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Neil Gross and Robert Alun Jones (eds., trans.). Durkheim’s Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the Lycée de Sens Course, 1883-1884, Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. 2004. pp. 339.

Thanks to the enterprise and hard work of the editors, a transcription of the original French manuscript has been available for some while on the web. Thanks also to their determination, an English version has now been published. But as the introduction to this makes clear, the manuscript is a set of notes taken by the young André Lalande, discovered among his papers by the librarians of the Sorbonne in 1995, and entitled, ‘E. Durkheim—lectures on philosophy given at the lycée of Sens in 1883-84’. The introduction considers the evidence for them as notes of a course given in fact by Durkheim. And it now seems the consensus of scholarly opinion that they are, with no special reason to conclude otherwise. Yet there is still a need for caution. Did Durkheim really subscribe to the proof of the existence of God at the end of the course? Was he completely free to express his own views, given the constraints of teaching an ofﬁcial philosophy programme? How reliable are student notes as a record of lectures? Indeed, it is because they are student notes that the editors have gone for a readable, free and easy translation, rather than a scrupulously literal rendition, as if of a ‘sacred text’ by Durkheim himself. And they succeed very well in what, in the circumstances, seems to me the correct translation strategy. The manuscript might not have immediate, obvious importance as a key to Durkheim’s sociology. But the book they have produced is a highly acces- sible guide to French philosophy of the time. True, it is the link with Durkheim that is the selling point. And this is no bad thing, if it encourages a wider and more informed interest in the French philosophical context in which he developed his sociology. The trouble with so many readings of Durkheim is that they either de-philoso- phize his sociology, or they parachute into it with a de-contextualized idea of philosophy itself. The publication of the Sens lecture-course is a welcome antidote to all this. But it is invaluable in another way. If we try to understand French philosophy in Durkheim’s time, and indeed want to construct a sociology of this, it isn’t enough just to go to contemporary philosophy books, reviews, articles, etc. For it is evident that it was a sig- niﬁcantly oral culture, transmitted as well as transformed through personal Durkheimian Studies, Volume 11, 2005: 117-140 © Durkheim Press ISSN 1362-024X 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 118

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contact, unwritten codes, discussions and debates, but also and not least the institution of the lecture. The Sens manuscript helps to give us a glimpse of this vie philosophique. Thus it is not hard to see why Lalande and his fellow lycée students felt inspired by Durkheim, and rated him so highly. If we consult standard philosophy textbooks of the period—for example, Jacques, Simon and Saisset, Manuel de philosophie (1863); Janet, Traité élémentaire de philosophie (1873); Rabier, Leçons de Philosophie (1884)—they aren’t exactly a lively, exciting read. It requires a truly Durkheimian ‘effort’—assisted by many cups of coffee and the threat of impending examinations—to stay awake while wading through them. In contrast, the Sens lectures are almost exhil- arating, in their brisk opening discussion of different takes on philosophy, their swift tour of Psychology, Logic, Ethics and Metaphysics, their new look at old issues such as freedom versus determinism, their always-to-the- point crispness. And coming across in the notes, there is the presence of the lecturer himself, the young man hotfoot from Paris, brimming with confi- dence, and well versed in how to attract and sustain attention. A general pattern is to set up a problem, then fill it out with clear statements of opposing positions plus handy references to their main supporters. But it is also to proceed, with a flourish, to how to solve the problem, so that knowledge of long-running issues and classic positions and references combines with a feeling of uplift, as students and lecturer together advance towards a new, modern, better understanding of things. Neil Gross’s introduction does a good job in setting out to identify main themes and lines and patterns of argument that run through the lectures. On the other hand, one of the patterns of argument is in fact to incorporate references to key figures who represent a particular position or a whole general approach. And so it can also be helpful to ask about the lecture-course’s references. Who tops its list of ‘Great Philosophers’, and why? Who is margin- alized, or left out altogether, and why? Thus it is Kant who is by far the most frequently cited and discussed philosopher of all. In contrast, there is no mention whatsoever of Hume, and indeed there is no other evidence that his work was ever read by Durkheim. It is instead John Stuart Mill who is picked out as the arch-representative of the radical philosophical empiricism attacked again and again in the lectures. And, after Kant, the most cited and discussed author is Mill—though closely followed by Spencer, seen as the lat- est lesson to us all of the errors of empiricism. Indeed, in a rough and ready but neat statistic, the references to Kant are equalled by the combined references to the arch-empiricist twins, Mill-and-Spencer. Moreover, this symbolic as well as statistical battle of references—Kant versus Mill-and-Spencer— leads on to perhaps the best strategy for tackling the lecture-course, which is to try to identify its basic underlying problematic. The prize, then, is if the Sens philosophy course contains a first version of the same basic problematic that underlies and shapes the whole career of Durkheim’s sociology itself. A place to start is where the lectures start, and his whole concern with philosophy as a concern with ‘the inner man’ and a study of ‘states of 118 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 119

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consciousness and their conditions’ (35). For it seems to me this is more than a main theme, but a foundation of the entire problematic at work in his sociology. Thus it is fundamental that the lectures extend consciousness beyond the faculty of cognition, so that it includes not only thought but sensation and action—or, as in The Rules, ways of thinking, feeling and acting. And it is fundamental because it sets up a problematic in which there is one same single world of human ‘consciousness’, but involving both a radical epistemological break between this world’s different realms, and, somehow, an interlinkage between them. Indeed, we could almost be reading ‘The Dualism of Human Nature’ when we read, in the lectures, that ‘the self remains one, the point around which all the faculties converge’ (59). And as in ‘The Dualism’, so in the lectures, what is at bottom wrong with empiricism is its monistic reduction of everything to sensory experience, utility, self-interest. In contrast, the trouble with Kant’s efforts to escape this is an escape from the world altogether, as in appeal to the a priori or imagination of the noumenal, and as in his attempt to reconcile freedom and determinism. Thus we could almost be reading Moral Education’s discussion of autonomy when we read, in the lectures, that Kant leaves the will imprisoned in the noumenal, so that the freedom he offers us isn’t a real freedom at all, but ‘metaphysical, virtual, sterile’ (163-164). Before going further, however, it is worth making some particular points. There is a more or less uniform hostility in the references to Mill, Spencer and other empiricists, who include Adam Smith and his ‘morality of sentiment’ (237). Yet there is not the same hostility in the references to Kant. Thus sweeping comments on Durkheim’s ‘anti-Kantianism’ are superficial and misleading. In fact, in the lectures as elsewhere, Durkheim is often highly appreciative of Kant, and this is not least an appreciation of Kant’s onslaught on empiricism. Thus the lectures on freedom work their way up to Kant, for, in his battle against empiricists, it was Kant who came up with ‘perhaps the strongest response’ to the doctrine of determinism (163). Sim- ilarly, after the lecture laying into Mill, Spencer, Smith and the empiricist ‘Morality of Sentiment’, we move on to higher ground in the lecture on ‘The Morality of Kant’. For here we read that Kant’s ethics, in their determination to draw us away from the world of the senses, constitute ‘one of the greatest efforts ever made to push humanity towards the ideal’ (242). True enough, it runs into difficulties and indeed is doomed to failure. But it is a ‘beautiful’ failure. In sum so far, the lecture-course’s problematic gets articulated in a consistent rejection of empiricism and its reduction of the world of consciousness to the substratum of the senses. But it is together with a more ambivalent attitude towards Kant, involving an appreciation of his arguments against empiricism as well as an indebtedness to these, yet also a consistent rejection of an escape from the world in which he takes flight into the a priori and the noumenal. Accordingly, the fundamental question generated by the problematic is to come up with a non-empiricist non- Kantian way to understand and access the one-and-plural human world of 119 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 120

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consciousness—which very much includes the question of how to access ‘the inner man’ at the core of this world. And if we look at the solutions on offer in the lectures, it is possible to identify important elements that in one form or another continue in Durkheim’s subsequent work. Even so, is there enough in all this to see a ﬁrst version of the problematic of his eventual sociology? Perhaps. Yet it is a bit like Hamlet without the prince. It centres round consciousness, and involves the idea of representations. But it comes without collective consciousness, or any idea of collective representations.

