience was key. Individual identity was highly circumscribed by group affiliation. Disobedience was punished severely. The military mode was mechanistic; it did not resemble the behaviour of French society. It lacked the flexibility and subtlety of a living organism. The military man was a human machine.

Mechanistic societies operate like machines, without much subtlety, flexibility or intelligence. They could not easily reprocess information to respond to different situations. Durkheim described native societies as very simple forms of society. Because their members were not specialized, they were interchangeable. Durkheim compared individuals in such societies to the segments of a worm like creature. He also ranked societies in hierarchical order from the primitive to the organic. Accordingly, Jewish society was lower than early Frankish society; Roman civilization was a step up the ladder; Medieval Christianity was more sophisticated than both, and so forth.

The fundamental distinction between mechanical and organic societies was reflected in the role and function of religion. Modern societies and higher civilizations were characterized by the separation of church and state and the decreasing significance of religion in social life. What this implied for Durkheim was that mechanical societies were characterized by a powerful collective consciousness that was crystallized in religious codes. These codes did not merely cover the tenets of formal religion, but applied to virtually all aspects of social life. Thus, the Old Testament was a religious/legal code that applied to relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children.

Durkheim was not universally negative about mechanical societies. He found them incredibly unselfish and altruistic. Members would make significant personal sacrifices for the good of the tribe or clan. These people were able to endure hardships that would make modern men and women shudder. While none of these characteristics saved mechanical societies from the stigma of backwardness, they could illuminate the worst features of individualism and alienation in more organic societies. Also, they acted as a reminder that social solidarity occasionally needed to be reinforced with sacred symbols and signs, even in the absence of formal religious institutions.

Organic Solidarity

Durkheim’s flexible living organism was modern French society. The biological nature of men and women may not have changed very much, but modern society altered their behaviour in positive ways. Paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht, man may be man, but only society can create the individual.

An organic society was a qualitatively different animal from the mechanical society that preceded it. Durkheim asks us to consider the nature of the contract in commercial society. A contract is much more than a market transaction; it is a document that implies a high degree of trust. The trust is not only between the signatories to the contract per se, but between the co-signers and an entire society. Society is always behind a contract, sometimes in the background, but ready to ensure that the respective individuals fulfill their duties and obligations. That is why, says Durkheim, contracts of any real significance are only possible within stable organic societies.

Modern society involves a plethora of roles and relationships that are summed up in its laws. Modern law differs significantly from the codes of a mechanical society in that its primary function is no longer to punish, but to restore situations to social equilibrium. In organic societies, civil law becomes more critical than criminal law. The civil code focuses on relationships rather than offences. Commercial law, for example, defines one set of relationships. Domestic law circumscribes another set of relationships. There are regulations for passing on one’s goods to others or to one’s children. There are rules and regulations for incorporating organizations and clubs as well as corporations. Specific rules apply to unions, professionals, government bureaucrats, churches, and the list goes on. The sole or primary function of these rules is to facilitate co-operation.

Many nineteenth-century thinkers focused on the function of laws for providing citizens with justice, and for keeping self-interest and competition from going to an extreme. But Durkheim was absolutely right in suggesting that most of the rules and bureaucracies that appear to complicate our lives do not have that as their purpose. Their purpose is not to police capitalism or to prevent injury, but to make our co-operation more uniform and consistent. As for justice, its primary role is not to police and protect, but to promote our desire for fairness and equity. Durkheim goes so far as to argue that the modern justice system is characterized by charity. One couldn’t imagine modern justice without a common concern for the feelings of others.

Whereas both eighteenth and nineteenth-century thinkers stressed the role of commerce in creating a just society, Durkheim objected to singling out commerce in such a way. For him, it was the ever increasing division of labour in society generally — in every form of life — that was key. Commerce was merely one thread in a wider weave. The division of labour in the West took place in the towns. Those same towns, however, were not merely vehicles for commerce. They were the home of government bureaucracies, writers, professionals, artists and artisans. To equate the towns with commercial activity was equivalent to ignoring most of urban life and culture.

Modern urban society was all about multifaceted roles and complex relationships that made individuals totally interdependent. Such societies were organic in that all the parts were distinct, but worked cooperatively, like the organs and limbs of a living thing.

