ABSTRACT

It has been the object of this work to show that Durkheim’s attempt to create a scientific sociology could not but be a failure. Durkheim’s sociology is as impossible as the epistemology on which it is founded, and, far from being a science, it is a mechanism for the rationalisation of phenomena given to it by political and social ideologies. Our analysis has been largely confined to The Rules of Sociological Method, the text in which this project of creating a scientific sociology is most developed and most clearly articulated. This concentration on one text may appear to have its defects. It may be objected that, even though the Rules is a failure, the Durkheimian project is fulfilled elsewhere, that the problems and contradictions of the Rules are overcome in Durkheim’s substantive works or in other of his methodological writings. There are good reasons why this should not be the case. In the introduction the intellectual space in which Durkheim’s project is confined was specified: for Durkheim to escape the parameters of the subjectivism/positivism couple, to constitute an object which is not pre-given by ideology, he would have had to shatter the boundaries of sociology as we know it. What works are possible candidates for this status? Clearly, there are none. Sociologists will not be satisfied with this; it is an answer predicated on the impossibility of a scientific sociology. But if the sociologist does believe that there is a Durkheimian sociology distinct from the Rules, a sociology which avoids its worst failings, we will try to show him otherwise. We will attempt briefly to argue the unity of Durkheim’s sociology, to argue that the Rules is its logical expression.