Durkheim as a Methodologist: Part I: Realism, Teleology and Action

Phil. SOC. Sci. 13 (1983) 425-50

Durkheim as a Methodologist*? Part I-Realism, Teleology, and Action

STEPHEN P. TURNER, University of South Florida, St. Perersbrtrg

Despite the voluminous Durkheim literature, there exists no adequate analysis of Durkhiem’s own philosophical account of the logic of explanations. The text in which it is most fully articulated-The Rules of Sociological Method-is given only a few pages by Lukes and Nisbet.1 Moreover, what has been written about The Rules is, for the most part, squarely focused on its functionalist or quasi-functionalist passages: even though these passages are incidental to the main theme of the book, which explicates Durkheim’s view of causal analysis in sociology. In contrast, little indeed has been said about the technical probability logic of Durkheim’s discussion of causality, which as we shall see in the second part of this article, is sophisticated and, contrary to frequent claims, consistent with his practice, at least in Suicide.

An understanding of Durkheim’s account of causality presupposes an account of a number of other features of his argument, including his ‘realism’ and his discussion of teleology. In Part I of this article, I will be concerned to explicate these much written-of issues in a way that pre- pares for the discussion of causality to follow in Part 11. This preparation is much more than a simple exercise in clearing the ground, however, because Durkheim’s realism commits him to an account of the language of action-explanation which takes him out of the line of development that sees ordinary explanations of actions in terms of motives as being underwritten in a fairly direct way by causal regularities.

KINDS OF REALISM A N D THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL REALISM

If one wished to divide philosophers into the categories of those who set up their problems in pictures and those who set them up in language, * Received 9.2.81 t Acknowledgements are due Whitney Pope and Robert Strikwerda for useful comments

1 R. Nisbet, The Sociology of Emile Durkheim, New York 1974, pp. 60-72. 2 Cf. W. Pope, ‘Durkheim as a Functionalist’. The Sociological Quarterly. 16. 1975,

363-69; A. Giddens. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge 1971, pp. 89- 91; A. Giddens, Emile Durkheim. New York 1979, pp. 44-46.

on an earlier draft.

426 Stephen P. Turner

Durkheim would be a handy example of the first sort. To understand The Rules is to understand a picture of what explanatory knowledge in sociology ought to be. Durkheim begins elaborating this picture with an epistemological argument, and finishes it with an account of the logic of explanation which places causal explanation into this picture. The novelty of the argument as a whole lies in large part in the picture itself. But the picture is easily misunderstood unless we take care to see what Durkheim commits himself to by each addition to it.

Durkheim is often called a ‘social realist’, and this, as we shall see, is partly true and partly false. The first step in the picture-creating of The Rules is to cast doubt on the adequacy of all the language hitherto employed in speaking of social life, and therefore on previous theories, which in one fashion or another assume this language. If one considers Hilary Putnam’s realism, as displayed, for example, in his argument that the terms of chemistry, which have not changed substantially for many years, may be said to ‘refer’ in a way that the prior language of chemistry did not, we can immediately grasp Durkheim’s point.3 Durkheim supposes that if there are ever to be terms in sociology that refer in the same uncontroversial way as do the terms of chemistry, they will be very different from the terms we use today in speaking of social life. And this means that theorizing using our present terms is futile. Our theories using these terms will seem to a truly referential future sociology to be no less ‘verbal manipulations’ than the theories of alchemy seem to present chemistry.

Putting Durkheim and Putnam in the same boat is anachronistic, but there is a justification for it. While Durkheim is unconcerned with the realist problem of reference per se , i.e., the problem of word-world relations, he is concerned with what he takes to be the problem of speaking truly about the real structure of a part of the world we do not yet know, or do not properly know. Thus Durkheim is concerned with solving not the problem of reference but its analogue, the epistemological problem of relating scheme and content, and of knowing that the scheme corresponds to the real phenomenon. The schemes we do have, Durkheim sees, conflict with one another in ways that suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong with them and with their uses. The point of Durkheim’s discussion of the ‘ideological method‘ is to give us a picture of what is wrong.

The examples Durkheim gives of the ideological method are various. Spencerianism, Mill’s economics, and Catholic natural law all are said to involve the same error. As Durkheim describes them, they all proceed by taking an idea, a ‘scheme’, and elaborating it, following out its implications rather than dealing with reality, the ‘content’ of the 3 H. Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, Cambridge

1975. pp. 235-36,290.

Durkheim as a Methodologist: Part I 427

scheme. The language Durkheim uses here is Bacon’s. The schemes, he says, function as idofa, which cloak and obscure the realities, to which they are only imperfectly ~onnected .~ So Durkheim’s use of these arguments makes him a ‘realist’, but a realist of a particular kind, which we might dub a ‘scheme-content’ realist. There are major consequences to Durkheim’s construal of the problem of the relation of scheme to content. One set of consequences is for the problem of the reality of ‘society’, another is for the problem of the expIanation of ‘action’, as well as belief. These sets of consequences will be taken up in turn.

NORMALCY AND PATHOLOGY

Being a scheme-content realist is not the same as being a ‘social realist’ in the sense of a believer in the ‘reality of society’. Whether Durkheim is a realist in this sense is a separate question. The ‘standard view’ is that he is a realist in the second, ‘metaphysical’, sense, or that he fails to avoid ‘metaphysical’ realism.5 The issue over this second question goes back to the time of the publication of the books, His critics, such as Tarde, accused him of replacing science with ontology, and it became a com- monplace that Durkheim had revived scholasticism, i.e., the teleological realism of the classics and AquinasG Parsons took it up in The Stritcticre of Social Action and tried to avoid what he saw as the flaws in Durk- heim’s approach.’ So the question of Durkheim’s belief in the reality of ‘society’ is appropriately taken up first. The interpretive difficulties show up with some of Durkheim’s central usages. The strategy here will be to consider these problematic usages in turn, beginning with ‘normalcy’ and ‘pathology’. The general point of the discussion is this. The concept of social fact involves ‘scheme-content’ realism but not ‘social realism’. Durkheim employs usages that usually are understood to involve social realism. But he justifies these usages very carefully, and in ways which enable him to avoid social realism. The construction of his arguments has usually not been noticed, for a simple reason. The usual approach to the text has not been to see how the argument develops, but to understand the concept of social facts in the light of the ‘social realist’ sounding usages.

There are indeed a large number of other arguments and usages which seem to involve a more drastic form of realism. One usage which brings the problem to the fore is the question of ‘normalcy’ and ‘pathology’ in social Iife. These are concepts which are ordinarily glossed teleologically, but which refer to a realm that is arguably governed by ‘mechanism’. The limits to mechanism seem to be set by the concept of ‘organism’, which does not seem to be easily glossed mechanistically. 4 E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, New York 1964, p. 17. 5 E.g., T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action Vol. 1. New York 1968. p. 357. 6 S. Lukes, Emile Durkheirn: His Life and Work, New York 1973. p. 306. 7 Parsons. op. cit., p. 368.

428 Stephen P. Errner

Durkheim was fond of the analogy between the relationship of biology to chemistry and the relationship of sociology and psychology, and this analogy is at the core of the case for regarding Durkheim as a teleologist and metaphysical realist with respect to society. The issues here are not as straightforward as they might seem, however, and as readers, we should be tipped off to this by the detail and care with which Durkheim explicates the terms ‘normalcy’ and ‘pathology’ in The R d e s .