Paradoxes and Contrasts

The difference between a mechanical and an organic society was as significant as the difference between a mammal and a single celled ameba. A mechanical society allowed little diversification between individuals. Once you knew where a person was from, you knew what he or she would be like. An organic society on the other hand was characterized by acute specialization; one person’s activities and behaviour can be very different from another’s, even if they live on the same street. A mechanical society allows almost no room for personal initiative. In an organic society, the arena for freedom is huge. A mechanical society is defined by its sacred or religious beliefs; an organic one contains a plethora of different belief systems, which have little real power.

The paradox in an organic society is that, although it promotes specialization and differentiation, it simultaneously generates uniformity. Distinctions between nations, regions, towns, villages, and cities begin to disappear with the advent of the division of labour. International co-operation increases as government bureaucracies become increasingly standardized. Peculiarities and singularities on the global scale begin to decline. Custom loses its power, as laws become codified and regularized. All of this speaks to the increasing uniformity of social organisms that thinkers like Max Weber deplored. As the globe becomes more routinized, it loses many of its most enchanting features.

E-mile Durkheim made an astonishing claim in The Division of Labour in Society. He argued that the major mistake of most nineteenth-century thinkers was to posit the solitary individual as the fundamental unit of society. Principles such as universal rights could only emerge, he argued, at a given stage in the evolution of society. If one considered the totality of human history, wrote Durkheim, it made more sense to view human behaviour as altruistic rather than self-interested. The concept of the individual was non-existent in the mechanical societies of the past. Individualism only developed because it served social needs; society did not emerge as a vehicle for individualism.

That is not all that Durkheim found wrong-headed about nineteenth-century civilization. He argued that Social Darwinism, or the emphasis upon competition in the marketplace, was as unscientific as it was gloomy. Competition and natural selection might have some relevance to the animal kingdom, but it could not explain the evolution of human societies. Neither the societies of the past nor the present were based upon a struggle for survival. They were founded, in the first place, on a powerful collective conscience and, in the second place, on the principle of co-operation. Ever increasing co-operation, the result of diversification, linked people together in a totally new kind of social solidarity. In the modern world, people were not competitors but collaborators who depended on one another.

Durkheim cited the case of the new industrial town of Middlesex, England. Middlesex was a microcosm of modern life. This English town depended on all kinds of other centres, as well as a robust countryside, for its survival. Without continual cooperation, Middlesex could not survive for more than a few weeks. Whereas the world we have lost tended to be highly self-sufficient, the modern world was characterized by specialization and differentiation, which made each part more closely dependent on the others. If the parts did not perform their respective functions, the entire social system — which Durkheim viewed as an organism — would fall apart. The very fact that it did not do so attests to the ability of human beings, not to compete, but to attach themselves to one another.

Durkheim’s organic and functional community was peopled by individuals filling the slots generated by the division of labour and fitting together in a beautiful and evolving system that resembled a harmonious and living entity rather than a machine. So fascinated was Durkheim by the sophistication of modern social life that he tended to overlook the ways that one group, i.e. the capitalists, imposed their will on others. So taken was he by the organic integrity of modern Western civilization that he never seemed to notice or mention the increasing antagonism between economic classes. Thus, it is fair to criticize Durkheim for justifying a system that relegated many to roles that were not much better than a machine. It is not fair, however, to dismiss his insights and contributions to modern social thought on those same grounds.

The Genesis of Individualism

Perhaps Durkheim’s optimistic evolutionary perspective was partly responsible for preventing him from appreciating some of the most dysfunctional relationships in modern society. More likely, however, he was struck by the ways that modern life increased individual freedom. There was no doubt in Durkheim’s mind that the nineteenth-century was the era of individualism. The individual was much freer than he or she had been in recorded history. Free to explore cultural and religious beliefs; free to form attachments to like-minded friends or romantic lovers; free to define his or her own unique personality; free, especially, from a mechanical community that proscribed individualistic behavior and prescribed exacting individual norms and social codes. There were no codes that could adequately circumscribe the rich diversity of lifestyles in the modern world.

The grandeur of the division of labour had changed all aspects of the relationship between community and the individual. It rendered mechanical social codes inflexible, obsolete and irrelevant. In their place, it substituted only one icon — the individual self. Individuals were encouraged to adopt the new self-reflective framework in the absence of communal codes. They could now begin to question authority, to explore alternatives, and to develop their personalities.

It is important to note that this was not simply the re-discovery of some individual self that had been suppressed by countless mechanical, authoritarian and despotic regimes. This was not natural individualism asserting itself. Individualism was created because it met the functional needs of an evolving social organism. The increasing division of labour emphasized difference and diversity; self-determinism was imperative to the health of the social organism. This is Durkheim at his most brilliant, counter intuitively asserting that society invented the individual. The self did not exist, he suggested, before society needed it. Society made the individual; the individual did not create society.