William Watts Miller

Massimo Borlandi and Giovanni Busino (eds.), ‘La sociologie durkheimi- enne: tradition et actualité. À Philippe Besnard, in memoriam’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, XLII (129) 2004. pp.410.

Through various obituaries the death of Philippe Besnard has now come to the notice of many Durkheimian scholars around the world. It has meant a great loss to studies of the father of French sociology. An accompanying tragedy has been that Besnard never saw the publication of two large works, directly associated with him, that were on the point of appearing just before he died. The first was a collection of mainly previously published essays, Etudes durkheimiennes, which was reviewed in the last issue of Durkheimian Studies. The second, which one might call a Festschrift, is the subject of this review and has become a text in memoriam. Massimo Borlandi and Giovanni Busino have edited a formidable and very com- mendable volume of essays, covering just over 400 pages, as a special issue of the Swiss-based journal, Revue européenne des sciences sociales. About 30 scholars have contributed articles or other pieces by way of tribute to the man who did so much for sound, historically based studies of Durkheim and encouraged many others to do likewise. Besnard also became a popular figure in the media through a Durkheimian approach to the study of first names. About five contributions appear covering this side of his achieve- ments. Not surprisingly the overwhelming majority of essays relate to those aspects of Durkheim that held a fascination for him. About 20 contributions relate directly to Durkheim. Of these seven are concerned with subjects arising from Le suicide—Borlandi, Merllié, Steiner, Fournier, Mucchielli, Colas, along with a debate involving Besnard himself on anomie. Approxi- mately the same number deal with various aspects of theory and the nature of sociology—Boudon, Paoletti, Riley, Busino, Mergy, Chazel, and Zerilli. A mélange of subjects is covered by Cuin, Galland, Heilbron, Lenoir, Menger and Traugott. (All these contributions on Durkheim and the Durkheimian school are listed under ‘Articles’ in Recent Publications.) There is nothing on sociologie religieuse and very little on ethics—two of Durkheim’s major 120 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 121

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concerns, which, it has to be admitted, were outside Besnard’s main inter- ests. But no one can be a specialist in the entire oeuvre of Durkheim! The large majority of the writers in this volume are French or those who chose to write in French. Of considerable interest is the entretien that J.-C. Mar- cel had with Besnard just before he died. It covered his career and profes- sional concerns. J.-R. Tréanton also holds a conversation with Besnard which also contains interesting analysis of letters among the Durkheimians, which deserve to be more widely known. The contributions, which deal with a fairly wide range of subjects, make it difficult for one reviewer to consider them all adequately. The task is made slightly more difficult by the fact that the editors have not grouped the essays according to subject matter but alphabetically according to surname. Risky it is to select a few essays from this large collection, but a choice has to be made. It in no way implies that the other essays are less interesting or less worthy of notice. Raymond Boudon writes provocatively about interpreting texts by Durkheim (and Weber) and about the use of psychological terms in ‘explaining’ social facts. For example, in Le suicide, the higher rates among Protestants compared with Catholics is related to a rational explanation of the individual’s interpretation of religious beliefs. This can be summed up in the question, how does one get behind social facts? Busoni takes the unusual step of highly praising the work of one of the young contributors, Giovanni Paoletti. The latter focuses on expounding a term much used by Besnard and basic to Durkheim’s thought, le lien social. This term covers two facets, integration and regulation. The twin concepts appear not only in Le suicide, but also in a parallel fashion in L’éducation morale, where the spirit of discipline is put alongside integration within a group. Interestingly enough, both texts were written at much the same time. Some articles open up quite new territory, for example, that by Mark Traugott. Employing the notion of seasonal variation as used by Durkheim in Le suicide, Traugott explores the phenomenon of French insurrection and barricades, going as far back as the late sixteenth century. He finds that harvests and the price of bread are factors of overriding importance. Sea- sonal fluctuation, associated with Le suicide was very much a theme in Besnard’s work. Beginning with the writings of Mauss, Marcel Fournier relates fluctuations in time, temperature and season to modern society. The Académie des sciences morales et politiques, founded in 1832, is the subject chosen by Johan Heilbron in exploring the social sciences in France before the time of Durkheim. Many Festschriften fade into oblivion and are seldom referred to. This is because too many widely varied subjects are included: writers throw something into a hat that often has been tossed off quickly. This is not the case with the tributes to Philippe Besnard. Many of the essays are very worth- while studies and deserve wide recognition.

W. S. F. Pickering 121 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 122

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Warren Schmaus. Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. pp. 195.

Warren Schmaus is well-known to scholars for his analytical studies of Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge and philosophy of science. In his new book, he presents an historical inquiry into the philosophical context of Durkheim’s thought, in order to clarify a main but not altogether clear topic of his later sociology, i.e. the sociological theory of the categories. This (partial) shift in methodology deserves our attention. A ‘lawful match’ between conceptual analysis and historical reconstruction can only improve our understanding of Durkheim’s multi-faceted works. After all, the querelle between the analytical and continental styles mostly worked at a theoretical level—involving ‘scholastic’ commitments about what philosophical studies ought to be but the disagreement can prove to be much less strong in practice. Schmaus’s book owes much of its interest, and some of its weaknesses, to its effort towards a fair methodological eclecticism. In this regard, it only partially achieves its aims. The book can be divided into three parts, containing three different the- ses. One can ask about both their internal soundness and the consistency of their link. The ﬁrst and last chapters are a kind of frame of the whole work, making its basic purpose explicit: that is, its pars destruens (chapter 1), which defies relativist and constructivist interpretations of the Durkheimian sociology of knowledge, and its pars construens (chapter 7), which shows how Durkheim’s theory of the categories, duly emended, could be the basis of a research program today about ‘the conceptual requirements for social life’ (26). The core of the book focuses on the problem of the categories as it was posed and resolved by a philosophical tradition beginning with Kant and leading to Durkheim. Chapters 2 to 4 a virtual second part of the work trace the problem back to Kant (and even Aristotle) but deal above all with interpretations of Kant by nineteenth-century French philosophers. The thesis is that such thinkers as Maine de Biran, Cousin, and Paul Janet established in France a psychological reading of the theory of the categories in terms of faculties, genesis of the self, etc., that was radically different from the Kantian transcendental approach, and indeed involved a misunderstanding of that approach. It was this tradition, and not directly Kant, that Durkheim implicitly referred to when developing his own theory in Elementary Forms of Religious Life this is the thesis of the third part of the book (chapters 5 and 6), which examines both an early stage of Durkheim’s philosophical thought, documented by the recently discovered Cours au lycée de Sens (1883-1884), and the sociological explanation of the categories given by Durkheim in his last masterpiece. It is obviously not possible to discuss in detail here the wealth of analysis and historical materials in Rethinking Durkheim. The author has not recoiled before the important, controversial question of Durkheim’s explanation of the categories. Together with some of Anne Rawls’s writings, the central chapters of this book represent the most important recent 122 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 123

