ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the theoretical and anthropological issues that disciplinary comparisons of electrical and moral forces have raised, rather than the pressing moral – and ecological – ones presented by the politics of urban technological systems. Emile Durkheim’s account of social force as a reality equal to physical forces like electricity drew on the technological terms of his nineteenth-century ‘discourse network’. Durkheim had a broader mission, however, not only to ‘explain the nature and origin of the forces which stimulate social action’, but also to reveal the ‘logic of collective representations the logic of logic – the foundation of all thought in social as distinct from mental life’. Whatever the source of the electrical metaphors in Durkheim’s own writing, he also draws heavily on an earlier study of magic by Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert for the distinctive notion of ‘force’ that underwrites this metaphor.