Durkheim labeled political individualism, in either its Lockean or Hobbesian forms, as a historical fabrication. Only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was it credible to construct a philosophy of the individual. Prior to that time, most people were unaware of this thing called the individual. Only a sophisticated division of labour allowed people to conceptualize themselves in this way. In other words, selfish egoism did not lead to the division of labour (AKA Adam Smith) but the social division of labour led to selfishness. Selfishness, or more accurately self-centredness, gave the individual a new capacity for uniqueness and allowed him/her to devote energy to a specialized role or function.

The history of the rise of the individual, therefore, was synonymous with the division of labour. Although the relationship between the individual and society had only recently become visible, Durkheim suggested that it had actually been evolving over a long period of time. Every society that increased specialization contributed to the development of the individual self. This meant that the more organized and sophisticated the tribe or the nation, the more it contributed to individualism. Ironically, this meant that those chiefs, despots and monarchs, who were targeted as the enemies to individualistic freedom, were in many cases the most essential allies of individualism. In fact, the first real individual was the chief of the tribe. The chief was the only one not totally subjugated to the collective consciousness. As leader, the chief had greater independence of action than his subjects did. Later on, the monarch increased the capacity for independence by adding the power to effect significant political and social change. While the chief of the Zulu was more restricted by the moral and religious code of his people than was the enlightened despot of the eighteenth-century, both contributed to the rise of individualism.

It is a whig (liberal and progressive) myth, argued Durkheim, that individualism was a political battle between subject and oppressor. Without authority, the division of labour would have been impossible. Without the example of the leader, the individual self and its capacity for independent action would have been inconceivable. It was only when the division of labour reached a much higher stage that the political leader became an obstacle to the further development of the self. It was only when the division of labour required maximum flexibility that the individual actor came into conflict with the collective consciousness. After that point, uniformity of thought and behaviour began to recede.

There remained one arena, however, where the common consciousness was not only maintained but also strengthened. Ironically, it was strengthened by that very ethic that appeared to negate its being. The new collective consciousness, the modern religion or common code, was the worship of self. It was no coincidence that the cult of the individual, the striving for self-discovery, and the homage to liberty, developed during the nineteenth century. Individual rights, creativity, and choice were the new social religion preached by politicians, artists, and opinion leaders. Make no mistake about what is going on here. Individualism is not essentially revolutionary; it is definitely not socially rebellious. Properly understood, individualism is an article of communal faith. As such, it became enshrined in the constitutions of modern nations such as America. You know the drill: all men (and women) are created equal; everyone has a right to pursue life, liberty and happiness in their own unique way; the only absolute rule is that we must avoid physically harming one another.

Individualism and Community Revisited

Durkheim was at his most insightful when describing individualism as the new social religion. He demonstrated that the ethic of individualism was part of the social construction of reality. At the same time, Durkheim recognized that the new relationship between society and the individual was characterized by tension. While individualism and the division of labour met essential social goals, it also eroded the sense of collectivity. While individualism replaced the common consciousness with an exciting new focus on self-development, it could not obscure the fact that selfishness could become dangerous to both the individual and the collectivity.

The harm that selfishness could do to the individual was most evident in the rising incidence of egoistic suicide in modern life. As individuals became more self-reflective, they sometimes explored the notion that their life was theirs to terminate. Modern thinking men and women could be very serious fellows, inclined to search for definitive answers that simply were not there. The modern alienated intellectual, for example, is a creature who pushes creative tension dangerously close to melancholy and despair. These negative feelings rarely exist in small-scale societies where most values are imposed from outside, rather than developed inside, the individual. Ideas from the inside can be deadly.

While modern society is infinitely more varied and fee than the world we have lost, it’s a mistake to equate freedom with happiness. Freedom is characterized by a constant sense of instability that erodes simple pleasures and makes us more nervous about our futures. If modern man is more sensitive to the pleasures around him or her, he/she is also more open to pain. A native warrior can experience all sorts of hardships that we today would find unsupportable. Durkheim cited the example of the nervous systems of animals, which, as they became more complex, were much more sensitive to negative stimuli. Modern men and women suffer in ways that our more primitive ancestors did not. In addition, our individualism contributes to our suffering. We constantly strive to achieve the fullest development of our unique selves, which means increased competition with others. Competition is a modern article of economic faith. While it makes a few more successful, it rarely makes anyone more happy.