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contributions to comprehension of this topic. Thanks to wide documenta- tion and a very clear way of stating his arguments, Schmaus sheds light on some previously enigmatic steps in Durkheim’s exposition: for example, the argument by elimination (‘A, B or C; but neither A nor B; ergo C’) that Durkheim used to refute both a priori and empirical interpretations of the categories, an argument shaped on Cousin’s and Paul Janet’s similar ways of reasoning; or the notion of ‘representative ideas’ as developed by Janet, which can help us understand the importance given by Durkheim to the mental content of collective representations. In general, Schmaus’s view of the philosophical milieu in which Durkheim was trained is quite instructive. Thus, one can disregard the occasional lack of historical evidence e.g., the fact that only eclectic spiritualists are taken into consideration as Durkheim’s philosophical interlocutors, or the long jump from the early lycée lectures to the Elementary Forms and some bibliographical vagueness. The study of philosophical background reveals its helpfulness also in chapter 6, where the evaluation of Durkheim’s position really unfolds. A major dilemma in his theory is understanding how a category of thought can be at once universal, necessary and socially determined. Schmaus’s elegant solution to this puzzle consists in distinguishing the categories properly speaking (space, time, classiﬁcation, force, causality and totality) from collective representations of them. The latter are culturally variable; the former are not: ‘each culture has the same set of categories … but has developed different systems of representations for thinking and communi- cating about them’ (120). But how can the universality of the categories be accounted for without simply resorting to invariable (or even innate) prop- erties of human nature? According to Schmaus, the analysis of causality in Elementary Forms (unfortunately, the only example he discusses at length) shows that this category has universal status not because every social group has the same conception of it, which is obviously not true, or because it derives from a universal social cause or shared experience, but in the sense that it performs a social function that is the same in every society. Without the idea of causality or, more precisely, of a ‘necessary connection’, any idea of moral responsibility (necessary connection between intention and action) and moral obligation (necessary connection between social integration and respect of social norms) in a word any social bond would be impossible. This stress on the functional meaning of the categories is conceived by Schmaus as an alternative to Anne Rawls’s causal explanation of their universality as an effect of the shared experience of ritually produced moral forces. The point the two authors share, in addition to the claim that Durkheim was no relativist, is their parallel devaluation of the concept of ‘(collective) representation’ a strong and challenging thesis for current readings of Durkheim and perhaps even for Durkheim’s texts themselves. While the central chapters of the book, taken as a whole, form a rather well-ordered sequence, the same cannot be said of the conclusion. The author’s account of the ‘prospects’ for the theory of the categories is not at 123 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 124

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issue here. The naturalistic trend of his reformulation of this theory, based on an alliance between sociology, cognitive neurosciences and evolutionary explanations, is not necessarily consistent with the general inspiration of Durkheim’s sociological approach to symbolism, representations and cultural institutions but it does not need to be. And he explicitly assumes responsibility for this new reading of Durkheimian tradition for today’s purposes. What is more difﬁcult to accept, because self-contradictory, is the under-estimation of historical studies that may be discerned in this ﬁnal chapter, as if understanding a classical author in his or her context were only a means of freeing that author from the prejudices of the past in this case a sort of ‘disencumbering Durkheim of his tradition’. Here the author is too harsh with himself. What his book shows, more than once, is that Durkheim’s thought developed (perhaps as anyone’s does) not only despite his historical premises, but also through them and, at least to some extent, thanks to them.

Giovanni Paoletti

Anne Warﬁeld Rawls. Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s The Elemen- tary Forms of Religious Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. pp. 355.

This is a long-gestation book. Anne W. Rawls’ article on ‘Durkheim’s Epis- temology: the Neglected Argument’, where the main arguments of the 2004 book were in embryo, was published in 1996. After that, other papers shaped—brick after brick—the whole proﬁle of the book. Good ideas need time to be fully developed. The basic idea that Rawls tries to defend is that The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is neither a book on Australian totemism, nor a book on religion per se; Durkheim’s aim was, instead, that of making an argument for a ‘classical’ epistemology, namely an argument for the origin of the fundamental categories of human thought. In more detail, Rawls’s thesis is that ‘Durkheim’s epistemological argument … locates the origin of the fundamental categories of human thought, or reason, not in individual percep- tion, as Hume had argued, nor as a transcendent and innate aspect of the mind, but rather, in the shared emotional experience of those ritually produced moral forces created by the enactment of concrete practices in the midst of assembled group’ (10). The categories of the understanding are the ‘direct result of such social experiences’ (20), and more particularly of the moral force ‘created by the collective performance of rites associated with the distinction between the sacred and the profane’ (109). There are two important subordinates of Rawls’s main thesis, that she tries to show at length in her book. The first one is that reading The 124 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 125

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Elementary Forms as if Durkheim was making an argument for a sociology of knowledge is completely misleading (readers can see on this the debate with W. Schmaus in the American Journal of Sociology, 104 (1998): 273- 301). While sociology of knowledge has to do with collective representations, and collective representations ‘originate as retrospective attempts to explain collective experiences’, the categories of the understanding ‘are themselves collective experiences’ (104-105). This implies, in turn, that if collective experiences are relative and dependent on particular social con- texts, the categories of the understanding are ‘identical, not only between individuals, but in some sense between cultures and historical periods as well’ (102); they are, in other words, universal. The second subordinate is related to the above mentioned priority of the epistemological argument over the sociology of knowledge, and it regards the priority of practices over beliefs. Practices, according to Rawls, come—in Durkheim’s masterpiece— first. Even if religion is usually related to beliefs, for Durkheim practices are essential to its definition, not beliefs. Speaking of epistemology, ‘it is not beliefs that are causally efficacious in the development of the categories of the understanding … What is essential, according to Durkheim, is that certain forms of rites be observed’ (116). Reading Durkheim’s 1912 masterpiece as a book on epistemology in the classical sense is not a banal idea. The author has not only to rebut more classical interpretations (e.g. The Elementary Forms as a treatise on totemism, on the sacred, on the sociology of knowledge), but she has also to struggle against a certain inner resistance of the book itself. In fact, the epistemological argument seems to be confined—and confused with the sociology of knowledge one—by Durkheim in a few pages in his introduction and his conclusion. However, Durkheim’s own rhetorical limits notwithstanding (18 et seq.), according to Rawls it is important to recognize that The Elementary Forms presents a detailed argument for the six categories of time, space, classification, force, causality and totality, and that this argument is only sketched in his introduction and conclusion, and it is made at length in the central chapters of the book, the ones on totemism, the one where he discusses the social origins of the idea of causality, and the whole of Book III where he focuses on rituals. So Rawls’s book invites us to read ideally Durkheim’s pages in a different order. Book III, for example, is much more important than Book II, dedicated to the notion of totemic beliefs, but Durkheim’s discussion begins with beliefs because a belief in the sacred (that is in turn the result of collectively enacted practices) must be considered first when considering religious rites (116). How- ever, if this can create the false impression that beliefs are more important than rituals, the crucial point is that beliefs are not causally efficacious in the shaping of reason, and that only enacted practices can have this causal efficacy. So we would have to dismantle the canonical order of Durkheim’s argument and to recollect the whole book along new lines. But Rawls’s main argument has also other kinds of important consequences and implications. For example, the emphasis on practices over 125 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 126

