How I crossed the Rubicon of social theory:
PAUSE FOR THOUGHT: A new translation of a book by a French sociologist
reminds Michael Prowse of his sudden conversion from economic liberalism
Financial Times; Apr 7, 2001 By MICHAEL PROWSE
Oxford University Press's decision to publish a new translation of a late work by Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist, in its popular World's Classics series may not seem headline-catching news. But it matters, nonetheless.
Publishers play a crucial role in shaping public conceptions of arguments and ideas that count. In Britain and the US, intelligent readers may well have read a few classic works by a philosopher, economist or historian, who are well represented in most popular series of "great thinkers". But these readers are less likely to have read the great sociologists or even to know there are any. In the Anglo-Saxon world, people who ought to know better tend to sneer at sociology as ideologically suspect and lacking rigour.
OUP's decision to publish Durkheim as a popular classic, to be followed by Max Weber, an equally illustrious German social theorist, is just possibly a sign of more enlightened times.
*
The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
translated by Carol Cosman (OUP,
2001, Pounds 8.99).
More books by and about Durkheim
My own conversion to sociology was as sudden as St Paul's was to Christianity. In the summer of 1997, I was writing a panegyric on economic liberalism. I regarded the arguments in favour of free markets and individual liberty as pretty near irrefutable, and I confidently expected to finish my book and resume my journalistic career within a few months.
But a rare moment of candour was my undoing. I reflected that I had not listened sufficiently to the "other side". For years I had spent my spare time frenetically reading works that simply reinforced my preconceptions: for instance, the classic British empiricist and utilitarian philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, and their 20th century epigones such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick.
So I decided to fill the lacuna (a mere technicality since I already knew the "right answers") by reading a few sociologists. Where better to begin than with Durkheim, a noted exponent of "holistic", and hence, I thought, nonsensical social theories.
For me, reading Durkheim was like crossing the Rubicon. He opened my eyes to arguments that I had not previously considered, prompted me to read a host of new authors and entirely ruined the book I was trying to write. I had only to read a few pages of Durkheim to realise my previous hostility to sociology had been blind prejudice. I had made the classic mistake of denigrating something of which I had been entirely ignorant.
Durkheim, I discovered, fitted none of the stereotypes of the discipline's detractors: he was not woolly-headed and he didn't hide behind obscure generalities. He was as compellingly lucid as any empiricist philosopher.
To my astonishment I found he was taking apart the arguments that I was trying to make in my book. How was this possible, given Durkheim was writing towards the end of the 19th century? The answer is easy: the economic liberal arguments so popular today (even among Labour politicians) - and which underlie the global spread of markets - are mostly recycled.
One of Durkheim's first targets was Herbert Spencer, then a towering intellectual figure. Spencer was one of the great Victorian exponents of free market individualism and evolutionary theory. See how little changes? There is virtually nothing in Hayek or the other contemporary exponents of economic liberalism that was not eloquently expressed by Spencer more than a century ago.
Like Hayek, Spencer believed market exchange and individual liberty are synonymous. And like Hayek, he saw progress as involving the substitution of markets for all other forms of social organisation.
Durkheim brought two weapons into play in his struggle with Spencer - a struggle that helped destroy Spencer's reputation as a serious thinker. The first was a more nuanced understanding of the nature of social phenomena than anyone in the market tradition had possessed. He had a vivid sense of the social as a sui generis order of things - an order that has to be just as carefully investigated as the realm of physical nature.
He thus stood at the extreme opposite pole to the late Sir Keith Joseph, the Thatcherite minister who thought he could get rid of social phenomena simply by outlawing the word. Durkheim's great books are dedicated to the proposition that society transcends the individual: that our beliefs, values, dispositions and desires are often products of social forces and structures we poorly understand.
If you doubt this, consider just one trivial example: fashion. Think of the way you come to regard styles as dated. Doesn't this just "happen" in a way beyond your control? Aren't you just swept along by social forces you do not understand?
Durkheim's other great weapon was his moral urgency: his infectious conviction that social co-operation is ultimately not about creating things (the obsession of all capitalists) but about creating better people, or at least the conditions in which we might learn to be better.
Descended from a long line of rabbis, Durkheim was what might today be called a "communitarian liberal". He staunchly defended the rights and dignity of the individual. He bravely criticised socialism at a time when it was gathering strength in Europe. But he avoided a mistake common in Jewish intellectuals: that of taking the strong bonds of their own community for granted and then prescribing a cold community-free atomism for everyone else.