Durkheim was optimistic, but he was not naïve. He never argued that freedom led to happiness. A society of potentially unhappy people can be a real problem. You don’t find native tribes committing suicide in the way that we modern people do. Ramming this point home, Durkheim labeled central Europe a suicidogenic zone. The despair was most prevalent in the most advanced geographic regions — the urban environment. Suicide increased in direct proportion to the division of labour. And, since suicide measured unhappiness, this means that the overall happiness of society was decreasing.

The rationale for progress is to increase the overall quality of life or sum total of social happiness. Why should society go to the trouble of changing, diversifying and specializing if the net result is that people will become more miserable and disconnected? Durkheim suggested that happiness was usually overrated and consistently preferred sophistication to mindless and mediocre contentment. But even this booster of modernity had to admit that modern society could become dysfunctional if individualism went too far. He advocated a greater investment into new forms of social organization that could combat increasing misery. In particular, he suggested a new and more complex role for professional and voluntary societies.

The problem, as Durkheim saw it, was that modern society had experienced too sharp and traumatic a shift from mechanical to organic solidarity, without building up new kinds of social groupings to support a more individualistic society. Moreover, the pathological emphasis on utility, competition and individualism had resulted in far greater estrangement and confusion than was necessary. What was necessary was the development of new kinds of linkages between emancipated individuals and modern society. Professional organizations and corporate communities provided the glue that was missing from the social bond. Individuals might no longer be able to relate to their increasingly abstract society, but they could join intermediary groups to which they had a clear identification. As professional societies developed, they would create a sense of belonging, tradition and security for the specialized individual. There was no reason why professional organizations could not construct their own customs and rituals to provide meaning in the lives of their members.

Outside the workplace, individuals could come together in another new way — the club or voluntary society. The nineteenth-century American experience was particularly instructive. The United States was the most individualistic nation that the world had ever seen; but it was also a society of joiners. More people belonged to more different kinds of mini-societies — including congregations, clubs, and hobby groups — than any other national community. Durkheim believed that people were naturally collaborative rather than competitive or individualistic. In the absence of a strong collective consciousness, they would always tend to form mini-societies. Like-minded people would collaborate and fashion their own communal culture. The different groups could function as links in the social chain. The human capacity for joining would ensure both the health of the individual and the health of the collective.

On Suicide

At least until people became totally comfortable in their individual skins, unhappiness was a characteristic of modern life. The more you think deeply about this thing called the self, the unhappier you’re likely to be. That’s why dumb people are usually happier than smart people are.

Despite any ethnocentric and chauvinistic flaws (Durkheim believed that women were less likely to commit suicide than men were because they were typically traditional, obedient and intuitive creatures, for example.), there is no question that Suicide was and is a sociological masterpiece of the first degree. Durkheim argued that the most personal, most selfish, practice that any person could ever engage in was a combination social facts rather than an individual act. He observed three main facts about suicide in defense of this counter intuitive position. First, suicide occurred much more often in some societies than others. Second, suicide occurred in some periods more than in others. Third, suicide was on the increase in virtually all modern societies. From these initial social facts, Durkheim proceeded to deduce other social facts to explain these changes in suicide rates. But, ultimately, he wanted to get to the big question: what can these variables tell us about the nature of our modern social relationships?

This is a BIG question, and one that Durkheim needed to proceed cautiously in attempting to provide a watertight answer. As a German living in a Protestant country right next door to Catholic France, Durkheim had a living laboratory for attitudinal comparisons. He noted that the rates of suicide were significantly higher in Protestant countries, even when these countries were at roughly the same level of modernization. Even within the country itself, suicide was usually much lower in Catholic than Protestant areas.

Durkheim’s analysis is the sociological imagination at its best. He begins by pointing out that there is nothing in the religious tenets of either religion that explains why one group commits more suicides than others do. Both groups disapprove of suicide as an act of despair, which demonstrates estrangement from God. If particular beliefs are not the issue, says Durkheim, then perhaps we should look at the nature of these religious communities for clues to different suicide rates. This intuition is reinforced by the insight that Jews do not commit suicide as often as Protestants either, despite the fact that there is little written against suicide in the ancient Hebrew texts.

How do Jewish and Catholic communities differ from their Protestant counterparts? The term protestant means one who “protests” or “questions” received wisdom and established authorities. A Protestant is a person who refuses to accept some rules and regulations for the governance of a religious society. They choose to rely on their own reason or analysis. The early Protestants turned to the Bible as their sacred guide and trusted to their own interpretations rather than those of others. That is precisely why the first Protestants disagreed with one another almost as much as they did with the Catholic Church. It is also the reason for the proliferation of Protestant sects right up to the present.