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beliefs involves both The Elementary Forms and The Division of Labour, where Durkheim had argued, according to Rawls, that in modern societies ‘orders of practice replace shared beliefs as the foundation of solidarity’ (4; on this the readers can see Rawls, ‘Conﬂict as Foundation for Consensus: Contradictions of Industrial Capitalism in Book III of Durkheim’s Division of Labour’, in Critical Sociology, December 2003). So, on the base of her practices-over-beliefs argument, Rawls can criticize the thesis of ‘the two Durkheims’. The same argument permits her to establish very interesting and illuminating comparisons between not only Durkheim and Marx, but above all Durkheim and Weber (see 11 n. 13, 43, 112, 219-220, 234 n.2), given the different weight that Durkheim and Weber gave to the role of beliefs and practices in their accounts of religion. But there are still broader consequences. Rawls’s book is only apparently a book strictly on The Ele- mentary Forms, since it contains a sort of programme for a general sociology—related to its philosophical basis—of practices based on a socio-constructivist epistemological approach capable of analyzing contemporary issues—such as solidarity in a global and multicultural world (practices provide the possibility of communication across boundaries of beliefs)—better than rival contemporary sociological approaches, all of them based at least implicitly on the prominence of concepts, norms, values (see her conclusion). So, through a rereading strictly focused on The Elementary Forms, the author shows us a possible and very interesting way of making Durkheim’s thought useful for contemporary social theory—a programme completely different from the one sketched by Schmaus in his Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition, where he defends an alliance between sociology of knowledge, psychology and the cognitive neurosciences, in accordance with the new philosophical Zeitgeist. What is challenging and thought-provoking, even beyond the possible perplexities about the idea of The Elementary Forms as an epistemological book, is that the fecundity of Durkheim’s thought emerges from its being against the main dominant philosophical and cultural tendencies of modern western thought (2-3, 423, 267, 270-271, 282) and against the consolidated image of Durkheim as the sociologist of order, values and shared norms.

Massimo Rosati

W. Schmaus, Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition, and A. W. Rawls, Epis- temology and Practice. Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Any serious attempt at a general overall ‘companion’ to Durkheim must tackle his agenda for a sociology that engages with philosophy and with fundamental issues in ethics and epistemology. This is brought home in the two new important investigations of his epistemology by Warren Schmaus 126 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 127

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and Anne Rawls. At the same time their enquiries raise the question of the relationship between what we might call the ‘living’ and the ‘historical’ Durkheim. For it is all very well to want interpretations that make Durkheim relevant to today, except if these skip the difﬁcult philosophical bits of his sociology or in other ways churn out a ‘living’ Durkheim that is behind the times and mythical, in its inattention to new continuing scholarly explorations of his actual work. Both Schmaus and Rawls are well- known for the contributions they have already made to this scholarship, and while both of them are concerned, in their new books, with the continuing significance of a Durkheimian approach, it is a concern firmly rooted in an effort to get to grips with Durkheim himself. Perhaps the ﬁrst thing to emphasize is that they go about this in quite different yet complementary ways. In a sort of division of labour, Rawls undertakes a detailed analysis of the argument of The Elemental Forms, while Schmaus sets this text in the context of the French philosophical tradition in which Durkheim was educated, and through which he approaches issues of consciousness, representations and categories. Thus Schmaus’s book not only includes a discussion of Durkheim’s Sens philosophy lectures, but provides an excellent guide to the philosophical background to these, and to understanding, for example, what we might call the ‘French Kant’—that is, the ‘Kant’ as seen through the lens of French 19th century philosophy, and the ‘Kant’ as perceived by Durkheim himself. And this takes us to how the two new books differ in another way, raising an interesting epistemological issue in itself. Rawls proceeds on the assumption that the argument of The Elemental Forms is directed against the empiricism of Hume and the apriorism of Kant, and she convenes a sort of Oxford philosophy seminar in which it is as if Durkheim, Hume and Kant are all round the same table, debating away with one another. The issue, then, isn’t so much that she might be mistaken in her assumption that Hume is Durkheim’s unnamed empiricist opponent, or that she ignores the detec- tive-work on this point already undertaken by Schmaus. Instead, it is to do with how she seems just completely uninterested in a French Hume or a French Kant as a way to approach Durkheim. For the issue is how legiti- mate it is to parachute into his work as if he is engaged in argument with a ‘real’ Kant or a ‘real’ Hume. Isn’t this a route to misunderstanding, since aren’t these inevitably—and anachronistically—her own modern ‘anglo- saxon’ versions of Kant and Hume? True, Schmaus himself appears to feel obliged to invoke an idea of a real Kant, in commenting on what he sees as the peculiarities and mistaken interpretations involved in the French Kant. But it is as part of a general effort to understand the careers of ‘great philosophers’ in different milieux and traditions, which is then a context for a self-understanding of what can be illuminating readings (or rather, re- readings) in Oxford-type seminars. In any case, the new books involve two quite striking similarities, along with a basic disagreement. In setting out to investigate Durkheim’s theory of the categories, both of them in fact focus on causality, on the grounds 127 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 128

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that it is somehow the most important category of all. Both of them then also share essentially the same interpretation of how, for Durkheim, there can be knowledge of the very reality of causal ‘forces’ at work in the world, and these are not just ideas of forever inaccessible things. However, Schmaus takes a dim view of Durkheim’s solution to this epistemological problem, arguing that it doesn’t get round Humean scepticism, and that it is little more than a sociological variant in a long succession of similar fail- ures to escape Hume but also Kant in the French philosophical tradition of ‘eclectic spiritualism’ (the tradition through which Durkheim got his pic- ture of Hume, with no evidence at all that he ever read him). In contrast, Rawls hails Durkheim’s solution as an original and brilliant break-through, dubbing it, as in an earlier article, his ‘neglected argument’. Indeed, Schmaus and Rawls have for some while been battling it out over the issue. And it is tempting to headline their new books as the climax of their affair, giving us the fullest statements of their positions in it. This would be a pity, since both books have so much more to offer. Thus it isn’t simply that Schmaus guides us through the philosophical background to Durkheim’s sociology. In the very activity of doing this, his book is a convincing demonstration of the need as well as promise and possibil- ities of this general type of research. So let’s hope it encourages further investigations of the nowadays largely forgotten landscapes in which ‘great philosophers’ are actually read (or usually unread, instead disseminated through textbooks, lectures, etc). Rawls, for her part, provides perhaps the most sustained argument to date for seeing The Elemental Forms as in the end anchoring ideas in concrete social practices. But it is with her version of a ‘living’ Durkheim—concluding yet also, one suspects, motivating her entire book—that she comes into her own, to make an eloquent and impas- sioned case for a sociology that is above all an investigation of practices. And it seems to me that the different attractions of each book far outweigh any ﬂaws, or the criticisms that might be made of the line they take in the particular case of Durkheim on causality. But it is worth entering some criticisms here, given their own fascination with this particular case. For a start, it is a bit atomistic to pick out causality as especially important. But it also entails a serious one-sidedness. Thus it isn’t hard to argue that, compared with causality, The Elemental Forms is just as concerned with time, in an emphasis on different alternating moments of different plural aspects of life. And isn’t this pluralism tied up with totality? Indeed, if any category is more important than others in Durkheim’s Elemental Forms, surely it is the category of totality. And this involves how the work thematizes the whole general idea of power, to treat causality and other categories as so many dimensions of the vast one-and-manifold power that is ‘god’, aka society. Causality, as necessary connection, is the dimension of this power to do with duty, discipline, regulation, routine. So although an idea central to science has its roots in social life, it is in an essentially neg- ative constraining side of things. Accordingly, it is no accident that the chapter discussing causality, determinism and science is at once followed 128 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 129