Mere appeal to the notion of normalcy and pathology is not sufficient to classify Durkheimas a teleologist and social realist. We can see this by considering the then recent history of the terms. The rise of scientific medicine in France had dealt with the Aristotelian tradition in a way that paralleled Durkheim’s problem of normalcy and pathology. As P. Q. Hirst has pointed out, the physiologist Claude Bernard argued that what Taylor calls symmetrical explanatory form prevails in science.8 Con- sequently, ‘there is no separate science of medicine or physiology, there is only a science of life. There are only phenomena of life to be explained in the pathological as well as in the physiological ~ t a t e ’ . ~ The possibility of reasoning causally about health, however, depended on restating the earlier notion of health in terms to which specific causal notions could be applied. The slogan of the medical revolution in France, ‘open up a few corpses’, expresses the means by which this was done.l0 It was discov- ered that many of the diseases that kill could be identified with states of tissue that could be described visually. The concept of ‘healthy tissue’ could be specified as tissue that was coloured or felt to the touch the way in which that particular organ’s tissue felt or looked in the corpses of persons whose death could not be causally attributed to disease of that tissue. The range of ‘healthy’ could thus be redefined empirically, and causally, by opening the corpses of recently healthy persons who had died on the Guillotine or in accidents.

Yet the concept of health that the new clinical medicine had established was in significant ways unlike the older teleological notion. There was indeed a range of events or states for which the two notions inter- sected, i.e., morbidity, but the notion of a kind of ‘pathology’ that does not produce death led to some differences, which are central to an understanding of Durkheim’s solution to the logical problems of social teleology. First, it should be recognized that states of tissue or conditions that cause or contribute to death may be called ‘unhealthy’ without departing from the paradigm of cause and effect and the criteria of deadliness. A person may be called obese, for example, by reference to a definition of obesity which is constructed by identifying those body states of obesity which can be said to cause or increase the chances of death. The ‘causal chain’ connecting obesity to death may have many

8 C. Taylor. The Erplanation of Beliarior. New York 1964, pp. 3-25. 9 Quoted in P. Q. Hirst. Diirkheim, Bernard and Epistemology, London 1975, p. 77.

10 M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, New York 1975, pp. 124-47.

Drrrkheim as a Merhodologist: Part I 429

links, of course, so that obesity is the direct cause only of some condition that produces or increases the chance of a given killing disease, which may be a direct cause of death or merely contribute to another disease. ‘Disease’, then, may be defined through ‘cause and effect’ and ‘death’ to extend over most of the things one would regard as disease under the older teleological notion of health and disease. But there may be conditions which are not causes of death, even indirectly, which would, in both ordinary usage and the traditional teleological sense of ‘health’, be classed as ‘unhealthy’. The subsequent history of the concept of ‘health‘ in scientific medicine was that it was discreetly abandoned, at least in the context of medical theory proper. Other notions, like disability, i.e., the reduction or loss of a capacity, which may be defined by ‘cause and effect’ notions together with the identification of a previous capacity, were used to fdl the gap between ordinary usage and medical theory. Another concept that had a role in this ‘gap-filling’ was ‘normal’.

Like ‘standard’, ‘normal’ (a carpentry term, as it happens, as are ‘explain’ and ‘true’) can mean either ‘usual’ and ‘typical’ or ‘correct’ or ‘true’. Durkheim argues that, for societies, ‘normal’ is equivalent to ‘healthy’, and gives two principal arguments for this equation of ‘healthy’ with ‘normal’. The first is a conceptual argument. He argues that when we speak of the normalcy of an animal, we can mean only that the animal has the characteristics most common within the species. For a veterinarian, for example, the two senses merge. ‘One cannot’, Durk- heim says, ‘without contradiction, even conceive of a species which would be incurably diseased in itself and by virtue of its fundamental constitution’.l* This suggests that ‘most common within the species’ is the fundamental sense of the term ‘normal’. The suggestion solves the problem of fitting the phenomena of nonmorbid pathology into a ‘scientific’ framework. ‘Most common within the species’ covers those phenomena, and in addition removes some paradoxes connected with the use of death as the ultimate criterion governing the concept of pathology. One such paradox involves pregnancy, which must on bal- ance increase the likelihood of death, yet can hardly be called pathological.’*

Durkheim’s second argument is that the Characteristics which form the normal type must have ‘adaptive value’. This concept may also be given a mechanistic, Darwinian interpretation. There must be a reason why these characteristics came to be quantitatively distributed in this way in the species, and this reason must be a causal explanation, which shows that causes operated to destroy other characteristics or to limit their occurrence. The greater frequency of the ‘typical’ characteristics proves their adaptive superiority. II Durkheim. Rides, p. 58. I2 Ibid., pp. 50-51.


So the distribution from which one plots statistical ‘norms’ can itself be explained causally. Indeed, Durkheim says, explaining it causally is useful in checking one’s results, for by identifying causes one can obviate a particular problem that arises when the formula equating ‘health’ and ‘normalcy’ is applied to societies. If a feature of society is found universally within a social species, it may nevertheless not be an adaptation. It may persist only as a consequence of blind force of habit. This difficulty is peculiar to sociology, Durkheim says. (It may be noticed that ‘habit’ is a quintessentially psychological concept.) If the distribution has been causally explained, either by explanations that appeal to ‘mechanically necessary effects’ of the conditions of existence or by the causes that produce the natural selection, one can ask whether the feature is an effect of current conditions or merely of conditions which no longer hold. Causal explanations are also useful in practical applications of the notion of norm, for they show what conditions must be changed in a given case to produce ‘health’.I3

However, causal explanation cannot be the starting point for deter- minations of ‘normalcy’ or ‘pathology’. The most famous form of this difficulty is found in Hobbes, who argued that causal laws, mechanistic laws, governed the social universe as they did the physical, and who also wished to reform society in accordance with that which was ‘natural’. Yet by showing that the present state of affairs arose through the agency of causal law, one shows that it arose ‘naturally’, and therefore could not be reformed to conform to ‘nature’. Similarly, if one wishes to speak of the normal, one cannot distinguish it by saying that it is a product of adaptation to the causal action of the environment, for the morbid or pathological is also a product of processes of nature and adaptation. Some independent criterion must be constructed. ‘Utility’ is such an independent criterion. But the normal cannot be distinguished by saying it is a ‘useful’ adaptation, since the fact that something is useful does not in itselfmake it n~rmal . ’~ It may be that all that is normal is useful, but this does not mean that everything that is useful is normal. The normal, in short, is a proper subset of the useful. To say something is ‘normal’, of course, does not explain it, because nothing is explained by a principle like ‘these facts tend toward the normal’: ‘norm’ after all, is defined as that toward which the members of a class tend, at least in the statistical sense. The use of the terms normal and pathological thus does not directly involve an appeal to a strong realist notion of society.

CLASSIFICATION AND SPECIES

These usages are, nevertheless, connected to another usage, ‘species’, which may well be more difficult to formulate without falling into some stronger form ofrealism. One thing must be remembered here. The facts 13 Ibid., pp. 59-62. 14 Ibid., p. 63.

Dirrklteim as a Methodologist: Part I 431

from which the terms ‘pathology’ and ‘normalcy’ derive, at least in Durkheim’s account, are facts which can all be explained causally. Durkheim goes out of his way to remind us of this. When he introduces ‘species’, he begins by saying that aclaim he has advanced in connection with the concepts of normalcy and pathology, that these concepts are relative to a given social species, implies that sociology must provide an account of species. If we treat this as the reason for providing an account of species that goes beyond the concept of social fact he has already established, we can take the usage ‘species’ to be subordinate to the problems of discussing normalcy. The context of speaking about judgments of normalcy and pathology is not explanatory. Thus whatever Durkheim says about the subject, or subordinate subjects, does not bear on his account of explanation proper, which is prior to it. Yet one could conceive of his falling into a stronger realism in specific quasi-evaluative contexts without intending to do so by inadvertently invoking an explanatory realist notion of society. So the passages on species present us with two problems: is the context non-explanatory, and does Durkheim invoke an explanatory notion of species which involves ontological commitments beyond those he has already made?