Egoistic Suicide

The Protestant worldview is distinctly individualistic and egoistic. A Protestant trusts more to the self than to established institutions for religious meaning. He or she relies more on his/her own reason than the accumulated teachings and traditions of the Church. In evangelical terms, a Protestant is illuminated by his/her own light.

Why is a Protestant more inclined to commit suicide than a Catholic or a Jew? The later is much more secure and accepting within a community that tells him what to do and provides him with a detailed rationale for action. The Protestant is not as well integrated and is far more prone to question all and any actions, including the extreme act of suicide. The suicide of a Protestant, Durkheim suggests, is egoistic suicide that results from the lack of cohesion in his/her community. Whenever the bonds of community and authority are weakened, egoistic suicides will result.

Consider the same issue from a longer historical viewpoint. The medieval world of the Roman Catholic possessed extremely strong communal bonds. The Protestant communities that began to develop in the fifteenth-century lacked the imperative of community (which is not to suggest that there were no genuine Protestant communities). The Reformation forced individuals to rely on themselves, and whenever people rely on themselves, some of them will commit suicide. Suicide is merely one option that an individual, who is used to following his/her own light, can take. The more egoistic the society, the more suicides are bound to occur. It doesn’t matter how particular religious communities regard the morality or immorality of the suicide act. What is at issue here is a much wider range of individual choice in a situation where the sense of group solidarity is fragile.

So what is Durkheim saying? He’s not suggesting that we knock on the doors of a Roman Catholic Church or Jewish temple and ask for admission. Durkheim was simultaneously a Protestant and an individualist. Durkheim was merely advancing a sociological proposition. Men and women will always be more prone to commit suicide when the organic bonds of society are weakened. Once weakened, however, we cannot hope to restore community artificially. When society changes so dramatically, it is necessary to create new and more relevant communities for modern egoistic men and women.

Already, Durkheim has unpacked the nature of modern society by looking at religious difference and history. But Durkheim also wanted to discuss the nature of suicide more generally. In order to do so, he made use of a new kind of information that was only beginning to be available in modern Europe — statistics. The problem with statistical information, however, is that it needs to be linked to ration-deductive argument. Many contemporary thinkers suggested that suicides decrease when life is easier and increases when life is difficult. Too simplistic, says Durkheim. If poverty and hard times were the primary culprits, we should expect suicides to occur most frequently among the poor in impoverished countries. The reverse is usually the case.

Anomic Suicide

Suicide is a social rather than an economic phenomenon, says Durkheim. The key to understanding suicide is understanding society. All societies are governed by normative rules, although these can vary in terms of codification, flexibility and adaptability over time. Social norms usually come into question when there is a crisis of a particular kind. Crises such as war tend to decrease suicide by reinforcing social cohesion and a sense of community. The kind of crises that Durkheim is looking for are the ones that weaken the bonds of community. If communal norms become seriously challenged, internal and external controls over acts like suicide cannot play their appointed role. Unless new norms are developed to replace the old ones, both the individual and the society may be in jeopardy.

What Durkheim was describing was the state of anomie or normlessness, a concept that he defined. Anomie is a state in which the individual or the group does not know what their appropriate role is. Anomie clearly describes the predicament of native communities that are colonized, but not fully integrated, into more powerful and sophisticated modern societies. North America’s native communities experience considerable confusion or normlessness that can, and often do, result in suicide. Thus, despite the fact that many of Canada’s natives are nominally Roman Catholics — a religion that stigmatizes suicides — they demonstrate an inordinate propensity to commit suicide.

Anomic suicide can be categorized somewhat differently. Human needs are potentially unlimited and never satisfied. Without some check on our appetites human beings will make themselves totally miserable in the search. One of the primary functions of society, argues Durkheim, is to reign in those appetites by condemning behaviour that goes beyond reasonable norms. The example that Durkheim liked to use was the sexual appetite that becomes pathological when unbounded. The social norms of marriage and the proscription against adultery help people to settle into more acceptable, and satisfying, roles.

By controlling our physical and intellectual appetites, society limits the incidence of normlessness or anomie. Anomic suicides occur when these limitations are missing. That is precisely why the number of suicides can rise during boom times as well as depressions. Norms are weakened just as much during a boom as a depression. Individuals can run amuck and lose their equilibrium during good times as bad. In both cases, a sense of purposefulness is missing.