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and counter-balanced by the chapter discussing creativity, freedom and art. Schmaus and Rawls ignore this, apparently with time only for the grind of the vie sérieuse. Yet it is especially odd that Rawls, with her ‘holistic’ analysis, just omits the chapter on sacred drama, art, the festival, the poetry inherent in all religion, and effervescent free creative energy. But also, while Schmaus dismisses effervescence and prefers to develop the func- tionalist strand in Durkheim’s account of the categories, Rawls is positively enthusiastic about the dynamics of assembly and even makes occasional mention of creativity. So it is unfortunate that she again somehow doesn’t have time to tell us more about power as creativity—an often unnoticed yet key Durkheimian addition to the traditional list of categories?—and to free and disentangle it from the forces of causality. However, if we now move on to how Schmaus and Rawls share a same interpretation of Durkheim’s epistemology it is in fact about the real basis in some or other form of the whole general idea of a ‘power’. And their shared interpretation is that his route to such knowledge is through an entirely unmediated internal experience of social forces and energies, which we can directly feel at work within us, and which is simply not the case with physical forces. But are they correct? They zoom in on just one single passage, eventually reached at book 3 chapter 3 section 3 of The Ele- mental Forms. It is very brief, amounting to a couple of pages (521-522). Its function is introductory, as a lead-in to the discussion of causality. It is highly abstract, in its emphasis on a basic contrast of ‘social’ versus ‘physical’ forces. And so it can also be read as involving Durkheim’s well-known use of hyperbole to make a point. Accordingly, it is quite extraordinary to characterize his whole position in terms of a straightforward literal interpretation of a single brief abstract passage, when it is contradicted by everything else in the work. Rather, it is necessary to decide between two options: he is just inconsistent, or the passage can be interpreted to bring it into line with everything else. Either way, however, the work’s main overall position is that although there is internal access to the reality of social forces, energies and ideas, it isn’t a completely direct internal access. Instead, internal experience of collective energies is always mediated by concrete material symbols, and indeed made possible by these. Thus not only on intellectual but aesthetic and indeed symbolic grounds, the entire work’s centrepiece isn’t—as Rawls eccentrically claims—the bit on causality, but the chapter revealing the one-and-manifold power that is ‘god’ as society. And in its account of the dynamics of collective effervescent uplift, the power of assembly combines with the power of symbolism and the art of the dance, the chant, the body-costume, the face-mask and face-paint- ing, so that these simultaneously create, communicate, express and ‘materially represent this internal transformation’ (312). Moreover, this is an altogether key case. For it is the effervescence created as well as communi- cated by the combined power of assembly, art and symbolism that is the nearest social forces ever get to a complete penetration of the individual—it isn’t in the times of the routine at the bottom of the account of causality. 129 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 130

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Thus it is part of such a radical internal transformation and penetration of the individual that there is the whole argument, again in the centrepiece, that social life is made possible ‘only thanks to a vast symbolism’ (331). And it is in referring back to this whole argument that the work’s conclusion again insists: ‘collective ideas and sentiments are possible only thanks to external movements that represent them, as we have shown’ (598) It is possible to go on citing further evidence, and it could seem tedious to do so. The trouble is with Rawls’s prior attachment to what for Schmaus is the deservedly ‘neglected argument’ of book 3 chapter 3 section 3, pp. 521-522, of The Elemental Forms. For it seems to involve her new ‘holistic’ analysis of the work in all sorts of tactics in which she either just ignores or quickly hurries through evidence for the Durkheimian role of symbolism, or tries to massage it in various dubious and sometimes quite desper- ate ways. A case in point is her attempt to downgrade symbolism through appeal to intentionality—collective energies and emotions precede their actual arousal through symbolism, since the purpose of a rite is just to use the symbolism to arouse the emotions (Rawls 274). This of course doesn’t get round Durkheim’s argument, and is like saying sexual highs precede actual intercourse, thanks to what is in mind. Indeed, appeal to intentionality is a dangerous game to play for someone wanting to anchor ideas in actual concrete practices. In general, in fact, giving up on the ‘neglected argument’ and direct internal access can very much strengthen Rawls’s own wider, more important concern to anchor ideas in practices. This is so for a number of reasons. But it is not least because it helps to overcome a difficulty with her conclusion’s robust, highly welcome critique of a perva- sive modern philosophical idealism. Thus she argues, against this, that the social domain doesn’t merely consist of concepts, but presents itself in the first instance in the form of sounds and movements in each other’s presence (Rawls 326). And the difficulty, here, is with a radical dichotomization of the social domain that appears to set up an unbridgeable logical chasm between concepts and sounds-and-movements-in-each-other’s-presence. But the situation changes with a Durkheimian emphasis on the social world as a domain of conceptual thought, yet, precisely as such, a domain generated and re-generated through the combined power of assembly, symbolism and art. For symbolism and art don’t merely consist of concepts, even in giving life to them. At the same time they involve collective communicable ways of thinking, feeling and acting that don’t just reduce to sounds-and-movements-in-each- other’s-presence, even in getting life from them. Finally, what are the implications for the epistemological debate that we are all in Rawls’s debt for helping to stir up with her discovery of the ‘neglected argument’? Its amendment to internal but mediated access to the reality of collective forces and energies might well fail to win over Schmaus. On the other hand, it softens up his opposition in introducing, through mediation by a concrete symbolism, the element of meaning that he complains is lacking in Durkheim’s account. This is crucial, since we 130 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 131

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are no longer talking about internal access to a reality represented by pure abstract ideas. Indeed, Durkheim in effect rules out the very idea of pure abstract ideas, in his insistence that symbols not only help to create more abstract concepts but continue to construct them, in going on injecting them with particular definite meanings and associations. So in sum, Durkheimian internal access isn’t just about feeling abstract ‘forces’ at work within us. It above all involves an experience of collective energies as created, constructed, and made real and meaningful through concrete symbols, a whole vast aesthetics, and participation in assembly. Can it succeed, then, as a Durkheimian escape route from having to make a philosophical choice between empiricism and the a priori? It seems to me this is tied up with a need to get away from and to decline to privilege the sort of relentlessly abstract philosophical discourse that not only sets up the choice but helps to imprison us in it. Rawls touches on this when she notices how critics of the epistemology of The Elemental Forms so often just pick bits from its congenially abstract introduction and conclusion, and skip the 500 pages of stuff in between. Yet she herself sometimes seems to get a bit cross with Durkheim for burying his epistemology in a detailed, thick-textured account of things. So a ‘neglected issue’, perhaps, is to do with the whole style of arguing of The Elemental Forms. For it embeds its ideas in a concrete sociological practice of writing that doesn’t just engage with particular philosophical positions but challenges an entire habit of philosophical discourse.

W. Watts Miller

Jonathan S. Fish. Defending the Durkheimian Tradition: Religion, Emotion and Morality, Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. pp. 207.