Paul Hirst, who ignores the question of the limits on the context of the discussion of classification, focusses on the crucial passages on species in The Rufes.I5 In this section Durkheim has given some methodological guidelines for classifying societies into species which amount to the admonition that the classification be inductive rather than ‘ideological’. He suggests a classification on the basis of structural simplicity and complexity based on the idea of social species segmentation. His argument is that the undifferentiated horde, i.e., one without any segmentation, is the logical limit of the concept of segmentation. Hirst, in his account of Durkheim’s view of the origin of society, argues that this is an illicit move, since the

whole discussion. . . is based upon aplay on the word ‘element’. In the beginning of the discussion he treats the social whole as a simple unity without social parts whose ‘elements’ consist of ‘things and persons’. But when he comes to discuss the different effects of the forms of association, combination and juxtaposition, he is discussing what he previously called ‘complex’ wholes, and the ‘elements’ of those wholes are not ‘things and persons’ but simpler societies.16

This is misleading. To show that the classifications he speaks of involve different kinds of ‘elements’ does not involve him in a contradiction. Societies may well be ‘made ofmen’ without this meaning that they must be classified in terms of units which refer to individual persons.

Durkheim anticipates this objection. H e clearly believes he has found a basis for the usage ‘society’, at least in this particular context, which 15 Cf. E. Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, New York 1974, pp. 26-29. 16 Hirst, op. cit., p. 168.

432 Stephen P. TIrrner

avoids the difficulties of traditional realism; but he also recognizes that his readers, like Hirst, will suspect he has put something over on them. He responds to the question which ‘the reader has perhaps put to himself as he has followed this discussion: How can we deal with social species as if there were such things without having directly established their exi~tence?’~’ We do it, he says, by reference to his method of classification which uses ‘element’. ‘We have seen’, he says, ‘that societies are only different combinations of one and the same original society’. By this he means that the type which he takes to be the logical limit of the concept of society, the undifferentiated horde, may be combined with other units in various ways.

Durkheim is impressed that the social idea which defines the member- ship of the horde persists after ‘combination’. The new ‘society’ retains this ‘element’ of the precombination situation, in the form of collectively held social or legal distinctions. The simplest case of this is found at the first step above the horde, a society made of ‘clans’ which originally were no more than juxtaposed hordes. Their combination, it may be noted, parallels the idea of the social contract: the recognition by the members of one group of the categories of the other group is a kind of symbolic change which creates a ‘union’ between two separate units. So the ‘elements’ which Durkheim chooses when he suggests segmentation as a basis of a system of classification are, in fact, defined by the collective representations of the actors in the social aggregate itself. Thus the ‘reality’ of ‘society’ so classified derives from the reality of the collective representations themselves. And these representations have already been admitted, provisionally, to the status of ‘fact’ by the definition of social fact, for they are among the things that have the constraining character that distinguishes the category of social fact, or that will distinguish this category once the principles governing their constraining influence-a notion we will take up in more detail shortly-are identified. If there are no such principles, the classification would be scientifically worthless and, of course, the ‘reality’ of the referents of the concept would be a dead issue.

So Durkheim has, carefully, added no ontological implications by his discussion of social species to what had been admitted by his discussion of social fact. He is not forced to claim that ‘society’ is ‘real’ in any sense beyond that in which the various collective representations are ‘real’. The reality of ‘society’, as he speaks of it here, is derivative from these collective representations in that one identifies ‘a society’ and its state of organization by first identifying the collective representations by which individuals define themselves and one another. There is no additional explanatory need to claim metaphysical reality for ‘society’. But it permits him to use the concept ‘society’ nevertheless. Durkheim de- 17 Ibid., p. 86.

Durklieitn as n Methodologist: Part I 433

scribes his notion of species as a middle ground between the ‘realist’ conceptions of society, which he attributes to ‘philosophers’ and the nominalist conception.1s It differs from the nominalist conception, he says, in that the notion is derived from facts which are themselves ‘real’, However, it must be recalled that social facts, including such collective representations as ‘la France’, are real or exist only insofar as they constrain individuals, a ‘reality’ which ‘Realism’ would regard as nominalistic in contradistinction to the reality it would claim for its own concepts of ‘humanity’, ‘community’ or the polis.

CAUSE AND TELEOLOGY

Durkheim’s discussion of the criteria for a scientifically adequate concept of health in social life establishes the basis for a crucial point. If either his concept of health or similar ‘inductive’ concepts are the only valid c ~ n c e p t s , ~ ~ not only the metaphysical reality conception of society but the sociological uses of teleology and the explanarory role of ‘society’ may be shown to be gratuitous. The setting he gives the argument on teleology shows his aim. His original line of attack in The Rrrles is against ‘ideological’ approaches to social life. He is conciliatory toward teleology and the teleological tradition. He never attacks it simply for being teleological. But his account of ‘health’ serves-to heap metaphor upon metaphor-to pull the teleologists’ ends out from under them. The discussion of ‘function’ is the coup de grice.

We have seen that, for Durkheim, ‘the normal’ is a proper subset of ‘the useful’, and that normal is not in itself an explanatory concept. But one might suppose that the normal facts are explanatory by virtue of being members of the class of useful facts. One might suppose that Durkheim thinks that showing the utility of some fact explains it, since he appears to rely on some such style of explanation in various sociological writings, notably The Division of Laborrr in Society.2o In The Rules, he shows that he is aware of the issue, and addresses it directly by giving a variety of arguments against this kind of ‘explanation’. He argues that the fact that something is useful cannot, in itself, explain why it is that this thing comes into being in the first place, nor can utility explain its specific nature. For example, a technological innovation like a dramati- cally more compact electric battery system would be useful. But its utility would not explain the fact that it came into being. To explain this one would show how it was created, and this explanation would appeal to efficient causes or antecedent forces. By the same token, ‘utility’ would not explain such facts as the causal necessity of a particular alloy in its construction.21 It might seem that actions could be explained by 18 Durkheim, Rules, p- 76. 19 Ibid.. p. 78. 20 E. Durkheim, Sociology and Pliilosophy. 21 Durkheim, Rides, p. 90.


their utility, and that therefore social facts that have been produced by actions resulting from individual desires and needs can be explained by appeal to some principle of utility. Durkheim argues that they cannot: a ‘tendunce’, e.g., an impulse, need, or desire, ‘is itself.. . objectively real; it can, then, neither be created nor modified by the mere fact that we judge it useful. It is a force having a nature of its own’, which must be produced or changed by other prior forces.22

Similar remarks on the theme of the necessity of causal explanation and the insufficiency of teleological explanation are found throughout the text. Durkheim questions the application of teleology to social life more generally when he points out that ‘where purpose reigns, there reigns also a more or less wide contingency’, for many different ways can be taken to amve at the same goal.= By identifying an end one does not determine which of a wide range of means must be selected. So as a mode of theorizing, it is especially weak. ‘Cause’, on the other hand, is a mode that may be refined to the ultimate in determinateness. And this fits the explanatory needs of sociology. When we look at social facts, Durkheim points out, we see evidence of an orderliness that goes far beyond the orderliness of ‘purpose’. We see astonishing regularities in such trivial matters as the nuptial practice of carrying off the betrothed, which is to be found wherever a certain family type occurs.24 These facts would remain forever inexplicable if sociology restricted itself to teleology. This argument, it may benoted, was revived by LCvi-Strauss as an argument against functionalism some fgty years after the publication of The R ~ l e s . 2 ~

Durkheim’s discussions of causal explanation seem to identify it with explanation tout court. There is to be found in Durkheim no additional discussion of functional explanation as an additional type of explanation. The textual basis of the claim that he was a ‘functionalist’ is in his usages. This styIe of interpretation, which ordinarily also involves a denial of the relevance of methodological writing to the interpretation of an author’s actual usage, needs to be carefully examined. Many of his usages are indeed ‘functionalist explanations’ in the sense that later functionalists treated these usages as self-sufficient explanations. One example of this is pointed out by Michael Harnmond, who describes the Davis-Moore theory of social stratification as ‘essentially an elaboration of Durkheim’s ideas’.Z6 This use of Durkheim does not mean that Durk- heim himself thought of the usages as explanatory, or, more important, that there was any logical necessity, given the structure of his argument, 22 Ibid., p. 92; idem, Les Rigles de la Me‘thode Sociologique, Pan’s 1937, p. 92. 23 Ibid., p. 94. 24 Ibid. 25 C. Evi-Stmuss, Srrircfirrai Anthropology, New York 1%7, pp. 13-14. 26 M. Hammond, ‘Durkheim’s Reality Construction Model and the Emergence of Social

Stratification’, Sociological Review, n.s. 10, 1978,713.

