ABSTRACT
After this account of Durkheim’s descriptions of his method, I now want to discuss some specific features of selected works, looking especially at their methodological particularities.
DIVISION The expositional logic of the Division hinges crucially on propositions in its first chapter, one of the most fiercely militant epistemological opening chapters of any major work of sociology. With dramatic and relentless logic Durkheim shows that the emergence of division of labour cannot be explained through appeal to human desire or need, i.e., teleologically, for these are themselves bound up with the changes which have to be accounted for, and thus have themselves to be explained. If the real object of study is moral conscience itself it is necessary to find a way of investigating it through an intermediary, an effect. This can be the complex connection of crime and punishment. From the existence of two types of sanction, which relate to two types of law, two types of social structure can be deduced. One of these is more primitive, the other resting on the division of labour develops progressively and is a derived phenomenon. In order to analyse this process it is necessary to identify the efficient causes and the functions of the division of labour. If this is done, it becomes clear that the former is not the cause of the latter, and that the functions of the latter do not cause it to come into existence. The causes must be sought elsewhere.
