ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim clearly viewed the moral disarray of his time as a problem in social order rather than in personal disorders. Social order rests on the complementarity and interdependence of cooperatively functioning individuals and groups. The inversion of state and society represented for Durkheim the source of autocracy, an order based on coercion rather than consent; and it was of social order based on consent that Durkheim sought. The clearest formulation of state power comes not in any of Durkheim's standard works, but in L'Année Sociologique. The role Durkheim assigned to the state as the protector of individual rights places him within the mainstream of individual rights, and thus of liberal political theory. Durkheim first traced the origins of the state in The Division of Labor within the framework of a progressive movement from mechanical to organic solidarity. Durkheim identified inheritance as a primary cause of the perpetuation of social injustice and argued that it was incompatible with moral individualism.