Drirkheiin as a Methodologist: Port I 435

for his treating them as explanatory. We may put this problem a little differently. The difficulties in regarding Durkheim as a functionalist are well recognized. Robert Bellah, for example, notes Durkheim’s ‘re- served and cautious use of the concept of function*.27 But Bellah draws the triumphant conclusion that he saves functionalism from the standard objections. One may ask, however, whether what is saved is properly describable as functionalism at all, or whether the means of avoiding the objections to functionalism serve also to avoid the appropriate application of the label ‘functionalist*.

Part of the difficulty here results from changes in the use of key terms. In sociology the term ‘teleology* is sometimes used more narrowly to refer, in contradistinction to ‘functional’, to a putatively illegitimate type of teleological reasoning. Nisbet, for example, distinguishes between ‘functional’ and ‘teleological* reasoning by characterizing teleology as the argument ‘that all social behavior must be seen in terms of a design formed by certain ends which are antecedent to the behavior, thus making for the kind of symmetry much prized by seventeenth century realists’.28 There is some textual warrant for thinking that Durk- heim himself identifed ‘teleology’ with this argument, as when he speaks of teleology as the view that ‘society is only a system of means instituted by men to attain certain ends’.29 But this is not the only context in which he uses the term ‘teleology’. There are other examples of this kind of interpretation: Parsons turns away Durkheim’s criticisms of teleology by such remarks as ‘arepudiation of teleology in this simple sense does not force one to accept naturalistic causation as the only alternative’, and by his association of teleology with utilitariani~m;~~ likewise Bellah argues that Durkheim is a functionalist but not a teleologist. Turner and Maryanski depart from this usage by distinguishing between teleology and ‘illegitimate teleology’, which they take to be exemplified by Durkheim. They claim that he argues that ‘integrative needs cause the emergence of structures’, which is ‘illegitimate’ because ‘Durkheim did not document how, and through what specific causal processes, integrative needs cause those phenomena that meet these needs’.31

Sorting these arguments out is not a promising task. So the question that will concern us here is whether Durkheim is an explanatory teleologist in any sense in his methodological writings. To use his own words in discussing the sort of interpretation of The Division of Labour

27 R. Bellah, ‘Durkheim and History’, in R. Nisbet (ed.), Emile Durkheini, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1%5, p. 157.

28 Nisbet, The Sociology of Dirrkkeim, p- 68. 29 Durkheim, Rules, p. 97. 30 Parsons, op. cit., pp. 406,350. 31 J. Turner and A. Maryanski, Functionalism, Menlo Park 1979, p. 119.

436 Stephen P. Timer

advanced by Turner and Maryanski, the question is whether he ‘even partially reverts to teleology’. Whether, as writers like Bellah suppose, there is anything like a nonteleological ‘functionalism’ is a question yet to be conclusively answered by functionalism. If there is, Durkheim may be an example, but one suspects that everyone will turn out to be an example of functionalism thus construed.32

One note of caution should be struck before attempting to sort out Durkheim’s position. One can scarcely read too much into Durkheim’s comments on cause and teleology, for at the time Durkheim wrote, no issue so dominated French philosophy. Two of the vocal participants at Durkheim’s oral defense of the The Division oflabour, Emile Boutroux and Paul Janet, had made these issues afocus of their work: Boutroux in such works as The Contingency of the Law of Natiire and Natriral Law and Science in Philosophy, Janet in Final Caiises.= So when Durkheim constructs his account of function, he is perfectly aware of the relevant technical philosophical issues. One of the things to which this French tradition has long been sensitive is the fact that ‘causal’ arguments often conceal implicit teleological notions. Boutroux, Durkheim’s teacher, was especially associated with the argument that mechanistic causes are never adequate explanations. So when Durkheim gives causalist analyses of teleological explanations, he is playing an established game, and there is nothing inadvertent about his pursuit of it. His philosophical 32 Cf. K. Davis. ‘The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and

Social Anthropology’, American Sociological Rew’ew. 10, 1959, 757-72. 33 Cf. Lukes, op. cit.. pp. 2%-98; E. Boutroux, The Contingency of the Lnw of Natiire,

Chicago 1916; Boutroux, Natiirul Law and Science in P/iilosophy, London 1914; P. Janet, Final Caitses, Edinburgh 1878. A more recent example of this form of argument, which captures its flavour perfectly, is given by Victor Gourevitch, in a remark on a claim he quotes from Nagel: ‘Consider, for example the teleological slatement “The function of the leucocytes in human blood is to defend the body against foreign microorganisms”. Now whatever may be the evidence that warrants this statement, that evidence also confirms the nonteleological statement “Unless human blood contains a sufficient number of leucocytes, certain normal activities of the body are impaired”, and conversely’. Ernest Nagel, The Striictrrre of Science [New York lWl], p. 405. In what possible sense are such terms as ‘sufficient’. ‘normal activities’, and ‘impaired’ less teleofogical than the terms ‘function’ and ‘defend’ which they replace? Taken in and by itself alone a blood-count is a mere number. As such, it is wholly meaningless and uninformative. It yields information only when it is compared to a normal blood-count. that is to say to the blood-count of persons who are known to be healthy and whose bodies are therefore said to exhibit ‘normal activities’. The knowledge that someone is healthy precedes and is independent of our taking their blood-count as a standard. It is pre-scientific. or first for us. The only real difference between Nagel’s two statements is that the so-called nonteleological statement takes for granted what the teleological statement renders explicit. Unless to take things for granted without critical examination is scientific. the so-called nonteleological state- mentis the lessscientificone [‘Philosophy and Politics. 11’. Review OfMetaphysics, 22, 1968, 2931’.

Diirkheirn as a Methodologist: Part I 437

readers, in any event, needed no reminder that superticidly teleological or causal arguments are not necessarily teleological or causal in actuality.

The ‘contextual’ fact of the dispute between teleologism and causalism suggests that Durkheim introduces the term ‘function’ in place of ‘end’ or ‘purpose’ in order to avoid the criticism that he is really offering teleological arguments: when he introduces the term ‘function’, he defines it in causal terms, which suggests that his aim is to avoid these criticisms. He nevertheless uses on occasion such notions as ‘the general needs of the social organism’, which suggest teleology. The important textual clue to his own understanding is this: he tells us that he thinks he has produced a means of reconciling cause and teleology, at least in the context of sociology, and he even goes so far as to suggest that ‘if more profoundly analyzed, this reciprocity of cause and effect might furnish a means of reconciling scientific mechanism with the teleology which the existence, and especially the persistence, of life implies’ .34

This means that he makes a distinction between a surface sense of teleology, which may be legitimate in limited contexts, and a ‘profound analysis’ of the same phenomena, in which life is explained causally. The biological analogy and such usages as ‘the social organism* do not, understood in this way, imply a ‘profound’ or philosophical commitment to teleology. One might wonder why he bothers to retain this surface sense. The suggestion that, in the context of biology, the apparent conflict between cause and teleology is reconcilable signals that the problem of sociological method Durkheim is dealing with in this section of The Rides is preeminently aproblem ofreconciliation, aproblem with general philosophical implications. It is in the logical structure of his attempt at reconciliation that we will find Durkheim’s meaning.

