The social world as will and idea: Schopenhauer's influence upon Durkheim's thought

The starting-point for this analysis is a remark made by André Lalande. that Durkheim was so enamoured with Schopenhauer's philosophy that his students nicknamed him ‘Schopen’. The intellectual context shared by Schopenhauer and Durkheim is explored, especially with regard to the opposition between the id-like ‘will’ and the mind. Schopenhauer's influence upon Durkheim's contemporaries is examined briefly. Then, this new context for apprehending Durkheim's thought is applied to selected problems in Durkheimian scholarship, problems that have to do with the dualism of human nature, perception, the unconscious and the unity of knowledge relative to the object-subject debate. The implications for sociological theory are also discussed.     

Sociology as an Art Form: One Facet of the Conservative Sociology of Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet’s ideas on sociology as an art form are examined in the light of Nisbet’s intellectual biography as we as in the tradition of other writers who have approached sociology and history as an art. Nisbet conceived sociology as an art of landscape and portraiture, in which neither theory nor methods should be allowed to become ‘idols of the profession.’ His thought on sociology as an art is best understood as part of a long-term effort to re-center sociology in a conservative intellectual tradition.     

From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics

By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role.     

Between Darwin and kant: Veblen's theory of causality

The aim of this article is to investigate and define the sources of Veblen's theory of causality. In his perspective, evolutionary explanatory patterns of observed phenomena are based on a causal nexus defined as ‘unteleological and opaque’. Because of the denial of any teleological explanation, Veblen's concept of ‘progress’ appears to be Darwinian, rather than Spencerian, even though there is no doubt on the relevance of Spencer's work in Veblen's intellectual biography. But Veblen's theoretical system seems to have a Kantian matrix too, as already suggested by Vianello (1961), Edgell (2001) and Viano (2003). And we shall try to show the interaction between Darwinian evolutionism and Kant's conception of finalism in Veblen's theory of causality.     

Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of religion: A central and peripheral concern

Although some of Bourdieu’s most basic concepts have their roots in the sociology of religion, religion itself has, in appearance, only a marginalized status within his work. This article focuses on the genesis of religious field and how the theories of Durkheim, Mauss, and Weber fold into the notion of field defined by Bourdieu. Religious field must be understood within the symbolic economy as well; divisions of symbolic labor are therefore discussed in relation to segmented and non-segmented societies. Finally, Bourdieu’s analysis of institutions, in particular the Catholic Church, further help us understand the use and evolution of religious field in his work and shed light on the sociologist’s understanding of the movement from religious beliefs toward aesthetic ones.     

ÉMILE DURKHEIM'S DIVISION OF LABOR AND THE SHADOW OF HERBERT SPENCER

This article assesses Durkheim's theory of the division of labor in advanced societies relative to Spencer's views on the subject. It seeks to correct a key chapter in the history of sociological thought, for it is in his classic 1893 work that Durkheim is presumed to have routed both Spencer's account of the division of labor and his larger theory of man and society. In fact, Spencer and Durkheim differ very little in their conceptions of the causes of an expanding division of labor (both identify population growth and concentration, and its impact, through heightened competition—group and individual—on specialization of function). They do differ, however, in their treatment of its effects, but Durkheim's explanation is not necessarily—as is commonly assumed in textbook narratives—an improvement of Spencer's. Indeed, many of the questions involved (e.g., whether and to what extent exchange presupposes or creates norms, or divided labor produces cohesion beyond that resulting from mutual need, or the division of labor itself is a moral or economic phenomenon) remain moot. Spencer and Durkheim championed explanations that derived from larger and generally competing perspectives, namely, the moral communalist and the "exchangist" (as Durkheim dubbed his opponent's position). One cannot actually banish the other, for each is a perennially serviceable intellectual outlook.     

A Certain Gesture: Reflections on the Murder of Sivaram

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a generation of young Tamils in Sri Lanka joined one or other of the militant separatist groups that sprang up in opposition to the Sinhala-dominated government of Sri Lanka. This paper examines the life of one member of this generation, the journalist and intellectual, Sivaram Dharmaratnam, who was abducted and murdered in Colombo in 2005. Sivaram's death provoked a flood of reflections from his peers and these are used to ask questions about the relationship between personal biography, intellectual trajectory and political commitment in a post-colony in long-term crisis. The subsequent appearance of a biography of Sivaram, written by his friend the anthropologist Mark Whitaker, provides an opportunity for further reflection on ethnography, friendship and the limits of biography.     