This is an ambitious endeavour in which the author undertakes a number of tasks. First, he conducts an exegesis of Durkheim’s account of the importance of emotion in the formation and maintenance of religion and morality and then demonstrates the salience of these themes in the writings of Talcott Parsons. Fish then critically explores the deployment of Durkheim’s work on emotion and morality in recent efforts to defend Durkheim in particular and sociology in general from the post-modernist assertion of the ‘death of the social’ and the redundancy of sociology as a discipline. Finally, Fish argues that the focus on the non-rational grounding of religion and morality in Durkheim’s writings discloses important links between these writings and certain contemporary developments in the sociology of emotions, links that could renovate the ﬁeld of the sociology of religion. He concludes with the statement: ‘Rumours that the Durkheimian tradition has exhausted itself are, therefore, much exaggerated’ (189). 131 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 132

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What connects all of these themes is the author’s analysis of the crucial role of emotion in Durkheim’s theory of social solidarity. Fish approaches this through an examination of Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, the text in which the role of the non-rational is most explicitly and com- prehensively articulated. Fish argues that Durkheim’s notion of ‘creative effervescence’ provides an account of the process through which emotional bonds are forged and sustained. This notion is thus closely connected to other concepts in the Formes—religious cults and rituals, collective representations, the sacred and the profane, and a homo duplex model of human nature. Fish then uses the developed theory of the Forms to trace its grad- ual emergence in Durkheim’s earlier writings on moral education and pro- fessional ethics, and back to his first major publication, De la division du travail social. Although collective effervescence and homo duplex do not figure at all in the conceptual apparatus of this text, Fish shows that nevertheless Durkheim assigns considerable importance to the role of emotional attachments in religion. Fish argues that it this focus on emotion that provides continuity between the Division and the Formes, and the writings between them should be seen as stepping stones on route to the formula- tion of the mature theory rather than as evidence of contradictions and ambivalences in the Durkheimian corpus. Fish next argues that Parsons was not only sensitive to Durkheim’s appreciation of the importance of non-rational elements in social life, but throughout his own writings displayed an interest in the role of these elements in modern social systems. This enabled Parsons to reject the Weber- ian thesis of the inexorability of the secularisation of Western culture, and predict a renewed importance for Christianity in the USA. I found the discussion of Durkheim and Parsons informative and convincing, uncovering aspects of their thought which reinforced their status as classics. In particular, Fish shows that both thinkers were fully cognisant of the importance of non-rational phenomena in social life, developing insights to be found in Comte, but which were subsequently marginalised by sociologists until the last three decades or so. Fish has performed an important service in exploration of these themes in both writers. The critical analysis of the continued importance of Durkheim in modern sociology through a discussion of the work of Maffesoli, Mestrovic and certain approaches to the sociology of emotion, is lively, and Fish makes a good case for the continuing vitality of a Durkheimian sociological tradition. However, this aspect of the book comprises two chapters, as compared to four on Durkheim and two on Parsons, and hence lacks the textual depth and exegetical authority of the discussion of the two classics. Nevertheless, Fish provides some suggestive comments on Durkheim’s contribution to the burgeoning field of the sociology of emotions through the latter’s theory of the interplay between social interactions and human emotions in the construction of social solidarity. As noted above it is only fairly recently that this relationship has been explored by sociologists. Not only was this aspect of Durkheim’s work ignored, it was explicitly dismissed by, for 132 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 133

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example, Lévi-Strauss, who in his essay on totemism baldly asserted that ‘impulses and emotions explain nothing: they are always the results, either of the power of the body or of the impotence of the mind’ (Totemism 1973: 142, original emphasis). The reassessment of the importance of emotions by contemporary sociologists is therefore signiﬁcant, and Fish does an excellent job in identify- ing Durkheim’s (and Parsons’) pioneering efforts in this area. However, I remain unconvinced by Fish’s claim that homo duplex provides valuable insights into the links between the non-rational and the social. Despite Durkheim’s protestations to the contrary, this model of human nature is derived from western metaphysics and theology and bears the signs of this provenance. Modern syntheses of neuro-physiology and social interactions in the sociology of emotions show that the dualism central to this model is simply incorrect, a dead end in the task of understanding emotions. In this respect, future research in this ﬁeld has to transcend the Durkheimian tradition. Nevertheless, Fish has ably demonstrated the fecundity and continued relevance of this tradition in contemporary sociology.

Mike Hawkins

E. Dubreucq. Une éducation républicaine. Marion, Buisson, Durkheim, Paris: Vrin. 2004. pp. 236.

After the defeat of 1870, the politicians of the fledgling Republican regime were determined that it should last. Accordingly, they saw as a high priority the education of the rising generation. They aspired to a liberalization of the educational system. By 1889 successive laws decreed a minimum com- pulsory, free and secular education for all. A ‘republican’ curriculum cen- tred on France and French culture comprised sixty per cent of the programme. Civics and moral education displaced religious education, except for a brief mention of God. Henri Marion, Ferdinand Buisson and Emile Durkheim, the subjects of this book, were broadly in sympathy, in their theorizing on education, with Republican objectives and the means deployed to achieve them. All three had taught for a while in schools, although not at primary level. Buisson had, however, been a schools inspector, and then the top Ministry official charged with primary education. He succeeded Marion in 1896 in the Sorbonne chair of pedagogy, but later entered politics; Durkheim took over his courses and later his post. Buisson was therefore the most qualified by experience to combine theory and practice. Durkheim, however, had an all-embracing interest in education, mounting courses for primary as well as secondary teachers. He also exerted influ- ence not only through Buisson, with whom he remained in contact but also 133 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 134

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through Ministry ofﬁcials such as Liard, then in charge of higher education, and moderate socialist politicians such as Millerand and Painlevé. Dubreucq embarks on a chronological comparison of the three educational theorists, dubbed ‘Republican educators’. Marion approached theory from the psychological viwpoint (but one that did not involve social psychology, a social science then in its infancy). His ‘doctrine’ was one of rationalism, concerned with exploring the nature of children and applying it to schooling—the author characterizes him as the pédagogue philosophe. Instruction was not so much the use of appropriate techniques as something always proceeding on principle. Moral teaching was more important than the three Rs. Moral laws had to be systematized in pedagogical action. Thus pedagogy was in fact an applied science as well as an art—and science is concerned with truth. Marion’s inﬂuence waned when Buisson came on the scene. In contrast with Marion. Buisson was the philosophe pédagogue. His approach could best be decribed as humanist. It chimed well with Republican ideals— themselves traceable back to the Enlightenment—of rationalism and liberty. Buisson wanted an education for maximum personal development—physical, mental and moral—an aspiration he believed to be intu- itively innate in the young. It should also emancipate, giving autonomy but recognizing reasonable authority. It would be otiose to detail the author’s comments upon Durkheim’s theory of eductaion as socialization. One can only indicate a few gaps. One would have liked more on how the problem of the conscience collective was relevant to the problem of moral education in a new and secular state; on the relationship of patriotism to universalism and its place in the Republi- can curriculum; or how specialization in education, with its class over- tones, was reconcilable with the division of labour, to mention only a few aspects that concerned educators. In view of the title of the book, the author might have more closely established the links between theory and practical problems. But his work, after all, is a philosophical treatise. Col- laboration with a historian of education might well have been rewarding. Nevertheless, the book is well worth reading. Every paragraph gives cause to ponder because the thought is so condensed. It is also well written. It is one of the few works on educational theories that one wishes could have been longer.

W. D. Halls

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Annette Becker. Maurice Halbwachs. Un intellectuel en guerres mondiales, 1914-1945. Paris: Agnès Viénot. 2003. pp. 478.

