ABSTRACT
A number of comments can be made about the kind of debate that has ensued over the Rules since 1894. Evidently a large number of different kinds of arguments have taken place. One thing, however, stands out above everything else: that apart from those who were in direct contact with Durkheim and his team around the Année, there has been only one basic judgment about its merit: the book is, as a statement of principles, highly defective. It has been thought illusory, even a complete delusion, as well as politically dangerous. It is widely believed that Durkheim himself treated the whole exercise more as a conceit, or a territorial claim, while his actual method was something completely at odds with his ‘official’ method. Many of the commentaries have sought to examine the work in the context of Durkheim’s own development. The significance of the Rules thus varies from the status of an early but marginal synthesis, after which the real break occurred in 1898 (Parsons, Lukes), or as a precursor of a break which occurred in 1895 (Lacroix), or indeed the Rules makes the break with the very first chapter of the work itself in 1894 (Alexander). Others have taken strong exception to this kind of analysis and we should note Giddens’s dissention: ‘the conventional interpretation… is that Durkheim moved from the relatively ‘materialistic’ position which he is presumed to have held in the Division towards a standpoint much closer to ‘idealism’…this is misleading if not wholly fallacious’ (Giddens, 1971:105).