‘Loyal resistance’: N.P. van Wyk Louw (1906–1970) and the intellectual

The article analyses the seminal role played by the poet N.P. van Wyk Louw in defining the intellectual in Afrikaans public discourse. It shows that Van Wyk Louw’s defence of key concepts such as ‘liberal nationalism’ and ‘the open discussion’ in the 1950s was a movement away from his earlier views on Afrikaner nationalism, in which he focused on non‐rational forces. In the contested terrain of debates on Afrikaner nationalism Van Wyk Louw emphasised the need for the intellectual to ground his interventions in the tradition of European political thought, which demanded a respect for justice and an attempt at reconciling nationalism with liberalism. The article finally comments on the relevance of Van Wyk Louw’s contribution to current debates on public intellectual life in South Africa.     

George Herbert Mead and the “Division Of Labor”: Macrosociological Implications Of Mead'S Social Psychology*

By presenting some results of an extensive reconstruction of George Herbert Mead's work published as yet only in German it is argued that Mead's work as a whole and particularly his social psychology contain an implicit conception of social order. This can be characterized as the idea that it is not normative integration as such, but communicative coordination that makes possible human society and social order. This is shown by findings on the early development of Mead's ideas (Hegelianism, Definition of the Psychical), on German influences in Mead, and on the meaning of democracy as self-government in Mead's political biography. Some hints to a comparison of Mead with other concepts of social order (Durkheim; negotiated order approach) are given.     

The Engaged Academic: Academic Intellectuals and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement

This paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. It identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. In general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci. More specifically, it considers that role in relation to one political ‘field’ and one type of movement: a field which we refer to, following the work of Peter Sedgwick, as ‘psychopolitics’, and a movement which, since the mid- to late-1980s, has been known as the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement—psychiatric patients and their allies who campaign for the democratisation of the mental health system. In particular, through a comparison of two texts, Nick Crossley's Contesting Psychiatry and Kathryn Church's Forbidden Narratives, the paper contrasts different depths of engagement between academic intellectuals and the social movements which they research.     

Review essay: on Mamdani’s mode of thought

This essay tracks the formation of a global intellectual, perhaps the only one, whose work moves across Africa, America and Asia. Mahmood Mamdani has been a central figure engaging in explaining the most controversial issues such as refugees, popular versus state nationalism, mass killings (Rowanda), settler versus native, colonial citizenship and its governed subject, September 11, the Dafur movement (and its self-indulgence), Imperial Human Rights, decolonizing university and knowledge production (the US as the first and never decololinzed), settler colonialism, etc. Fearless and thoroughly grounded, Mamdani’s mode of thought is to historicize the conditions of the existence of the problematics in question with a theorization emerging out of the analyses. As a whole, Mamdani’s political practices as educator and public intellectual and the body of brilliant work have been inspirational. The essay is written as an introduction to Decolonizing the World: A Mahmood Mamdani Reader, a collection of his selected work, to open the channel of interaction between Asia and Africa.     

Reconceptualizing the Study of Community Life:

Emile Durkheim may be best known as a structuralist and an empiricist of a distinctively quantitative sort, but a comparatively neglected set of lectures on pragmatism presented by Durkheim just prior to his death suggests that this characterization is only partially justified. Interestingly, whereas Durkheim is critical of pragmatism in some very consequential respects, he not only uses pragmatism to indicate the major shortcomings of rationalist and empiricist approaches to the study of human group life but he also builds on pragmatism as an instructive resource in developing his own thoughts on human knowing and acting. These lectures may help scholars appreciate some of the more enduring tensions in Durkheim’s scholarship, but they also reveal some of the inadequacies of contemporary “sociological theory” with respect to both depictions of the scholarship of Emile Durkheim and the more fundamental study of human knowing and acting.     

Durkheim and the Homo Duplex: Anthropocentrism in Sociology

Previous analyses of anthropocentrism in sociological theory primarily attribute the origins of anthropocentrism in sociology to George Herbert Mead. This study addresses anthropocentrism in the influential works of David Émile Durkheim. At the core of Durkheim’s theory is his concept of the homo duplex, an inherent but tentative quality separating humans from all other animals. Durkheim uses the homo duplex as an ontological device, defining humanity as having the unique capacity to create and participate in the social. This collective process permits humans to transcend the profane, or what he observes as the immoral, passionate, animalistic individualism of nonhuman animals, into social solidarity: a realm generating morality and, ultimately, the sacred. This key distinction serves as the basis of all Durkheimian theory. This profound anthropocentrism becomes significant considering the degree of Durkheim’s influence on the field of sociology and the extent of anthropocentrism in sociology as a whole.     

