Jeffrey C . Alexander the Anxiety of Being Misunderstood Rethinking Durkheim ' s Intellectual Development

In this paper I offer a new interpretation of the development of Durkheim’s thought. Rather than linear progress, Durkheim’s scientific career presented a distinctive circularity. Although always interested in a ’structural’ theory, from the beginning of his work Durkheim sought a structural theory which would decisively differ from the materialist emphasis on coercion. In the first part of his career, however, Durkheim was unable to conceptualise such subjective structure in a satisfactory way. As a result, in his early writings between 1885 and 1893, Durkheim’s theorising was incredibly unstable. Starting from an idealism he moved eventually to a materialism. The Division of Labour (1893) contains within itself all these unstable solutions, and even by the time of its publication Durkheim indicated an intense dissatisfaction with the result. Over the next three years he rewrote his theory in a fundamentally subjectivist way. Although throughout this period theoretical issues per se were uppermost in Durkheim’s mind, so was the critical reception of his work. I examine the social and intellectual context of Durkheim’s France, particularly a series of little known reviews of his first works, to establish this critical milieu, and I demonstrate how sensitive Durkheim was to these criticisms in this decisive period of theoretical change. Readings of great theorists are geared to the times. Just as Marx has recently been decisively reinterpreted, so has Durkheim. On one thing most of Durkheim’s readers, past and present, have always agreed: he, like Marx, emphasises social structure. Durkheim helped to create classical sociology because he located social forces outside of the individual actor. But at this point the serious theoretical problems only really begin. The problem for Durkheim, as for Marx, is what does structure mean? Of what are these limits composed? If structure exists, somehow, outside of the individual, can it act only in opposition to freedom? The problematics of Durkheim interpretation, then, are precisely the ones around which Marxist inquiry has also revolved. The fundamental question has always been how Durkheim stipulates the relation between determinism and free action. People keep reading Durkheim, and arguing about him, to find out whether the determinateness of social structures must involve the sacrifice of voluntary control and, conversely, whether the postulate of individual control can be purchased only at the price of denying the realities of external force. How generations have understood Durkheim has fundamentally shaped the pattern of their sociological discourse. The debates over Durkheim’s work are, inevitably, arguments about the most basic directions of sociological thought. at Yale University Library on May 26, 2010 http://iss.sagepub.com Downloaded from 92 Yet Durkheim has become the resource for such theorising in fundamentally different ways and at fundamentally different levels of analysis. Theorists have argued for and against the ’Durkheimian solution’ in ways that, ironically, have eliminated properly theoretical analysis altogether. Merton (1967 : 59-60) and Stinchcombe (1968 : 25) insist that Durkheim’s greatness lies in the power of his empirical generalisations, an insistence which would remove from our consideration of Durkheim the power of his theoretical reflection as such. The mirror image of this argument is that, far from being observational and scientific, Durkheim’s work must be viewed as the immediate product of his social environment. For Zeitlin (1968 : 235) and Kagan (1938 : 243), if Durkheim’s conception of social structure leads in one direction or another it is for ideological reasons, not for merely empirical ones. The present essay insists, to the contrary, that Durkheim’s understanding of the critical relation between individual and society cannot be reduced to either of these anti-theoretical extremes. It involves, rather, reference to sui generis analytical issues that are neither simply ideological nor completely empirical, issues that revolve around the ’problem of order’ in a strictly delineated sense. This analytical problem of order has been seriously misunderstood in the recent history of sociological debate. In the first place, it has been falsely conflated with theoretical issues of a much more specific kind. For Coser (1960), Nizan (1932 : 191-192), Rex (1961 : 105-108) and Kagan (1938),’order’ means simply assumptions about the empirical frequency of conflict or equilibrium, and on these grounds they find Durkheim’s insistence on a modicum of social stability to be seriously deficient. In Kagan’s words, Durkheim ’is the anti-revolutionary par excellence in the sense he is profoundly attached to tradition’ (1938 : 243). Yet those who defend Durkheim frequently make the same theoretical mistake. Nisbet (1965 : 28) claims that Durkheim’s acceptance of social harmony and obedience constitutes ’a massive attack on the philosophical foundations of liberalism’, and for this attack he applauds and embraces him. Following the same narrow definition of the order problem, but rejecting Nisbet’s reading of where Durkheim stood in relation to it, Giddens (1972 : 41) claims that because of Durkheim’s concern with change and historicity ’it can perfectly well be said that it the problem of order was not a problem for Durkheim at all’ (cf. Giddens 1972a : 358-361). Much of this confusion, of course, can be traced back to Parsons’ influential interpretation in The Structure of Social Action (1937 : 313, 346-347),, for while Parsons sharply differentiated the concern with empirical stability from any necessary ideological orientation, he often linked Durkheim’s analytical solution to the order problem which Parsons himself did so much to illuminate with Durkheim’s perception of empirical equilibrium. at Yale University Library on May 26, 2010 http://iss.sagepub.com Downloaded from 93 In terms of the present essay, the ’problem of order’ involves two distinctive theoretical issues, each of which concerns the fundamental nature of social relationships. First, the order problem involves a decision about the random versus structured quality of human events, about whether the sources of individual aggression are individualistic, or collective and supra-individual. This question, which involves the sociological reformulation of the nominalism-realism debate, must be cross-cut by a second one: by assumptions about the nature of human action. Whether or not individuals act simply in an instrumentally efficient and purely calculating way or whether every act involves reference to a nonrational and ideal standard vitally affects the nature of the individual or collective order that a theorist describes. It is as a result of such decisions about the nature of action that individualistic order is portrayed as an ’exchange’ (e.g. Homans 1961) or as ’symbolic interaction’ (e.g. Blumer 1969) and that collective orders are described as external and coercive (e.g. Marx 1962 (1847)) or internal and voluntaristic (e.g. Parsons 1937).’ i It is the contention of the present essay that the conflict between Marxism and Durkheimian sociology revolves precisely around this latter issue. Various theorists, of course, have contended that this conflict does not exist, that Durkheim, like Marx, is a ’structuralist’ who emphasises social organisation and external control. But the notion of ’structure’, as I insisted above, is where sociological theory begins, not where it ends. The most critical issues in theoretical logic are lost if Durkheim’s and Marx’s common collectivism is taken to exhaust their theoretical relationship. While Marx and Durkheim agreed that social science must focus on supra-individual social structure, they disagreed profoundly about the nature of action upon which such structures are based. This profound disagreement with the Marxist understanding of order was, at least, the position at which Durkheim arrived by the time of his fully mature theoretical work. What has not been understood is that on the way to this latter position, Durkheim seriously considered a variety of theoretical alternatives. Indeed, in the process of his early theoretical development he came, in his own view, precariously close to the position of Marx himself. It is on the nature of this early development, and on the rationales for Durkheim’s changes in theoretical position, that this essay will focus. In so reconstructing the dialectic between Durkheim and the shadow of Marx, the following argument seeks to illuminate not just the central dilemmas of classical sociology, but those of contemporary thought as well. It will refer to some of the most basic controversies in contemporary studies of science and knowledge production in a more general sense. at Yale University Library on May 26, 2010 http://iss.sagepub.com Downloaded from 94 Durkheim’s Early Writings: Ideological Consistency and Theoretical Change Durkheim came to maturity in the late 1870s and 1880s, in the crucible of the formation of the Third Republic in France. From the very beginning of his identification as a sociologist which Mauss dates from 1881 he linked his intellectucal vocation to certain normative or ideological goals: first, French society must be changed so that it could become stable; second, this stability could be achieved only if there were justice, particularly justice in economic distribution; third, the increased state organisation necessary to create justice should never occur at the expense of individual freedom. Durkheim described these goals as socialism, but he insisted, to use contemporary terms, that this be socialism with a voluntaristic or human face. This ideological approach to order remained constant throughout the course of his life. The problem, for Durkheim, was the translation of these goals into a theoretical and empirical perspective. It is precisely here that the changes in Durkheim’s sociology