ABSTRACT
In his La Méthode Sociologique de Durkheim Lacombe attempted a detailed assessment of Durkheim’s project, and the essay has been extremely influential. His conclusions were that Durkheim had made a radical and ambitious ‘synthesis’ of significant philosophical currents with the empirical social sciences, so that the true originality of Durkheim lay in the ideal of sociology as a single science encompassing all the social disciplines, with the primary emphasis on experimental and positive research aimed at producing sociological laws through the constant interrogation of facts (Lacombe, 1926:13-4). The main problem was that this project was in danger; it needed to be defended against the specialists and the philosophers. There were some elements in Durkheim’s own formulations which might lead to the project being rejected for entirely spurious reasons. Particularly weak was Durkheim’s conceptualisation of the conscience collective, which was in some respects a purely arbitrary hypothesis, open to the charge of sociological anthropomorphism (1926:38). Linked to this was a seriously ambiguous conceptualisation of social facts themselves defined in terms of ‘constraint’ which was used in at least three different ways: the term should be rejected (1926:42-8). It was still possible, however, to find a completely acceptable definition even within the Rules themselves: a social fact is any way of acting which has an existence in society independent of its individual manifestations. Usage of this concept in Suicide confirms this possibility. It maintains, against Tarde and the positivist tradition of Comte and Spencer, the idea of causation specifically linked to social species, and it is this which is essential to Durkheim’s sociology, and is its radical element (1926:52).