Le livre est construit autour d’un paradoxe: le peu de place que tient la réflexion sur la guerre dans l’œuvre d’Halbwachs par rapport à l’importance que les deux guerres mondiales ont eues pour lui et sa famille. En particulier, Annette Becker, historienne de la grande guerre, est frappée par le peu de références à la guerre dans les travaux d’Halbwachs sur la mémoire collective, écrits alors même que se construisait la mémoire de la guerre, notamment à travers les monuments aux morts et divers rituels de commémoration. Lors de ses travaux antérieurs, Annette Becker s’est intéressée non seulement à ces aspects négligés par Halbwachs mais aussi aux mouvements humanitaires et opposés à la guerre, dont certains des principaux acteurs étaient très proches d’Halbwachs, notamment sa soeur et son beau-père. Halbwachs lui-même, bien que ne s’étant pas opposé à la guerre, fut cependant réformé pour cause de mauvaise vue. Lors de la deuxième guerre également, l’attitude relativement conformiste d’Halb- wachs contraste avec celle de son fils résistant et finalement avec le destin même d’Halbwachs qui mourut en déportation, après avoir été arrêté plus pour ses relations familiales que pour ses propres activités. Si le livre représente une mine d’informations sur le milieu familial, intellectuel et politique de la période de maturité d’Halbwachs, l’auteur ne pré- tend pas ‘traiter en profondeur des aspects philosophiques de l’œuvre’ (p197), pour lesquels elle renvoie à Ricoeur. La perspective de l’auteur est au contraire de considérer l’œuvre d’Halbwachs dans le contexte de son expérience de la guerre –qui en fait se résume à son oubli dans les deux livres sur la mémoire, à un traitement limité dans ‘Les causes du suicide’ et aussi à la topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre Sainte’, publié sous l’occupation allemande –ce dont Annette Becker souligne le courage car le livre reflétait les affinités d’Halbwachs avec le judaïsme par sa belle-famille. A maintes reprises, la mince place faite à la guerre par Halbwachs dans ses écrits est en contraste avec son impact sur la société française, la vie et la mort d’Halbwachs et de ses proches mais aussi avec le traitement de la guerre par des auteurs contemporains tels que Durkheim et Marc Bloch. Cette impasse sur la guerre est expliquée de deux manières. Avec un tour psychanalytique, Becker explique d’abord le silence d’Halbwachs concer- nant la guerre par un sentiment de culpabilité pour son absence de participation au combat. Son analyse s’appuie sur des textes théoriques de l’entre-deux guerres, notamment ‘Le Conteur’ de Benjamin qui associe le déclin de l’art de conter avec l’incommensurable expérience de la guerre et avec la césure entre la société d’avant-quatorze et celle d’après-guerre. L’autre explication est d’ordre théorique et se base sur l’article de synthèse ‘La doctrine d’Emile Durkheim’ écrit par Halbwachs en 1919 peu après la mort du maître. Dans cet article, Halbwachs explique comment Durkheim délimita pour la sociologie un territoire entre l’histoire et la psychologie, laissant ‘la succession concrète des événements’ à la première et ‘l’homme 135 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 136

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intérieur’ à la seconde. Comme le fait remarquer Annette Becker, si Halb- wachs adhérait à cette doctrine, il était curieusement insensible à la dis- tance prise vis-à-vis de l’histoire traditionnelle par ses collègues et amis de l’université de Strasbourg, Bloch et Febvre, qui l’invitèrent pourtant à col- laborer aux ‘Annales’. De même, Annette Becker regrette que Halbwachs ne se soit pas plus intéressé à Freud, ce qui l’aurait aidé à comprendre son expérience personnelle et à la relier aux événements historiques. C’est ainsi que dans ‘Les causes du suicide’, le seul ouvrage où il consacre une place relativement importante à la guerre, Halbwachs ne considère celle-ci que dans le cadre d’une analyse de la relation du suicide aux crises en général: comme pendant les autres crises, le nombre de suicides a baissé pendant la guerre avant de remonter immédiatement après. Le livre est une contribution majeure à l’étude de tout un pan de la vie intellectuelle et universitaire française entre les deux guerres mondiales. Il est dommage sans doute que l’analyse des œuvres d’Halbwachs se focalise plus sur leurs manques que sur leur intérêt pour l’historien ou le sociologue de la mémoire. Malgré cela, la vaste fresque que peint Annette Becker des rapports d’Halbwachs et des siens face à la guerre amène à reconsidérer l’oeuvre dans la perspective des bouleversements de la société française et des succès et drames personnels.

Jean de Lannoy

Jeffrey Alexander. The Meanings of Social Life, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. pp. 296. Randall Collins. Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2004. pp. 464.

These books represent major statements by two of the most important American sociological theorists, and it is of great satisfaction to those inter- ested in Durkheim that both theorists should be classiﬁed within the tradition that the great Frenchman created. Both begin with Durkheim’s Elementary Forms and the theory of ritual and symbolism contained therein. Their differences lie in what they add to that core and what it becomes as a result. Collins wants a theory of ritual that can be used to examine a far wider range of social action than the formal religious rituals described in the Ele- mentary Forms. He therefore calls on Goffman’s mechanics of the interaction ritual to augment Durkheim’s theory. Ritual can be formal or natural, stereotyped and formulaic (thereby potentially more powerful in its effects, but also subject to the danger of mere empty ceremonialism) or situational and non-scripted (though not merely spontaneous). In both cases, it consists 136 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 137

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of four main ingredients: (1) physical co-presence of participants, (2) exclu- sion of outsiders, (3) a collective focus on the same object or activity, and (4) a shared emotional mood (Collins 48). Once this is understood, rituals can then be evaluated according to the amount and variety of emotional energy (EE) they generate. Those that are successful at building up high levels of rhythmic entertainment generate high EE, a long-term emotional mood of attachment to the group involved with the ritual and the associated symbols. Those that are not so successful create low EE, which man- ifests itself as long-term emotional alienation from the group and its symbols. EE, Collins suggests, can be empirically observed and measured, and, at least theoretically, an individual’s pathway through various interaction rituals and the outcomes it has produced in him/her in terms of EE can be reconstructed as an interaction ritual chain, which permits a thor- oughly sociological approach to the psychological categories of ‘personal- ity’ and ‘identity’ (118-9, 131-3). Instead of moving in the direction of a radical micro-sociology of ritual interaction, Alexander looks to the ways in which the symbolic structures generated in ritual take on an autonomous life of their own. He mixes his Elementary Forms with the hermeneutics of Geertz and newer work in narrative and genre theory in order to escape a sociology of culture that would understand culture only as an effect of structure and contribute instead to a ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology where, as in the ‘strong program’ in science studies, culture as code can be recognized as autonomous from social structure. His neo-Durkheimian cultural theory is summarized in the following three components: (1) cultural autonomy, (2) a commitment to hermeneutics, or the ‘thick description’ method of detailing the texts that make up culture, and (3) a commitment to causality via attribution of culture to specific social agents, rather than relying on abstract systems of symbolic logic as the causal agent (Alexander 13-14). It is in the third of these elements that Alexander endeavours to immunize his theory from the anti-empirical abstraction of some structuralist and poststructuralist work in culture. Where it is the ritual as subcognitive micro-structure, ultimately reducible to the physiological makeup of humans as creatures drawn to rhythmic attunement with others, that makes up the bedrock of Collins’s book, Alexander locates a base in the Durkheimian investigation of the symbolic element of ritual, most specifically in the universal binaries of sacred/profane and pure/impure sacred that Durkheim and his colleagues Mauss, Hubert, and Hertz mapped out in their most important work. His chapter on the cultural sociology of evil makes an argument the reviewer has also found of substantial interest in the past several years, i.e., even a renewed interest in the Durkheimian language of sacrality as something that can be applied as a descriptive tool outside the realm of religion is yet insuf- ficient until we recognize the duality of that conceptual tool. The sacredness of transgression and of ‘evil’ in some situations and among some groups is a powerful theoretical insight. Alexander discusses in passing several examples 137 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 138