Altruistic Suicide

Suicide is less common in close knit communities that are successful in imposing their values upon members. Tribal societies do not easily tolerate abnormal behaviour, says Durkheim. The appropriate question here is: why do suicides exist in such primitive and mechanical societies at all? The reason is that the community tacitly, and sometimes openly, sanctions certain kinds of suicides.

Altruistic suicides occur when individuals: sacrifice themselves to tribal gods; seek death in battle; or kill themselves when they become a drain on scarce community resources. Such suicides are totally different from modern egoistic suicides. They reflect a huge identification with group norms and no balancing affirmation of the life of the individual. The Iroquois tribes, for example, practiced their death songs from youth, so that they could taunt their tribal enemies even while being tortured to death.

Durkheim could only find one comparable group in modern society — the military — who conformed to the altruistic type of social organization. Couched in academic language, Durkheim believed that military men are essentially primitive and mechanical in their social organization that they have virtually no individual identity. They don’t question orders; they show no capacity for independent thought; and they are always ready to provide their military commanders with freshly filled body bags.

All of these forms of suicide are inherently altruistic. They involve thinking about others or the group more than oneself. Durkheim has precious little interest in these kinds of primitive communities.

Conclusion

Durkheim constructed an ingenious argument in defense of the modern world, despite all of its anomie and alienation. If one agrees with Durkheim, it is no longer possible to artificially reconstruct the high degree of social cohesion of the societies of the past. A society characterized by a specialized division of labour was a new kind of organism. Its members achieved a high degree of uniqueness and flexibility within an intricate and interdependent structure. Egoism and the preoccupation with the self were the characteristics of modern life. There was no chance of turning back the clock.

If the new world held advantages over the world we have lost, particularly in the way it stimulated human creativity and civilization, it remained vulnerable to certain pathologies. The relentless search for the self, and the pursuit of limitless desires, could leave many frustrated and morose. A society with too many sad or morbid individuals is unhealthy.

Durkheim suggested that humanity would successfully adapt to this transformation over time, just as long as social engineers like the utilitarians were not allowed drum their ethic of individuality and efficiency into people’s limited brains. And people would do this, not because they were told to, but because human beings naturally like and want to collaborate with one another. Modern individuals were not entirely egoistic; they were by nature social beings. Altruism rather than egoism, collaboration rather than competition, were the historically defining characteristics of human beings. If encouraged to develop naturally, they would begin to re-combine in new and positive ways. They would link to friends and lovers; form clubs; and participate in professional societies. Then they would regain that sense of belonging and security that was the best defense against the sometimes frightening freedom the new world offered them. No longer alienated or normless, these modern men and women would have the energy and creativity to develop even more sophisticated societies in which they felt at home. These might not be the kind of societies that some thinkers clamoured for, characterized by shared beliefs and submerged identities. But they would be communities in which individuals bonded with like-minded others.

In addition to classical economics and utilitarianism, the main villain in Durkheim’s analysis was the nation state. Durkheim believed that nationalism was essentially a backward looking political philosophy. The division of labour would eventually make nations obsolete and the increasing spread of inter dependency between nations would result in a more international community. Durkheim believed that the global community would establish peace and common values in ways that competitive nations could not. It is interesting to note, therefore, that international co-operation has become an axiom of the European community as historical nations begin to collaborate, much to the chagrin of people like Margaret Thatcher, who got kicked out of British government for her anachronistic nationalism.

Globalization, while it might contribute to peace and stability, will never appeal to those who seek to submerge selfishness within the collective consciousness. But society and community will not become blips on the radar map either. Churches are being reinvigorated as communities rather than dogmatic institutions. Environmentalism is attracting new adherents daily. Many of my colleagues identify more with specialized academic societies than with their university colleagues. My ex wife subscribes to actuarial and accounting magazines that contain jokes that could only be funny to C.A.s. I talk to people on the Internet who share my interest in underground groups that hardly anyone ever heard of. We all have friends for our different moods, roles, and hobbies.

Certainly, we have put some distance between ourselves and our nineteenth-century counterparts, who found the transition to modernity difficult. Whether or not we have made the kind of progress that Durkheim anticipated is a question that I’ll leave for you to decide. Perhaps there is a certain level of egoistic suicide and alienation that is the price of living in a modern society. There is considerable room for debate over all aspects of Durkheim’s intellectual legacy. However, his most astonishing revelation and lasting legacy is a brilliantly conceived insistence that individualism and competition, crudely construed, can never be the foundation of any human society — even a capitalistic one.