Shildrick’s monster: exploring a new approach to difference/disability through collective biography

Working with memories generated in a collective biography workshop on difference/disability and drawing in particular on Shildrick’s analysis of monstrosity, this article analyses the ambivalent processes through which difference is othered and abjected. The article argues that through the process of abjection we disown for ourselves whatever qualities are being categorised as monstrous, with negative effects not just on the other, but also on the self. We look at the ambivalence of ‘reclaiming the monster’. This article opens up an alternative of expanding the possibilities of being by focusing not on difference as categorical otherness, but rather difference as movement, as differenciation, or becoming.     

Theorizing the social: Émile Durkheim's theory of force and energy

This paper offers a new interpretation of Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) as the basis for reconsidering the Tarde–Durkheim debate of 1903 and the distinctions between a theory of social force and a theory of social assemblage. Resisting traditional interpretations of Durkheim's scientism, this essay traces how concepts of force and energy are centrally developed in Elementary Forms to draw new lines between epistemology to ontology for twentieth-century theory. I argue that Durkheim develops an ‘energetic epistemology’ that conceives of the human capacity for shared meaning as a product of invested energy in the form of continually enacted and evolving material practice, thought, and attention. According to Durkheim, when a member of a collective perceives a god or feels belief, he or she actually perceives the accumulated energy of on-going creation and maintenance of objects and ideas by members of a collective. Sacred objects, images, and ideas bear the trace of collective energy the more they are carefully crafted, maintained in spaces that are specially arranged, and written into behavioural codes. This reading of Durkheim allows us to consider him in a lineage of social constructivists and, particularly, in relation to Ludwik Fleck, who has been largely confined to different theoretical discussions when his contributions to sociology have been acknowledged at all. By reconsidering Durkheim, we have occasion to rethink his sociology and understand how he redrew the lines between thought and action, between epistemology and ontology, through the material framework of energy and force.     

On the Necessity of Re-engaging the Classical Greek and Latin Literatures: Lessons from Emile Durkheim’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Evolution of Educational Thought</Emphasis>

Although much overlooked by both sociologists and educators, Emile Durkheim’s The Evolution of Educational Thought (EET; lectures from 1904–1905) not only provides extended insight into the developmental flows and disjunctures of Western education and scholarship from the classical Greek era to Durkheim’s own time but also indicates the fundamentally sociological nature of these transformations. As well, and in contrast to the more heavily structuralist, Cartesian rationalist approach that Durkheim adopts in his earlier, better known works (especially The Division of Labor in Society, Rules of the Sociological Method, and Suicide), Durkheim’s EET may be better characterized as a historically informed, sociological pragmatist approach to the study of education as a humanly engaged process. Given the extended amount of material covered in EET and the necessity of establishing in some detail Durkheim’s position on the development of educational thought over the preceding 2000 years, it has been necessary to divide this material into smaller packages for the purpose of presentation. In the first six chapters of EET Durkheim addresses (a) the Greek and Latin foundations of educational thought in France, (b) the role that the early Christian church assumed in shaping and preserving education and scholarship, and (c) the nature and emphasis of the Carolingian Renaissance (8^th and 9^th centuries), along with its relevance for the development of universities in Europe. Following (1) an introduction to Durkheim’s EET, (2) a synopsis of the first six chapters of EET, and (3) a highly compacted overview of the remaining 21 chapters of this volume, this paper concludes with (4) a commentary on the necessity of attending to the historical development of Western social thought for a sociological analysis of knowing and acting. An epilogue briefly considers (5) some ways that sociologists, classicists, and other students of the human condition may contribute to this exceptionally consequential venture     

Everyday incivility: towards a benchmark

Commonplace incivility is a topic of longstanding interest within social theory, perhaps best exemplified by Goffman's studies of the interaction order. Nevertheless we know very little about its distribution and expression in everyday life. Current empirical work is dominated by criminological agendas. These tend to focus on more serious and illegal activities rather than minor deviant acts that are simply inconsiderate or rude. The paper reports findings from a focus group study conducted in Melbourne, Australia that set out to benchmark everyday incivilities. The results suggest that perpetrators of incivility have a surprisingly broad social distribution as does the range of locales that might be characterised as ‘high risk’. Turning to the work of Putnam and Wolfe, we call for a research focus on low‐level incivilities as key symptoms of the state of civic virtue and the strength of moral ties within civil society. Drawing on Virilio, Bauman and Durkheim, it is suggested that the experience of incivility is underpinned by the growth of freedom and movement in contemporary urban settings, and has ambivalent implications that not only invoke boundary maintenance and retreatism, but also offer the possibility for boundary expansion and tolerance of difference.     