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in contemporary popular culture that are particularly compelling, e.g., the ‘badass syndrome’ in some rock and rap subcultures (118). Both writers show their mastery as weavers of narrative in the manner in which they take on particular empirical topics and submit them to their theoretical machinery. Collins demonstrates that even topics such as sexual drive and the effects of substances on the body, the seeming domain of the biological sciences, can be better understood via a concentration on interaction rituals. Evolutionary biological theories of sexual motivation posit a gender difference, males motivated by individual pleasure-seeking, females by repro- duction and mate-selectivity, but Collins shows that both men and women are motivated by emotional energy garnered from sexual interaction rituals. The clients of prostitutes, who might seem the prototype of the individual pleasure-seeker, desire at least the simulation of a successful interaction ritual and even young males who seek sexual conquests divorced from emotional attachment do so at least in part because of the ritual energy this generates for them in interaction with other male peers (Collins 229, 237). Likewise, the use of substances such as tobacco, linked with increasing suc- cess today to discourses of physical addiction, must be understood as a ritual process. Collins carefully traces the social history of various forms of tobacco use and describes a number of ritual forms of its ingestion: relaxation, carous- ing, and elegance rituals. Each creates emotional energy for participants which can even be fed on later in solitary tobacco use (305-6, 317-19). But perhaps the most insightful of Collins’s application chapters deals with stratification. Here, he takes a position certain to win him few friends among the macro-structural, quantitative sociologists who currently domi- nate the American field of stratification, as he argues that their construction of ‘abstract scaffolding[s] of hierarchy manifested in a shell of objective- looking quantitative data’ does not in fact strike at the empirical heart of stratification (258). Categorical identities (e.g., white, black, male, female, upper-class, lower-class), which are those assumed to be of overwhelming centrality by the macro-sociologists of stratification, are of variable value in micro-situational encounters. It may be that in formal rituals, which rely on scripted and ceremonial forms of interaction, those categorical identities are central. But in natural rituals, the numerically more prevalent form of ritual, this is not obviously the case (272). How otherwise to explain e.g., the often largely female administrative assistant and clerical staff who defer in the abstract to their (often male) bosses but in fact exercise vast amounts of power over the actual operation of many bureaucratic organizations and can in fact frustrate many of the designs of those bosses when they choose to do so (286)? Or the middle-class whites, operating according to the Goff- manian code of interaction rituals based on required manifestations of respect and deference to others, who defer in public places to lower-class minorities, who are more likely to act according to a ‘code of the streets’ that valorizes confrontation (283)? The empirical chapters in Alexander’s book take on big cultural narratives and engage in Geertzian close-readings, with more attention than one 138 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 139

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finds in Geertz to the processes of ritual construction of the narratives. In discussing the Holocaust and the Watergate crisis, Alexander demonstrates how the narrative structures of these events emerge and how control of symbolic means of production affects precisely what kinds of narratives will do so. The Holocaust does not become the Holocaust until the necessary narrative work has been done to properly so define the mass-killing of Jews by the Nazis. Initially, a progressive narrative is dominant. This is dri- ven by the American state’s near complete control of the definition of events and it locates the importance of the Jewish killings as one of a number of evils beneath the aegis of a broader Nazi evil that has been defeated, thus framing the killings as a ‘liberation’ from a conquered enemy (Alexan- der 38, 40). The emergence of the category ‘the Holocaust’ requires a new symbolic framing of the events, this time according to a shift in the moral dimension of their definition. The radical evil of the Holocaust emerges as new groups (emerging leftist political critics of the conduct of the Allies in WWII, the nation of Israel, Jewish political and cultural groups in the United States and elsewhere) gain some access to the means of symbolic production and enlarge the circle of perpetrators of the deeds (60-66). No longer is it a matter of a delimited act, performed by a small sub-set of peo- ple in only one country, against a specific group, ethnically and socially dif- ferentiable from ‘normal’ Americans and Europeans. It now becomes a ‘sacred-evil’, an evil of such enormous dimensions that it becomes inex- plicable and impossible to locate in the familiar language of guilt and inno- cence (50). All must identify with the perpetrators and with the victims in a testimony to the radical evil lurking in all of us. A symbolic pollution is at work here, as the realm of the responsible/evil grows larger and encom- passes those who failed to act to stop the killings or materially aided the killers even in ways unknown to them. The Holocaust is ritually enshrined in this new, tragic narrative in the many memorials and museums dedicated to it. Alexander vividly describes the Holocaust museum in Wash- ington, D.C. and the ways in which it endeavours to reproduce this narrative of identity with guilty and sufferers and this symbolic structure of sacred-evil (78-9). Similarly, the events associated with the cultural symbolic structure known simply now as Watergate do not by mere definition constitute a political and cultural crisis of the first order for the American polity. They have to be made into such a thing via particular symbolic processes. This requires a significant social consensus that the thing in question is a pollution of the sacred qualities of the American polity (the centre, in the vocab- ulary of Ed Shils), not simply a political strategy for defeating opponents. Effective response to such pollution, once it is constructed as such, requires the mobilization of ‘countercentres’ that can be seen as relatively autonomous of the now at least partially polluted centre. Finally, ritualistic processes of purification are unleashed to sanctify the newly reformed centre (Alexander 157). Thus he describes the ritualistic content of the Senate Select Committee hearings in May 1973—the constant invocation of sacred 139 03-Section III 5/31/06 11:56 AM Page 140

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notions of American polity such as ‘a nation of laws, not men’, the confes- sional structure of much of the hearings, the close relationship between the sacredness of core symbols and the limits recognized by all as to how politics could be engaged in during this liminal moment of deep moral crisis. For example, Archibald Cox’s firing by Nixon during the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ of October 1973 marked an immediate increase in support for the President’s impeachment because many saw this act as a sacrilegious intru- sion into the new sacred centre of the Special Prosecutor’s Office, while a fourth article of impeachment, dealing with Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, was dropped from the final set of articles because there was yet no moral consensus on the business of the war in Vietnam. Alexander’s account of all this is brilliantly executed, rich in detail and clear in explication. In the end, he argues against the notion that Watergate created disil- lusion with the political process. On the contrary, in the short run at least, the successful ritual purification and closure increased faith in the political system, observable in the explosion afterward of unprecedented critical investigations of new potential areas of moral corruption in the centre (174). What Alexander offers here is a revised Durkheimian theory of secular ritual for contemporary societies, where we must recognize incom- pleteness and the importance of media framing (the Senate hearings were televised to the country) as central elements of the ritual process. These two superb books are essential reading for those who want to keep abreast of contemporary theoretical discourses in the social and cultural sciences, especially those that can be located in the expanding and rich vein of neo-Durkheimian theory.

Alexander T. Riley

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