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Anomie and His Spray Tan: the Life, Work, and Contemporary

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Anomie and His Spray Tan: the Life, Work, and Contemporary Anomie and His Spray Tan: The Life, Work, and Contemporary Relevance of Émile Durkheim Caity Rose Campana RLG 6013: Modern Analysis of Religion Professor Whitney Bauman 12 December 2019 1 “…Religion must be an eminently collective thing.”1 These few words, which bring an unsentimental end to the first chapter of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, reflect the essence of Émile Durkheim’s theory of religion. It is this ardent focus on the social aspects of life, culture, identity construction, and being in the world that not only set Durkheim apart, but cement his position as one of the architects of modern sociology. While a comprehensive review of this theorist’s life and work is certainly beyond the 6,000-word scope of this paper, the goal of the next twenty pages is to briefly examine Durkheim’s background, highlight the most compelling and unique elements of his theories and methodology, and apply those elements to several contemporary issues. Among these topics are questions relating to the global environmental crisis, pluralism, and globalization (with a particular focus on the recent proliferation of nationalist and isolationist policies around the world). If anything, this essay seeks to explore why it is that Durkheim’s name, regardless of whether or not one agrees with his ideas, appears to always have a place—out of respect or otherwise—in academic discussions of society, religion, and culture. In doing so, my hope is twofold: (1) to transport Durkheim’s conceptual framework into a modern arena, thereby rendering it more accessible and relevant, and (2) to ensure that Durkheim’s contributions to the field of religious studies are understood not simply in their own historical and sociological context, but also in the context of their many critiques. Beginning with a short study of Durkheim’s upbringing, career, influences, and significant lived experiences, the paper then shifts its focus to the theoretical. This second section is primarily concerned with delineating those tenets with which Durkheim is so closely associated, such as the concepts of collective effervescence and social integration; it also 1 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 44. 2 introduces several notable criticisms of the thinker’s work. Finally, through the contemporary shift mentioned above, the third section aims to explain—and, in some ways, defend— Durkheim’s importance to religious studies, and, more broadly, the humanities. Historical Location David Émile Durkheim was born in Épinal, France in 1858—a place and time shaped by two major revolutions—to a devout Jewish family. His father, a rabbi, ensured that he received a religious education befitting a young member of the Jewish community. As he matured, Durkheim came to identify as an atheist, but never denied or distanced himself from the heritage that shaped his formative years. As a young adult, he attended the prestigious École normale supérieure in Paris; after graduating, he began teaching philosophy at various lycées, or secondary schools.2 Of note here is the year Durkheim devoted to studying in Paris, Berlin, Marburg, and, finally, Leipzig, where he worked with the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. Out of this period came several of the theorist’s articles on German academia and philosophy, which helped establish “his credentials as a promising social scientist.”3 The year 1887 brought about several changes for Durkheim; he became a professor at the University of Bordeaux and married—in a “religious ceremony blessed by the Chief Rabbi of Paris”4—a wealthy woman named Louise Julie Dreyfus, with whom he had two children. Durkheim published his doctoral dissertation (and first book), The Division of Labor in Society, in 1893; this was followed by the release of The Rules of Sociological Method in 1895 and Suicide in 1897. Though controversial 2 Alexandra Maryanski, Émile Durkheim and the Birth of the Gods (New York: Routledge, 2018), 42. 3 Ibid., 52. 4 Ibid., 55. 3 at first, Durkheim was preoccupied with social science and sought to establish sociology as a legitimate discipline. One of the ways he did this was through collaboration with other scholars on the popular academic journal L’Anee sociologique. Perhaps the most significant moment of Durkheim’s life in terms of academic achievement, he was named a professor at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) in 1902; ten years later, he published The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. After the outbreak of World War I, which naturally had the most severe impact on France and Germany, Durkheim found himself in a politically divisive climate. He lost his son to the war late in 1915, a misfortune that spurred a sharp decline in his health and scholarly output. Durkheim died of a stroke in 1917, five years after the publication of Elementary Forms, which would become his most widely cited and impressive work.5 