The textual perplexity arises when Durkheim describes ‘functions’ as ‘effects’, i.e., causally, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, retains such usages as ‘needs of the organism’. Nowhere is this dual usage more evident than in a paragraph where he advises that problems of function and cause be separated, and that the question about cause be treated first, questions about function second: ‘This sequence, indeed, corresponds to that of experience. It is natural to seek the causes of a phenomenon before trying to determine its effects’.35 From these remarks one is entitled to conclude that a ‘function’ for Durkheim is a kind of effect. He goes on to explain what kind of effects ‘functions’ are. He has already said that ‘social phenomena do not generally exist for the useful results they produce*, so ‘function’ evidently does not mean ‘usehl effects’.% But he also says, in the next sentence, that ‘we must 34 Durkheim. Rides. p. %. 35 Ibid., p. 95. 36 Ibid.

438 Stepheit P. T imer

determine whether there is a correspondence between the fact under consideration and the general needs of the social organism’. He qualifies this remark by saying that this must be separated from the question of whether the correspondence has been intentional or not. So ‘function’ seems to mean ‘effects which are useful to the social organism irrespec- tive of whether this utility was intentional’. This usage would correspond to more recent ‘functionalism’ in sociology and anthropology. But here it becomes unclear what the explanatory significance of ‘functions’ could be for Durkheim. How can any explanatory use of function escape the devastating objections against such explanations Durkheim has advanced only a few pages before?

Durkheim makes clear that he has something else in mind. He observes that the relation of cause to effect is to some extent reciprocal. An effect cannot exist without its cause. But often the cause cannot exist without its effect, since the effect often ‘restores’ the ‘energy’ of the cause. The effects, in other words, may include some of the precondi- tions for the fact which is the cause. Durkheim gives a number of sociological examples of this. He observes that as men furnish more specialized work, the quality of the work improves, and the products of the work are of greater quality or quantity. But this increase in quality and quantity is ‘necessary to compensate for the expense which this more considerable work In this example, then, the effect is one of the conditions for the fact of specialization. But it is not simply a necessary condition of the fact. Notice that there may be other causes of specialization, such as a simple demand for quality or quantity that might derive from military or religious rather than economic ‘needs’. It is a necessary condition only for the maintenance of the fact of a high degree of specialization in society. ‘Maintenance’ is thus the crucial feature of this ‘reciprocal relation’ between cause and effect.

‘Maintenance’ could be explicated either teleologically or entirely in terms of cause and effect. Durkheim already has explicated his own apparent appeal to a teleological principle of maintenance of ‘self- preservation’ in terms of cause and effect. He generalizes this explica- tion here. He observes that it is generally necessary that a social fact be useful in order for it to maintain itself.38 But the reason for this is not that there is a true teleological principle, such as ‘all social facts are useful to the social organism’. On the contrary, some social facts, such as survivals, are simply not useful.39 So whether a fact is useful or not is contingent, not necessary. The reason most social facts are useful is that the maintenance of a social fact requires effort. If most social facts were parasitic in character, i.e., made no contribution to social life, ‘the 37 Ibid., p. %. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 91.


budget of the organism would have a defi~it’.~OThese are difficult usages to reconcile with the kind ofcausalist interpretation I am proposing here. However, they can be reconciled. One may ask what explanatory significance attaches to the remarks that it is generally necessary that a social fact be usefuI in order for it to maintain itself, and that maintenance of a social fact requires ‘effort’. A plausible construction of these remarks might be as follows. If one were, say, a follower of G. E. Moore, one might observe that in no society have there been a large number of practices or institutions which do not in some fashion con- duce to the good, and that no society can survive for long without meeting some minimal level of good. But to say this one would not need to suppose that one had explained any particular institution. These would be, one might say, empirical observations which would be easily made by anyone who had the concept of ‘the Good’ in hand. These observations would, then, be non-explanatory observations in a non- explanatory context. Durkheim, at the point in The Rules where he is making these observations is, similarly, in a non-explanatory context. He has already told us that explanations require causes, and then turned to the normative but non-explanatory problem of normalcy and pathology. Once he has established these distinctions he is in a position to make observations that most social facts are useful and that their maintenance requires effort, without having in mind any explanatory application of these observations.

‘Budgetary’ considerations cannot explain the existence of any particular social fact, since as Durkheim has already pointed out there are many ways to fulfill any purpose, of which the particular social fact is just one; and not all social facts do serve a purpose. The only way to explain a social fact is by identifying its causes. It is reasonable to think that a social fact which maintains itself over along period of time has a cause to which its own effects somehow contribute. So seeking the functions of a fact in order to see how it maintains itself amounts to seeking this reciprocal relationship between cause and effect and identifying the particular links in the causal chain that make up this reciprocal relationship. Notice that there is no necessity here apart from the causal necessary relationship between each cause and each effect. The existence of such a reciprocal relationship itself is not necessitated by anything at all. It is merely contingenr that there actually is an effect of a given fact which contributes to the maintenance of this fact. This is to suggest that Durkheim is merely offering methodological

advice of a prudential character when he suggests that one should seek ‘hnctions’ as well as causes. His intention is clear from the way the concluding sentence of the section on functions is formulated:

40 Ibid., p. 97.

440 Srepltert P. Erriter

Consequently, to explain a social fact it is not enough to show the cause on which it depends; we must also, at least in most cases, show its function in the establishment of social order.41

The reason we must seek functions in ntosr cases rather than all cases is that all social facts do not depend on a reciprocal relation in which its effects are conditions for its causes. Moreover, there is no necessity that even those facts which maintain themselves depend on such reciprocal relations. ‘Survivals’, to choose Durkheim’s own example, do not,

The meaning of ‘function’ for Durkheim, then, is not ‘effects which are useful to the social organism’. It is ‘effects which are conditions for the cause of the fact’, i.e., effects that are part of this kind of reciprocal relationship. Even Durkheim’s reference to ‘the establishment of social order’ in the concluding sentence of the section must be understood not as a reference to a teleological ‘need for social order’ in the ‘social organism’. The ‘social order’ that is explained by the tracing of causal relationships is no more or less than the maintenance of particular social facts. Naturally, the reciprocal relations of conditionality tend to be intertwined, creating a kind of ‘system of reciprocities’, and therefore, the maintenance of this ‘system’ is itself a kind of precondition for the existence of the particular social facts that compose the system. But these reciprocities are entirely causal, and the ‘system’ may be explained entirely through causal explanations. The facts that are main- tained by these causes are, from the point of view of the causes, the ‘ends’ which the causes ‘function’ to produce. Durkheim’s point in this section, then, is that teleological explanations are not necessary to account for the phenomenon of the ‘maintenance’ of social facts. He is thus not smuggling teleology back in with the concept of function, but banishing teleology more effectively by showing that the facts which the teleologists attempt to explain may be explained, and explained better, by causal explanations. It is crucial in this connection to note that Durkheim does not appeal to a ‘need for maintenance’ or to a concept of equilibrium, or to a notion of ‘functional necessity’ as the ‘functionalist’ sociologies of the fifties did. If Durkheim had intended to propound a teleological functionalism, it would have been necessary for him to identify some such fixed ‘end’ toward which society is oriented. It is not surprising that he does not. Indeed, his arguments against the existence of common human purpose would readily extend to the question’of common ‘societal’ purpose. The force of his argument is that the 41 Ibid. It should be noted that the French text does not mention ‘social order’ at all, but

speaks of ‘cerre Aarmonie’, a reference to a previously mentioned harmony between the internal and external milieu. If we take this ‘harmony’ to be a contingent, causal result-and Durkheim hasgiven usgood reasons to think that this is theonlyusefulway it can be spoken of-the sentence has no suggestion that he is a teleological ‘social order’ theorist (Les Rtgles, p. 97).