Sorokin as Lifelong Russian Intellectual: The Enactment of an Historically Rooted Sensibility

Prior to his 1922 emigration to Europe and thence to the United States, Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin had an exceptional intellectual and political career in Russia and the Soviet Union (Sorokin 1924, 1963a; Johnston 1995; Krotov 2005). Indeed, he was among the early founders of the science of sociology in his native land, where, according to a relatively recent bibliography (Sorokin 2000), he produced 162 Russian-language publications between the ages of 21 and 33. This listing includes not only book reviews and journal articles, but also substantial monographs and a two-volume theoretical treatise. While still a relatively young man, Sorokin had thus gained widespread recognition as a scholar of the first rank. He was also the initial chairperson (from 1919 to 1922) of a fledgling department of sociology at the University of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), an elected member of the national Constituent Assembly and an appointed staff member of the 1917 Provisional Government, the first democratic regime in Russia. This much would have sufficed for an entry in a sociological encyclopedia, and Sorokin’s political career has few parallels in the history of the field, other than the involvement of Emile Durkheim in French educational policy and the participation of Max Weber in creating the Weimar Republic in Germany. Nevertheless sociologists in the United States and most western historians of the field have not yet appreciated the full influence of the formative period, especially from 1905 to 1922. Lacking familiarity with Russian culture of that era and knowing little about the larger Russian socio-historical milieu, its intellectual discourse and collective memory, they have not been able to comprehend Sorokin’s outlook, behavior and professional output in the United States in relation to these earlier contextual factors. This is arguably a fundamental reason why many U.S. sociologists have tended to see Sorokin, especially since 1937, as a marginal figure and to regard his works largely as deviations from accepted social scientific practice. This paper will argue that a more adequate appreciation of Sorokin’s background and early adult life illumines both stylistic features of his works in America and also places into proper perspective several of his substantive foci that did not accord with contemporary “normal science” (Kuhn 1962). In short, despite his overall assimilation into American society and higher education, including his appointment at Harvard University and his election as president of the American Sociological Association, Sorokin should be understood in large measure as a life-long Russian intellectual. His was a Russian-born sensibility and consciousness—indeed a “Russian soul”—so deeply ingrained that it stamped his entire professional career in the United States, including his published researches, his popular sociology and his university teaching.     

Durkheim,Schopenhauer and the Relationship Between Goals and Means: Reversing the Assumptions in the Parsonian Theory of Rational Action*

Scholars have approached Durkheim's thought primarily from the starting point that he was a positivist. Although Schopenhauer's philosophy is not generally invoked in Durkheim's work, it appears that Schopenhauer's philosophy supplanted Comte's positivism at the turn of the century and that Durkheim was enamored with Schopenhauer's philosophy. In this essay Schopenhauer's influence upon Durkheim is traced, and the implications of this influence are discussed in terms of their effect upon sociology. By applying this starting point to Durkheim's thought and the Parsonian-Mertonian goals-means schema, it is demonstrated that Durkheim, like Schopenhauer, assumed the opposite of the Enlightenment belief that human reason could dominate passion. Implications for interpreting Durkheim's work are also discussed.     

Ambivalent Interactionist: Anselm Strauss and the “schools” of Chicago sociology

This article takes up the discussion recently stimulated through the volume, A Second Chicago School? That book’s connecting postwar Chicago sociology with the “Chicago approach” of mainly the 1910s to 1930s is extended, going back as far as the turn of the twentieth century and also forward to the 1990s, with a view endorsing Simmelian interactionism as opposed to Spencerian utilitarianism. Albion Small, first Chairman of the Chicago Department, introduced a Simmelian sociology to the U.S., and the question arises to what extent this legacy is being realized until today. Using Anselm Strauss as a case in point, the article has two main parts. Part One recapitulates various attempts at understanding the phases and realms of Chicago sociology. The focus is not only on the various “Chicago Schools” that may be separated, but also the differences in the work of three scholars who often are grouped together under the label of Chicago, namely Herbert Blumer, Robert Park, and Everett Hughes. Part Two recollects Strauss’s intellectual biography, as life of a scholar determined to make a contribution to modern sociology, in the name of “Chicago interactionism.” Strauss’s work, however, came to endorse Spencerian-type utilitarianism more than Simmelian-type interactionism from the middle 1960s onwards—thereby joining in with anti-structural functionalism tendencies in American sociology.