The Problem Durkheim Was Answering

Emile Durkheim's doctoral thesis, De la division du travail social (1893), addressed what he took to be the central sociological question of his generation: what holds a modern society together? The question was not idle. France in the 1880s and 1890s was a society in visible motion. Industrialization, urbanization, the consolidation of the Third Republic after the defeat of 1870, the expansion of mass schooling under the Ferry laws, and the rise of secular public institutions had produced a society whose most thoughtful observers believed was losing its shared moral fabric. Conservative critics — most prominently Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre in the earlier nineteenth century, and their late-century successors — argued that the decay of traditional religion and the atomization of individuals into self-interested units must lead either to moral collapse or to revolution. The sociological question Durkheim posed was empirical and prior to that pessimism: how does cohesion actually work in a differentiated society, and does differentiation in fact corrode it?

Pre-industrial societies, as Durkheim and his contemporaries observed them, seemed to share a visible moral order. Members of a rural village, a guild, or a religious parish shared beliefs, rituals, occupations, and a sense of a common destiny. The common faith and the uniformity of custom were not merely decorative; they were, in some sense, what the society was. Modern societies appeared, by contrast, to be differentiated all the way down: occupationally, economically, morally, religiously, regionally. If social cohesion required shared belief, modernity seemed to lack the conditions for it.

This problem was not Durkheim's alone. Four rival responses were in play, and locating Durkheim against them is the simplest way to see what was distinctive about his answer.

Karl Marx's answer, developed across the 1840s through 1880s, was in effect that cohesion does not survive (Marx and Engels 1848, pp. 35-38). Capitalism produces alienation, class antagonism, and the hollowing out of pre-capitalist communal forms. What appears to be a functioning modern society is in fact a set of contradictions stabilized temporarily by ideology and state force. The coming break — revolution — would resolve the contradiction and make a genuinely cohesive post-capitalist society possible. For Marx, the question 'how does modern society cohere' had a short answer: it does not, really.

Max Weber's response, developed in the 1890s and elaborated systematically in the 1910s, emphasized the ongoing process of rationalization and what he termed the disenchantment of the world (Weber 1905, pp. 180-182; Weber 1922, pp. 24-26). Traditional forms of authority and communal meaning were being replaced by instrumental rationality, bureaucratic organization, and calculative action. Weber was less sanguine than Durkheim about whether this produced a stable moral order; his late writings carry an unmistakable melancholy about the 'iron cage' of modern rationalism.

Ferdinand Tönnies, whose Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft appeared in 1887, six years before Durkheim's thesis, provided the typological vocabulary closest to what Durkheim would adopt (Tönnies 1887, pp. 33-41). Gemeinschaft — community — named the traditional form of social life rooted in kinship, locality, and shared belief. Gesellschaft — society, or association — named the modern form rooted in contract, instrumental exchange, and impersonal law. Tönnies's framing was elegiac: Gesellschaft was what modern cohesion had become, but Tönnies regarded it as a thinner, less durable form than the Gemeinschaft it was displacing.

Durkheim's distinctive move was to refuse the elegy. His thesis was that modern differentiation produces its own characteristic form of solidarity, not a weakened version of traditional solidarity. The name he gave these two forms — mechanical and organic — and the analytical apparatus he built to distinguish them, is the subject of this topic.