Diirkheirn as a Methodologist: Part I 441

maintenance of a particular social fact is causally explainable, as is the maintenance of a set of social facts which are related through causal reciprocities. This does not require any telos.

Durkheim’s self-consciousness about the eliminability of teleological argument shows up in The Rides. Yet in The Division of Labour, he, to use his own words, ‘explained the constant development of the division of labor by showing that it is necessary in order that man may maintain himself in the new conditions of existence as he advances in history’.42 The need of man to ‘maintain himself sounds very much like a teleological principle, indeed the very teleological principle that figures in the writings of some of his predecessors. In The Rides, Durkheim denies that this explanation even partially reverts to teleology. His reasoning is that the so-called ‘instinct of self-preservation’ does not in itself account for any facts about the division of labour. The work of the explanation is done by the appeal to various specific causal conditions plus ‘impulses’. The effect of the conditions was that the particular direction that attempts at self-preservation took were constrained. Indi- viduals pursuing unspecialized tasks found survival more difficult, so they were constrained to specialize. The individual’s alternatives to specializing were emigration, suicide, or crime. But these paths were blocked by the constraints of our ties to our country and our sympathy for our fellows. In the average case, specialization is the path of least resistance. The habits that prevent narrower specialization ‘had inevita- bly to yield to each impulse that arose’.43 Thus the teleological ‘need for self-preservation’ expresses itself through ‘impulses’ which are deter- minately caused. No principle formulating a ‘need for self-preservation’ is necessary for an explanation of these impulses. The relation is rather the reverse. The particular form in which the ‘needs’ occur must be causally explained in the first place. The phenomenon of social development that would be explained by the teleological principle of self-preservation then, may be explained in causal terms, and teleology in this particular case serves no explanatory need.

So Durkheim’s aim in The Rides is to show the gratuitousness, on the one hand, and the inferiority, on the other, of teleological explanations of social facts. And he establishes this by showing that his approach can handle the facts that the teleological approach handled best, the fact of the maintenance ofbeneficial institutions. His own ‘social realism’ is not the sort of social realism appropriate to the teleological tradition, but is more closely akin to the sort of realism that derives from word-world, scheme-content distinctions. He takes care in his discussions of such characteristically teleological notions as ‘normalcy’ and ‘pathology’ to show that they can be given a causalist, non-teleological interpretation. 42 Ibid., p. 92. 43 Ibid., p. 93.


Those teleological usages which he retains but does not give a causalist account of are confined to non-explanatory contexts.

CONSTRAINT AND ACTION

Durkheim’s causalism is itselfproblematic, and in the rest of this article I will take up some of the issues in connection with it. In the second part the concern will be with the technical logic of Durkheim’s analyses, and with his rationale for it. In this section my concern will be with the problem of action explanation.

If one considers the character of standard ‘causalist’ analyses of human action, the implications of Durkheim’s ‘scheme-content realism’ for the tradition of the philosophy of action may be readily grasped. Hobbes, for example, writes as though one could take the usual terminology of action explanation and simply translate this language into the language of ‘motions’. Mill spoke similarly about motives as causes, and supposed that the relevant language for the causal analysis of action was very close to the language of ordinary usage. With the Logical Positivists and Popper, the difficulties in this supposition became more evident. Popper’s account of ‘logic of the situation’ explanations was an attempt to explicate historical explanation, which relies largely on agents’ terminology, by showing precisely where ‘generalizations’ were req~ired.~’ Hempel’s classic paper, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, attempted to show that proper historical explanations could be analyzed to show the essential role of generalization^.^^ The difficulty that became evident was this: the laws of psychology, whatever these might be, would evidently have little to do with this terminology. So one establishes the relevance of generalization to ordinary action explanation at the expense of the close connection to a causalist psychology which Hobbes and Mill assumed.

Recently Donald Davidson has developed these themes at some length, in part against Hempel, who continues to take the view that the concept of rational action can be applied in a fairly direct way to ordinary action explanation and be given an empirical interpretation as an elabo- rated psychological theory. Davidson argues that the relevant sets of concepts-‘mentalistic’ language and the language that figures in nomic explanations-are radically different in character, so that the sort of translation or dictionary from one language to the other, such as Hobbes and his successors supposed could be constructed, cannot be constructed, and that the empirical underwriting of the concept of ration- ality is a hopeless enterprise.* 44 K. R. Popper, The Poverty ofHistoricism. New York 1964, pp. 143-52. 45 C. G. Hempel, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, in P. Gardiner (ed.),

46 D. Davidson, ‘Action, Reasons and Causes’, JoitrnalofPhilosophy ,60,1%3,68S-7~; Theories of Histov, New York 1959, pp. 344-56.

Dirrkheim as a Methodologist: Part I 443

Weberalso says something like this, and draws the conclusion that the cognitive interest of the sociologist is in explanations in concepts under- standable to present day agents, and not in the language of nomic generali~ation.~’ Durkheim takes the other road. He insists on aspiring to the language of nomic generalization, in which ‘reality’ can be grasped, and rejects ordinary language about action-represented for him by the Introspectionist psychology of James as falling short of ‘reality’. In principle, the effect of this rejection is to render ordinary action explanations sociologically irrelevant.48 In practice, Durkheim is much less draconian. He qualifies his usages of such terms as suicide by giving them a slightly different definition from ordinary usage, but treats the ordinary descriptions as de facto equivalents of the ‘scientific’ descriptions. This is done quite casually, and is never elaborately jus- tified. Justification, however, is not needed, for this reason: a concept proves its suitability to the task of forming nomic generalizations by actually figuring in a true causal generalization, not by any a priori reasoning. Durkheim’s reflections on the problem of causality involve the argument that, owing to the inapplicability of other methods, sociological generalizations should take the form of concomitant varia- tions. Since true causal generalizations of this sort are hard to come by in sociology, this is a stringent standard.

For Durkheim, the concepts that meet this standard mirror what is actually there, the real causal structure of the world. Other concepts, including those of the agents, are idola, cloaks of reality.49 If we take this imagery seriously, as Durkheim certainly does, the problem of action takes on a quite different character. All the usual terms for describing action and the social world are bracketed. Some parts of this terminology will fit through the needle’s eye of this standard; most will not. If the experience of physics is any guide, very little of our ordinary conceptual or descriptive armamentary will survive. Yet in practice the usual bias is to take the criticism of some concepts more seriously than others. A term like ‘custom’ or ‘law’, for example, is apparently analyzable in individual terms, such as ‘the commands of the sovereign’ or in psychological terms, such as ‘habituation’. But Durkheim rejects this bias. He denies that psychological terminology has any better claim to mirroring reality than terms like law or custom.50 This is Durkheim’s

idem, ‘Mental Events’, in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds.), Experience und Theory, Amherst 1970, pp. 79-101; idem, ‘Psychology as Philosophy’, in J. Glover (ed.). The Philosophy of Mind, Oxford 1976, pp. 101-10; idem, ‘Hempel on Explaining Action’, Erkenntnis, 10,1976,239-53.

47 M. Weber, The Methodology ofthe Social Sciences, tr. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch, New York 1949, p. 75.

