ABSTRACT

A few years before the First World War, a young ethnologist of the Durkheim school, Robert Hertz, described an unusual ritual. In some Borneo tribes, important persons are entitled to double funerals, the length of the interval between the two ceremonies being proportional to their social status. Ethnologists, and some sociologists too, now regard the Durkheim school as obsolete. The Division of Labor in Society, is an anticipated criticism of totalitarian consciousness. Durkheimianism was the ideological expression of the Golden Age of the French bourgeoisie. The disalienating tendency common to Marxism and Durkheimianism results by no means from a fortuitous coincidence; it is a consequence of a fundamental homology in their respective perception of social reality. Durkheim foresaw an uninterrupted progression of the social division of work, from mechanical to organic solidarity. The Marxist determination of consciousness by social being, as postulated by historical materialism, is present under a different name in Durkheimianism.