ABSTRACT
The current conjunction of rapidly changing historical events, and the creation of relatively new political and cultural forces provides an opportunity to revisit classical social theory from a vantage point of post-classical attitudes, which include among other things, a scepticism towards the unity of an oeuvre. What is taken as post-classical sociology is not an emancipation of critical theories only from the spirit of Marxism, but also from the burden of prejudicial receptions and even the self-(mis)understandings of authors, which took on the legacy of orthodoxy. One can, then, revisit the sociological classics in order to extend and generalise their perspectives on other problems, theoretical traditions and trajectories. In this chapter, Durkheim’s work is approached from a double vantage point.
Durkheim’s work is looked at from one vantage point of a post-classical attitude that, in this reading, intersects the ontological recasting of the social in the work of Castoriadis.1 Even though Castoriadis rarely refers to Durkheim, and his work stems from an interrogation of the categories of historical materialism, he takes an explicit ‘imaginary turn’ in order to more fully address similar questions and issues that remained central yet unresolved and open to question in Durkheim’s work. In other words, it can be argued that Castoriadis’s work stands also in the wake of Durkheim’s central notion of collective representations, and the way it has continued to cast its long shadow over the French intellectual tradition (Castoriadis, 1997a: 318; Howard and Pacom, 1998: 83-101; Rundell, 2004a: 307-343).2 In a similar way that Durkheim posits his notion of collective representations, Castoriadis also posits that social imaginary significations are, in the ontological sense, the glue that binds society together, and as such possess positive validity. For Castoriadis, the status of the constitution of socially produced meaning creations – or imaginary significations – can only be addressed by invoking the idea of the excess or surplus of meaning that cannot be ‘soaked up’ entirely in its linguistic or symbolic form.3 At this level, they are incontestable and contain the truth content of a society that is irreducible to its logical content. Truth, in Castoriadis’s view and similarly to Durkheim’s view, constitutes the
dimension of social closure at the level of the sacred. In other words, the binding, meaningfully rich collective representation places its own truth outside the possibility that it might be questioned or contested. However, it is at this point that the other part of Castoriadis’s project
enters, and with some delimiting results. The value horizon to which his work is orientated is the horizon of autonomy, which indicates reflexivity and social openness, and it is against this that Castoriadis judges and constructs social types. Its opposite is the heteronomous social type, which for him represents most of the history of human societies. While autonomy, for Castoriadis, occurs through a social opening begun as a question, and is, thus, a position through which the subject, as well as social imaginaries are decentred, nonetheless, his privileging of it as political condition entails that reflexivity itself is restricted only to those periods and forms of activity that are constituted through this particular type of opening. It is in this context of social opening that I will concentrate on Durkheim’s
work, rather than Castoriadis’s, to explore this issue of reflexivity and openness. This is done in the context of Durkheim’s notion of collective representations and the long dureé of the modern period. Durkheim’s model of reflexivity opens onto another vantage point from which his work is approached in this chapter, that of political modernity. Here political modernity is viewed as a particular constellation of the circulation of power, especially in nation states, open forms of reflexivity, and democracy, in contrast to another political modernity that revolves around totalitarianism, terrorism and the closed reflexive form of the redemptive paradigm (Fehér, 1987c: 61-76; Heller, 1987: 243-259). Durkheim’s work can be a fruitful point of departure for an analysis and critique of political modernity because his theorisation occurs in a way that opens onto its forms of political representation, its historical development, and its mode of reflexivity, especially. So, by approaching his work in this way, light can be further thrown onto the images of political modernity that Durkheim himself constructs, as well as the often-incomplete insights that emerge from it which equally provide insight into the nature of political modernity itself. This is especially so if his lesser-known work is taken as a point of departure. This work includes Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (a series of lectures written between 1890 and 1900, of which only the first three on professional ethics were initially published posthumously in 1937, and finally as a whole in 1950); The Evolution of Educational Thought (a book misleadingly titled and thus studiously ignored by general sociology, which began life as a series of lectures originally delivered in 1904, first published in French in 1938 and English in 1977); and his important 1898 essay in defence of Dreyfus, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, all of which are interpreted against the background of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, published in 1912, and Pragmatism and Sociology. Thus, the logic of the following discussion is not to impute to Durkheim a
model of political modernity that is extraneous to his own sociological project with its own nuances and shifts. Rather, as indicated above it is argued that
there are three interconnected strands that constitute an image – a theory would be altogether too strong – of political modernity within his work, which, to be sure, entails that some aspects are emphasised at the expense of others. From this vantage point the strands are: an ideal of social reflexivity that is internal to the construction of his notion of collective representation; a civilisational image of the occident, which is deployed especially in The Evolution of Educational Thought and alluded to in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals; and his commitment to civic republicanism and his deployment of the professional associations. Before we can discuss Durkheim’s images of political modernity, we must
begin from this basic insight of collective representation before turning to the issues of civilisation and open reflexivity, where his study of the medieval university plays a crucial role. It will be argued that Durkheim views the medieval university as not only a source for a publicly located reflexivity that is required for political modernity. He views it as a model.