48 Cf. S. Turner, ‘Interpretive Chanty, Durkheim and the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Science’, Philosophy of the Sociul Sciences. 11, 1981,231-43.

49 Durkheim. Rules, p. 17. 50 Ibid.. pp. 44-46.


primary innovation, for once one concedes the possibility of the causal reality of such things as custom, the realm of the psychological begins to look very different, and we get a quite different picture of action.

Put crudely, Durkheim’s alternative picture is this: such things as ‘custom’ and ‘law’ are facts, realities, with determinate causal relations, both to other facts and to individual action. But the usual descriptions of custom and law do not necessarily correspond to the ‘fact’. Causal relations are a matter of curve fitting. The relation of ‘social facts’ to ‘psychological facts’ is that the two are both types of psychological fact, i.e., they exercise constraint on action.

To explicate this picture it is easier to start with the featu,res of it that have most puzzled commentators, the notion of constraint, which figures in the definition of social fact:

A social fact is every way of acting, faed or not, capable of exercising on the indiyidiial an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general tliroicghoiit a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations .51

The temptation is to ask ‘what does “constraint” mean in this context?’ or to criticize this view of constraint by asking whether it leaves room for the willing agent. Giddens asks, ‘In what sense.. . are social facts “constraining” ’, and tries to answer the question by identifying various ordinary uses of ‘constraint’ in connection with action and seeing which of those fit Durkheim’s usage.52 This way of approaching the usage, however, presupposes that Durkheim is doing something that he denies he is doing, and ignores the whole picture of the relationship between ordinary concepts and the real structure of the world which he has been arguing for.

In speaking of the real causal structure of the world, in terms of his picture, i.e., of causal relations between social facts and between social facts and individual actions, ‘constraint’ can signify one thing: the existence of a law-governed relationship, for there is nothing in this world besides facts existing in law-governed relations. To restate this law-governed relationship in some other terms, such as the terminology of ‘individual will’, is potentially to mis-state it, for the terminology in which one wants ‘constraint’ explained is idola terminology.

Thus it is no surprise that when Giddens attempts to elaborate his criticism, he does so by using and appealing to the vocabulary that Durkheim has rejected, or bracketed. When Giddens says that ‘it has been commonly accepted, even by those generally sympathetic to Dur- kheim’s viewpoint, that his stress on the constraining nature of social 51 Ibid.. p. 13. 52 A. Giddens, ‘The “Individual” in the Writings of Emile Durkheim’, Errropean Jorrmd - of Sociology, 12, 1971, 218.


facts leaves no place for the social actor as a conscious willing agent’,53 he imposes on Durkheim apicture of action that is not his. The idea that there is a line between the psychological and the sociological which corresponds to the boundary marked by one’s phenomenological sense of what is and what is not subject to one’s will, which is presupposed by such comments as Giddens’, is specifically rejected by Durkheim, and the vocabulary of ‘will’ is among the terms Durkheim would bracket as idola. So Durkheim’s strategy is more radical, at least at the level of principle, than Giddens gives him credit

Yet Durkheim frequently uses traditional psychological language in the context of ‘causal’ questions: in Srticide, for example, he even speaks of reasons as causes.ss And he appeals to the phenomenological experience of the agent in explicating his views. The way in which he does this seems rather to invite misunderstanding. This is particularly so in the places where he attempts to show that certain distinctively ‘psychological’ facts, such as habit and inhibition are separable from yet compatible with the characteristics of ‘social fact’ which attach to the same phenomena at the same time, such as habitually performed duties.

A case in which he attempts to show the social character of putatively psychological concepts in a way that suggests the degree to which the territory of psychology is to be claimed for sociology is his analysis of crowd sentiment, a crucial issue at the time because of the influence of LeBon and Tarde. ‘Great movements of enthusiasm’ are unlike such ‘crystallized’ facts as moral regulations and financial systems, which are more obviously ‘outside’ the individual, because the ‘influence’ of the crowd is not expressed with the aid of an outward form, such as laws and regulations, but more directly. Durkheim wishes to argue that this influence nevertheless amounts to ‘collective constraint’ in spite of the 53 Ibid. 54 If Davidson were formulating this argument, he would do soon the linguistic grounds of

the relation between types of concepts. Durkheim, a child of his time in this respect, formulates it as an epistemological argument against the validity of the phenomenology of ‘will’, especially as found in the writings of introspectionist psychologists, such as James. For the introspectionist, the limits of mind are the limits of the power of htro- spection. Durkheim denies the possibility of drawing the line introspectionisticd1Y when he argues for the ‘incompetence of consciousness’ in the matter of assessing causesof action (Emile Durkheim. Sociology and Pliilosophy, New York 1974, p. 21). James argues that ‘If 1 imagine that I hate or am indifferent when in fact I am in love, I have merely misnamed a condition of which I am fully conscious’ (paraphrased by Durkheim in ibid.). Against this, Durkheim remarks that ‘If I misname acondition. it is because my consciousness of it also is false and does not express all the characteristics of this condition’ (ibid.). Durkheim’s reasoning is that the ‘condition’ still has consequences. ‘My feelings have all the constituent traits of love since they affect my conduct: but I do not recognize them, so that in a sense my passions direct me one way and the knowledge which I have of them, another’. Thus it is possible for the causal processes that go on in the mind to be inscrutable to the actor himself.

55 Emile Durkheim. Le Str ide , Paris 1930. p. 114.

446 Stephen P. TNrner

fact that the constraint is not felt or seen as aconstraint. He distinguishes between those persons who give themselves up to the enthusiasm, and therefore ‘feel’ no pressure, and those persons who oppose the social current. The experience of the person who stands against the influence of the crowd is revealing. The ‘external’ influence of the crowd cannot be kept external, but is experienced phenomenologically as inner conflict. ‘The emotions [of the crowd] that he denies will turn against him’.56 This is a revealing turn of phrase, for the picture it suggests is that the individual harbours sources of opposition to collective emotions, and these various forces fight it out for control of the individual’s actions. In such a situation, the individual mind is divided against itself, divided between the various social forces in the mind or between these forces and those which originate in himself. Yet this is not one’s phenomenological experience, one’s experience as a ‘conscious willing agent’. One who has been in the grip of crowd emotions, while in their grip, is not cognizant of their externality. After these emotions have, so to speak, ‘passed through the mind’, however, and are no longer in- fluencing our action or felt, we can recognize their externality and can even be horrified by them.

The apparent inconsistency of Durkheim’s reliance in some contexts on phenomenological experience and denial of its credibility in others shows quite clearly here: a great deal seems to be based on these presumably defective or bracketed experiences. Similarly, in describing ‘the distinctive characteristics’ of a social fact we are told that ‘the most important characteristic of a “thing” is the impossibility of its modifica- tion by a simple effort of the will’.57 Durkheim’s reasoning appears to be as follows. He does not want to place us in the position of denying the validity of all our experiences, for this would include the data of sociology as well. What he wishes to do is to show that we are in the same position in relation to our own psychology as we are with any fact of nature. Our phenomenological experience is a ladder to be kicked away once we amve at more reliable data. But the process of ascent to reliable data necessarily consists in building on one part of our experience, its most ‘objective’ part, to replace the less reliable parts of our experience.