Life events are integral to understanding how a theorist’s work developed. For Durkheim, three are prominent. The former two have more to do with an overall climate or state, while the third is a proper event; regardless, they all had an outsize impact on his interests, theory, and personal outlook. First, Durkheim’s location as a European (but specifically French) thinker in the late 19th century is consequential, as his country had experienced a whirlwind of transformation, some of it quite bloody, in the form of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. These changes brought about mass migrations away from rural areas and into cities, great shifts in wealth distribution, and what could be characterized as a religious identity crisis in the wake of major scientific developments. Daniel Pals outlines four patterns Durkheim observed in and about this specific national and cultural setting: 1. In place of Europe’s traditional social system, laced together as it was by ties of family, community, and religious faith, a new “contractual” order was emerging, in which private concerns and money-related interests seemed to predominate. 2. In the realm of morals and behavior, the sacred values once sanctioned by the Church 5 Daniel L. Pals, Nine Theories of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 83-84. 4 were now challenged by newer ideals, which stressed reason over religious faith and a desire for a happiness in this life over any hope of Heaven (or fear of Hell) in the life to come. 3. In the sphere of politics, the emergence of the democratic masses at the bottom of society and a powerful central state at the top had changed the nature of social control. Individuals were finding themselves disconnected from their old moral teachers—the family, village, and Church—and were left to find what guidance they could from political parties, mass movements, and the state. 4. In the area of personal affairs, this new freedom of individuals released from their old frameworks presented great opportunity and great risk. With it came the chance of greater prosperity and self-realization but also the serious threat of loneliness and personal isolation.6 These observations are significant because they (1) unsurprisingly, illuminate Durkheim’s primary concerns as social, and (2) suggest the areas of social phenomena that he may be most closely invested in studying. For example, the fourth trend, newfound freedom of individuals potentially leading to isolation, echoes Durkheim’s interest in uncovering the role of the social in suicide, an undertaking to which he dedicated an entire book (the contents of which are examined more closely in the next section). A second “fact” of sorts that shaped Durkheim’s lived experience and work, despite his being an avowed atheist, was his Jewishness. Although he was not an observant Jew, nor did he actively identify with many Jewish causes throughout his life, his upbringing and the rather illustrious line of rabbis from which he descended ensured that Judaism would always be a part of his identity. In her 1986 essay for Modern Judaism, Deborah Dash Moore argues for a Jewish reading of Durkheim as a means to better understand him in non-Jewish contexts, beginning with a note about his father: An Alsatian Jew who settled in Épinal where he served as a modern French rabbi, Moses Durkheim provided his youngest son with a model of a man of learning whose scholarly ideals embraced duty, morality and a devotion to work…Durkheim’s adoption of his French middle name, Émile, underscored his new identity. As Émile Durkheim he was intellectually no longer merely his father’s son but, as the founder of French sociology, 6 Ibid., 85-86. 5 the heir of Comte and Saint-Simon, de Tocqueville and LePlay. Most writers on Durkheim accept his transformation; they locate Durkheim’s intellectual debts in European culture, ignoring his Jewish roots. Yet Durkheim’s intellectual baggage included his early Jewish upbringing and he successfully assimilated this knowledge into his sociological writings.7 But Durkheim’s Jewishness went beyond the values instilled in him by his parents. The very act of existing as a Jewish person in the world, both then and now—no matter the level of assimilation attained—carries with it an element of otherness, the unfortunate but inarguable product of antisemitism. Durkheim was no exception, as this otherness in part shaped his understanding of integration, public identity, and the place of Jews in modern European society. Thus, viewing him not simply as a French or European scholar, but as a Jewish thinker, is necessary for understanding his approach and theory, as his “blend of politics, morality, and science intersected with a Jewish perspective on modernity.”8 A glowing example of the formative nature of Durkheim’s Jewishness is his avid Dreyfusard stance during the wildly divisive Dreyfus Affair, in which a French military officer of Alsatian-Jewish heritage—like Durkheim—was falsely accused of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment, exiled to French Guiana, and subsequently pardoned.
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