ABSTRACT
I have attempted to show that Durkheim’s classic essay the Rules is a more serious work than is generally recognised, is not based on simplistic principles, and, far from constituting a methodological summa was, for the Durkheimians, a treasure house of ideas and methodological suggestions. Sociologists have in general failed to meet the challenge of this work and have treated it, not as a brilliantly inventive work of popularisation, but as pseudo-scientific dogmatism. If sociologists have found it full of inconsistencies, and hold that it was never applied even by Durkheim in his sociological investigations (somewhat misleading, as we have seen) their denunciations have a persistence and variety that suggest they have never really seemed to have got to the bottom of its mysteries, for they have been recommenced at regular intervals. This is almost certainly because, despite being written clearly and vigorously, it is part of a sociological and philosophical tradition of great sophistication and considerable achievement. Even those who have criticised Durkheim’s theory as seriously flawed have had to admit, ‘whatever its shortcomings, Durkheimian dogma has proved a remarkably productive and progressive research programme.’ (Lukes, in his introduction to the Rules (Durkheim, 1982:18).)
I have shown how the commentators have refused to follow Durkheim’s way of linking methodological elements in a complex strategic path through the thickets of fixed polarised oppositions that dogged philosophical and social research, and that his work has been seen as either paradoxical, or eclectic. And, because insufficient care has been taken to consider the framework of his development, spurious efforts which tried to identify vast changes of theory have been common. In order to avoid these mistakes it has been necessary to reconstruct the unifying threads of this work, and in so doing it has become clear that this unity is fundamentally connected to the ultimate aim and motivating force of the enterprise, the continuation of the radical Enlightenment enterprise which had ‘miscarried’ in the Revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1871, through failures to understand the true complexity of social transformations. But today there are possibilities for the emergence of a new and more adequate assessment of Durkheim’s project, and here a new assessment of the Rules will play a key part.