This usage is underwritten by Durkheim’s realism. The phenomenological experiences one has of the world, according to this realist picture, are unreliable; but they are experiences, in the large, .of something. One cannot draw a line around the reliable experiences, nor can one guarantee the validity of any particular experience, including phenomenological ‘experience’ of the contents of one’s own mind. Nevertheless, one’s experiences may show, to the reflective thinker, the contours of something deeper, something ‘real’ in the sense of the sort of 56 Durkheim, Rules, p. 5. 57 Ibid., p. 28.


causal reasoning characteristic of science. To be sure, it is only when we know what the something deeper might be-know, that is, by analogy to other sciences-that we can usefully think of it as ‘something deeper’ whose contours are only indicated by the surface we ‘experience’. So one can be mistaken about, say, the limits of one’s will, but the fact that one experiences such limits suggests something, a ‘something’ which our nineteenth-century prejudices tell us can only be properly articulated in causal, scientific terms. It may be noticed that when we observe ourselves responding to the crowd we are nascent sociologists, not mere introspectors. We observe a causal regularity in the reaction of the crowd, which we ourselves instantiate, and in this way realize, as we would not realize by introspection alone, that we are in the grip of a collective force. Yet it is quite ararity that we are in the position of being able to directly observe the causal consequences of the collective current, since we are ordinarily in and a part of society. Similarly, we never feel the absence of atmospheric pressure. So there is no handy everyday experience which will give us any reliable insight into the limits of the collective current, and therefore of the location of the line between our individual consciousness and the collective consciousness.

What makes it plausible to accuse Durkheim of leaving no place for the conscious willing agent is that he wishes to push the boundaries of the collective consciousness very far indeed into the territory of what has traditionally been conceived as ‘individual consciousness’. When he describes the causal psychological sequence which leads to anomic suicide, he is careful to emphasize just how little control the individual as a rational agent has. A man who loses status ‘cannot avoid exasperation’ and ‘naturally revolts against the cause, whether real or imaginary, to which he attributes his ruin’.58 If he blames himself, he commits suicide. If he blames another person, suicide may be preceded by homicide. The ‘reversal of all his habits reduces him to a state of acute over-excitation, which necessarily tends to seek solace in acts of destruction’. In this state, the object of the passions is ‘of secondary importance’ determined by ‘the accident of circumstan~es’.~~ In short, the individual is not in control of his impulses-they are in control of him, and he ‘cannot avoid’ their taking their course. In these cases, the causally determinative source of control is the external social facts.

The relation between this control and the conscious willing agent, however, is not a matter of mutual exclusion. Like Hobbes’ deliberating person whose sense of control or deliberation is the phenomenological manifestation of competing impulses, Durkheim’s man who acts morally is one in whom the impulses arising from collective, obligation- 58 Ernile Durkheim, Suicide, New York 1951, p. 285. 59 lbid.


producing facts dominate his other impulses. The deliberations themselves are experienced as causal, but they are not.

Deliberations, in fact, so far as reflective consciousness affects them are often only purely formal, with no object but confirmation of a resolve previously formed for reasons unknown to consciousness.6o

‘Resolve’ is a characteristically psychological notion. Durkheim’s use of it in this context is meant to suggest that the outcome is causally fixed, as a result of the relative strength of the impulses, by the time the ‘deliberations’ occur. So the ‘conscious willing agent’ is there for Durkheim much as it is for Hobbes. Hobbes supposes that there is something like a lexicon which contains the correspondences between the true, causal vocabulary and the vocabulary of the ‘conscious, willing agent’, which has led his critics to accuse him of simply redescribing ordinary action in pseudo-causal terms. Durkheim does something similar. For him the relations between the two vocabularies are a matter to be settled only once the true laws are in hand-but he expects the vocabulary of morals to correspond, imperfectly, to a realm of causal social fact of its own. This realm, unlike the Hobbesian one, is ‘external’ to the individual. So, like Hobbes, Durkheim is not concerned simply with discrediting the ‘conscious willing agent’, but is concerned with discrediting the ordinary vocabulary on which the philosophical notion of the ‘conscious willing agent’ rests, and, unlike Hobbes, is concerned with replacing this vocabulary with the vocabulary appropriate to a causal account of action which contains sociological causes.

This explanation may be applied to constraint in another way. Accord- ing to a realist, causalist view of social life, sociology is concerned with causal relations-meaning in this case ‘curve-fitting’ regularities- between social facts. It is idle to ask such questions as ‘how do social facts constrain?’ as some critics have, because this question asks that the regularities be somehow ‘cashed in’ in a language alien to them. The question is akin to ‘how does gravity really pull?’ asked as though there would be an answer like ‘by a string’. The only answer to a question like ‘how do gravitational force fields “constrain”?’ is to show the inter- locutor the quantitative law relating the facts. Other answers are super- fluous, and, in the case of sociology, detrimental, for they demand that these ‘real’ relations be restated in the idola of ordinary action explanations, thus contributing to the illusions about action contained in ordinary action terminology. The circularity in Durkheim’s definition of social fact as something that constrains exists only from a non-realist perspective on these facts.

One final set of remarks on Durkheim’s ‘psychology’ is in order. Many of the same writers who wish to impose on Durkheim the question 60 Ibid., p.‘297.

Durkheini as a Methodologist: Part I 449

of the powers of the ‘conscious willing agent’ also wish to impose a teleological psychology on him. Durkheim’s explicit rejection of teleological psychologies has seemed to these interpreters to apply only to the use of these psychologies as explanations of social phenomena, It has seemed to them that he supplies, or perhaps should have supplied, a teleological account of the individual on whom the ‘collective currents’ impinge. Both Giddens and Lukes, for example, attempt to reconstrue the social aspects of the suicide problem as a matter of social conditions for mental health. ‘Mental health’ suggests a picture of the ‘individual ego’, as Parsons puts it, responding to the ‘external’ forces Durkheim has identified.61 The phrase, ‘the personality system’, is suggestive of the kind ofentity which these of Durkheim’s interpreters would prefer to find in his writings.

The careful reader of what has been said so far should be tipped off immediately by terms.like ‘system’ and ‘health’, which are teleological or quasi-teleological terms, and by the presupposition that ‘external’ means something like ‘external to the personality system’. As we have seen, Durkheim rejects this notion of ‘externality’. Moreover, we have seen that he uses ‘health’ in avery careful way in speakingof ‘pathological’ social forms, and is especially concerned that there be criteria of health that can be grounded on something other than teleological philosophy. Since it is doubtful whether the concept of mental health as it is ordinarily used and understood can be separated from those weaknesses of teleological arguments that Durkheim himself remarks on, it would be surprising if Durkheim were to throw these painfully acquired methodological scruples to the wind and suddenly begin speaking of the person in these terms.

The texts that suggest a teleological interpretation of Durkheim’s individual are, however, interpretable in causal terms. Consider as an example the use in Suicide of the notion of ‘equilibrium’. This usage is not necessarily teleological: the Hobbesian actor can be said to be in a state of equilibrium in a nonteleological sense of ‘equilibrium’ with respect to a given set of alternatives when the various impulses impinging upon action have neutralized one another. I may develop a desire on the one hand to presene my wealth, on the other to acquire a new Ferrari, such that I settle between these desires by staying at the same level of spending I have lived at in the past. Durkheim’s occasional references to the individual being in equilibrium with respect to the act of suicide may be understood in the nonteleological sense. Durkheim purposely structures his ‘collective causes’ in such a way that they themselves at the extremes of strength produce suicide. So when these ten- 61 A. Giddens. Srrtdies in Social and Political Tbeory. New York 1977, pp. 297-321;

S. Lukes. Eniile Ditrklieim: His Lge and Work, pp. 220-22; T. Parsons. The Slrtictrtre of Social Action, p. 350.


dencies-the social currents themselves-are in equilibrium, that is, are constantly and equally strong in impinging on the individual, he is in a state of equilibrium with respect to the suicidal alternatives on either extreme. Thus neither the individual’s ‘equilibrium’ nor the ‘equilibrium’ between the social forces presupposes a teleological account of equilibrium. Similar causal interpretations can be given for other putatively teleological uses.

Editor’s Note: Part 11 will appear in the next number, volume 14, number I , March 1984.

Durkheim as a Methodologist: Part I: Realism, Teleology and Action

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