ABSTRACT
Methodologically, there were two principal influences on sociology: the idea of productive or ‘efficient’ causation itself (and the idea that each effect must be thought to have a single cause) derived from the physical sciences, and the theme of reproductive or ‘functional’ causation (derived from the biological or life sciences). The principles of evolutionary biology were to form the scaffolding of the new social science and were not to intervene as substantive ideas in social analysis. The major difference between Marx and Durkheim here was that whereas Marx saw the social scientist as playing the role of ‘midwife’ to the new order in the chain of social evolution, Durkheim rejected the idea that the ‘next stage’ was implied in the previous one and was even predictable (Durkheim, 1982:140). This gave Durkheim’s sociology its apparently conservative complexion: the role of the social scientist was to know how what exists can be brought to a higher
state of well-being. Against the view that knowledge should simply attempt to approach the natural perfection in which everything exists, and against the view (actually closely associated with the former) that considerations of fact and value should be kept completely separate, Durkheim postulated what he considered a far more complex idea, common in the life sciences-the idea of health and pathology: the objective of the sociologist was to determine as far as possible the healthy norm, the practice of the sociologist was not to act as midwife (it can be seen that his position implies a basic critique of this metaphor, since the midwife is engaged in a process not of the production of a new species, but in the reproduction of the old) but as general physician to society, to restore it to its normal state in times of illness. Durkheim expressed this theoretically in the curious phrase as by ‘comparing the normal type with itself…we shall be able to find if it is not entirely in agreement with itself’ (1984:34).
