ABSTRACT
Even though Simmel did not fully realize his concept of sociation, I have argued that the three a prioris when understood in terms of causal powers theory constitute the answer to Giddens’s Call. In this strict sense, sociation is the perfect standpoint from which to examine Durkheim’s naturalistic theory of social life. While Simmel’s return to Kant is certainly muddled, it was, one must say from my discussion in Chapter 5, certainly rich and, we’ve seen, potentially promising: of course, in spite of Simmel and not because of him. In the case of Durkheim, his return to Kant is never muddled, to be sure. After all, Durkheim’s signature has always been that of a magnificent clarity, and his return is in keeping with that renowned marker of his work. Nevertheless, I now want to show in systematic detail that at the center of his social theory is the return to Kant in order to confront the question for his work, that of freedom in its relationship both to the possibility of naturalism in sociology and to the possibility of morality in modern social life. The directness of his confrontation of Kantian freedom and the intimate detail of his thinking it through has convinced me that it is certainly an impressive window into the making of the social fact. But that very clarity reveals, in my judgment, his distortion of Kant’s theory of freedom under the auspices of the ultimate thesis. The price paid for the social fact was reification: it is intrinsic to the naturalistic project he forged, and in that machinery of making sociology a science the understanding of Kant’s theory of freedom under the terms of his scientific realism was completely lost. Is this last judgment extravagant? It is, but only with respect to traditional Durkheimian scholarship. In what is to follow, I think not. We will see that one of the premier Durkheimian scholars, Edward A. Tiryakian, finally came to the conclusion that Saint Simone and Kant were the two major influences in Durkheim’s sociological work; in the case of Kant, however, once again it is the traditional view that he upheld, that is that morality was the crucial category of influence. That of freedom is never mentioned (Tiryakian 1978: 237-86). In fact, I have yet to read a discussion of Durkheimian theory before or after the 1970s, in which, given Tiryakian’s unique conclusion, the
major Kantian category of importance for the theory of the social fact is freedom (Alpert 1961; Stark 1963: 236-43, 247-49; Nisbet 1974; Bierstedt 1966; LaCapra 1972; Lukes 1970; Pope 1976; Ceri 1993: 139-68; Joas 1993: 229-45; Lehmann 1993: 15-116; Levine 1995: 87-92, 152-80; Turner 1999: 87-110; Jones 1999; Schilling 2001: 40-56).
