Revision:Durkheim and the Division of Labour in Society

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Published in 1893, as Durkheim's first major theoretical work. Taken on board and given historical significance partly as a way for the Third Republic to deal with reconstruction after the war of attrition with Germany. Previous theories advocating rampant individualism and acting as ideological buttresses to capitalism (Spencer, Darwin) were deemed insufficient.

Division of Labour in Society deals with three problems:

• Sociological - Demonstrating the existence of society as an entity in itself (sui generis, explicable through its own laws and not just the sum of its parts.
• Moral - How to reconcile individual freedom and social order
• Political - How to foster forms of social organisation that would maximise individual freedom yet at the same time produce social solidarity

These are the questions that Durkheim is concerned with. As such, there is break between what Durkheim finds problematic and what his intellectual fore-fathers (Comte, Spencer, Darwin) were concerned with.

These are not the only questions however. Durkheim is concerned with asking such questions as "Why does the individual, while becoming more autonomous, depend more upon society?" The answer to this question, he asserts, is "a transformation of social solidarity due to the steadily growing development of the division of labour."

The Division of Labour

Although the concept of the division of labour was first suggested by Aristotle, it had failed to advance much since Adam Smith. As a result of the progress of biology, some theoreticians had drawn a parallel between the increasing specialisation in an economy and increasing specialisations in organisms (as a sign of development). Durkheim took from this the notion that the division of labour was part of a much wider evolutionary process.

Durkheim wanted to avoid a moral judgement, and, like a good positivist, wanted to get down to the "empirical" facts of the matter.

This involved three methodological strategies:

• Determine the function of the division of labour in society
• Determine the causes and conditions of the division of labour
• Catalogue the pathological forms of the division of labour

Durkheim gave a primacy to the empirical and the social over the individual and the biological. Morals were indispensable for a society, but thought that they should be studied in a frame of reference that was more concrete rather than abstract.

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