Alexander T. Riley - The Social Thought of Emile Durkheim

Series Editor
A. Javier Trevio
Wheaton College, Norton, MA

Published
The Social Thought of Georg Simmel
By Horst J. Helle

The Social Thought of mile Durkheim
By Alexander Riley

The Social Thought of C. Wright Mills
By A. Javier Trevio

Forthcoming
The Social Thought of Karl Marx
By Justin P. Holt

The Social Thought of Erving Goffman
By Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sren Kristiansen

The Social Thought of Talcott Parsons
By Helmut Staubmann

Copyright 2015 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Riley, Alexander.
The social thought of mile Durkheim / Alexander Riley, Bucknell University.

pages cm.(Social thinkers series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4522-0263-1 (alk. paper)

1. Durkheim, mile, 18581917.
2. SociologyPhilosophy. I. Title.

HM479.D87R56 2013
301.01dc23 2013037525

14 15 16 17 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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T he SAGE Social Thinkers series is dedicated to making available compact, reader-friendly paperbacks that examine the thought of major figures from within and beyond sociology. The books in this series provide concise introductions to the work, life, and influences of the most prominent social thinkers. Written in an accessible and provocative prose, these books are designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of sociology, politics, economics, and social philosophy, as well as for scholars and socially curious general readers.

The first few volumes in the series are devoted to the classical thinkersKarl Marx, mile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, George Hebert Mead, Talcott Parsons, and C. Wright Millswho, through their seminal writings, laid the foundation for much of current social thought. Subsequent books will feature more contemporary scholars as well as those not yet adequately represented in the canon: Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harold Garfinkel, Norbert Elias, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu. Particular attention is paid to those aspects of the social thinkers personal background and intellectual influences that most impacted his or her approach in better understanding individuals and society.

Consistent with SAGEs distinguished track record of publishing high-quality textbooks in sociology, the carefully assembled volumes in the Social Thinkers series are authored by respected scholars committed to disseminating the disciplines rich heritage of social thought and to helping students comprehend key concepts. The information offered in these books will be invaluable for making sense of the complexities of contemporary social life and various issues that have become central concerns of the human condition: inequality, social order, social control, deviance, the social self, rationality, reflexivity, and so on.

These books in the series can be used as self-contained volumes or in conjunction with textbooks in sociological theory. Each volume concludes with a Further Readings chapter intended to facilitate additional study and research. As a collection, the Social Thinkers series will stand as a testament to the robustness of contemporary social thought. Our hope is that these books on the great social thinkers will give students a deeper understanding of modern and postmodern Western social thought and encourage them to engage in sociological dialogue.

Premised on Newtons aphorism, If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants (an aphorism, incidentally, that was introduced into sociology by Robert K. Merton, himself a towering figure in the discipline), the Social Thinkers series aims to place its readers on the shoulders of the giants of 19th- and 20th-century social thought.

M y thanks to A. Javier Trevio for the invitation to write this book, which gave me a wonderful opportunity to summarize and put into order material I have been thinking with and teaching for the past decade and a half. I am profoundly indebted to the many colleagues and friends whose writing on Durkheim has influenced me in one way or another over the years. Far too numerous to attempt to name exhaustively, the most important among these scholars include Jeffrey Alexander, Robert Bellah, Philippe Besnard, Marcel Fournier, Mike Gane, Victor Karady, Steven Lukes, William Watts Miller, W. S. F. Pickering, and Edward Tiryakian. Readers of this book who wish to deepen their knowledge of Durkheim and the contemporary application of Durkheimian thought are strongly encouraged to consult their work.

mile Durkheim is universally recognized as one of the founders of the discipline of sociology, but he may well also be the member of the central trio of the founding generation (Max Weber and Karl Marx are its other two members) whose reputation is lowest among contemporary sociologists. He is not infrequently accused of seeing society as static and unchanging, and liking things that way, and of totally rejecting problems of interpretation and meaning. It is claimed by some that he is at his core an apolitical, or perhaps even reactionary, positivist who thinks sociology is or should be a kind of approximation of a laboratory science, and that he envisions the morally healthy society as a quasi-totalitarian entity that forcibly compels the individual to its collective will. A brief consultation of American and British introductory texts reveals a depressing scenario in which this caricature is drawn and redrawn, usually with little or no consultation of original sources and a mere glance at the already existing common sense about Durkheim in the discipline. Recently, in June 2012, a sociologist-blogger writing in the