Prof: Okay, so today is about the notion of
anomie.
And anomie seems to be a very simple notion.
Anomie means the state of normlessness,
and therefore it's very easy to interpret--it looks like it is
very easy to interpret anomie.
I will show that's far from the case.
In fact, Durkheim has a pretty complex notion about
abnormalities in the transition to a market economy,
in the transition to modernity.
But before I do so, let me come back to the issue
of the division of labor in Durkheim.
Though he stages the book with the idea of collective
conscience, and goes long lengths
explaining why he's using law as an indicator of collective
conscience-- and we discussed that at great
lengths-- when it comes to describing the
crucial differences between mechanical and organic
solidarity, he doesn't make much out of it
really.
>
What drives the analysis of this distinction,
right, pre-modern and modern societies,
to put it in other words--the crucial criteria is actually the
division of labor.
What drives the story is the division of labor.
So in this sense, in fact, I think Durkheim can
be understood as being greatly inspired by Adam Smith,
right, who also saw evolution of human societies,
as you'll recall, as a gradual evolution of the
division of labor.
Durkheim just does not offer such complex or sophisticated
periodicization of societies, like hunting/gathering,
and animal husbandry, and agricultural and commercial.
He just makes this bipolar distinction between mechanical
and organic.
But if you ask, well yes there is a difference
in the legal system.
But what is fundamentally different is the division of
labor.
Right?
Mechanical solidarity has little division of labor,
based on similarity of the actors in the society.
Organic solidarity has a great deal of division of labor,
and a great deal of dissimilarity of the action.
And this is puzzling, because the question is,
if it is such a high level of division of labor,
and such a great diversity, where on earth solidarity will
come from, how we hang together?
So that's, I think--we should appreciate how important the
division of labor for Smith from Durkheim was.
By the way, in some ways, even the early Marx,
in The German Ideology, also tried his periodicization
of society with the division of labor.
So I think this is also the influence of Adam Smith.
So I think there is a clear Adam Smith impact on the work of
Durkheim, on the types of solidarity.
There is also another issue I would like to mention.
I pointed out how important, right, Montesquieu was for
Durkheim.
And it's obvious.
He acknowledges his debt to Montesquieu,
starts the book with collective conscience and the notion of--
and law as the best empirically observable indicator of this
collective conscience comes, of course, directly to
Montesquieu.
But there is another less frequently noticed impact of
Montesquieu on Durkheim, and that makes actually
Durkheim a very interesting author for us today.
As I mentioned, he primarily has an impact
today with his later work as the cultural analyst.
But in his early work, he responded to another
stimulating idea of Montesquieu, and that is the interaction
between social system and the environment,
and the ecological system.
I went at some lengths in the lecture on Montesquieu to show
how important it was, and how unique Montesquieu's
contribution was-- how important it is for us
Durkheim actually has a much more sophisticated and complex
understanding of the relationship between environment
and society, and the type of solidarity,
and the division of labor in society.
Unfortunately, this is sort of a neglected
element in Durkheim.
Too bad because, in fact, the problem of
environment and studying environment should be a central
issue in economics, political science,
sociology and anthropology.
And it is not quite as central as it should be,
especially I think in political science and sociology and
anthropology.
The study of environment is too narrowly focused on
environmental social movements.
Well Durkheim has a different interesting take,
which I think should inspire social researchers;
be they economists, political scientists,
sociologists or anthropologists.
What is it?
Durkheim, in The Division of Labor, has a core of an idea
what one can call the ecosystem.
Right?
He sees an inter-relationship between the physical
environment, the size of population which
lives in this physical environment,
the technology which is used in this environment and the
division of labor, and the type of social
organization what we have, what kind of social solidarity
you have.
Let me just put this on the blackboard.
I think this is rarely noticed.
You will rarely hear in Durkheim's lectures,
or rarely read about this when you read about Durkheim.
So the idea is that you have the environment,
you have the population, you have technology,
and you have social organization,
and these constitute a system, right, which interacts with
each other; and what ought to be studied is
really this whole system.
And, of course, technology has a lot to do with
division of labor.
Right?
And that's what can be called the ecosystem.
He doesn't call it this way, but environmental researchers
would call it today as the ecosystem.
And I think this is an extremely productive way for
social scientists to think about the problems of the environment.
Right?
And let me give you an example.
Why don't you think about Southern California?
Right?
Southern California, before the Europeans appeared
on the scene, right, was a very dry
climate--suffered from the lack of water resources.
So the Los Angeles Basin probably could accommodate a
livelihood for something like 20,000 people.
Right?
These 20,000 people, right, lived in this very arid
environment, used very elementary technologies,
and had a very limited division of labor.
So the population size was greatly affected with the
technology and the environment.
And they had mechanical solidarity.
Right?
That was the way how society was organized.
Now today we've figured out how to solve the hydraulic problems
for the Los Angeles Basin, for the time being.
Don't hold your breath because in no time we may have a major
crisis.
So in the same basin where 20,000 people lived,
now twenty million people live.
But they live at a very high level of technology,
where we successfully pollute the air,
which is, right, hard to breathe in downtown Los
Angeles during a hot summer day.
Right?
And we have, of course, organic solidarity
operating.
Right?
And we managed to screw the environment, thank you,
quite nicely.
And we keep doing it, in no time the LA Basin will be
uninhabitable.
Right?
That's why I think it is interesting to think about this
Durkheimian idea of ecosystem, how it interacts.
As I said, it would offer you a very rigorous,
right, scientific framework to study the interaction,
right, between social organization,
the demographic problem, the technological issues,
right, and its relationship; how we can live,
if we can, peacefully with the environment.
Anyway, just a backdrop because, to show again the
centrality of the division of labor for Durkheim.
Now today I will talk about anomie.
And anomie is one of the abnormal consequences of the
division of labor.
And well this is one of the troubling aspects of Durkheim's
work--the whole idea of abnormality or social
pathologies.
And he has been criticized about this a great deal.
How do we know what is abnormal, and how on earth can
we tell what is the normal state of society?
Pathology does assume, right, that social researchers
have some way how to judge what is the healthy condition for
society.
And this comes from Durkheim's early functionalism,
as I said.
Right?
He was greatly influenced by biology.
He was not a biologist by any means.
But as I pointed out, the whole metaphor of organic
solidarity uses the human body, right, as the example.
Right?
How in the human body diverse organs depend on each other to
reproduce each other.
And therefore the word pathology is also borrowed from
medical sciences.
Society will have pathological features as well,
and there are abnormalities in society--
and somehow believes that social researchers will be able
to establish what abnormality is and what pathologies are.
This is, I think, troubling for most social
scientists, right, because we seem to have
some commitment to at least value neutral type of analysis,
right, in which we do not label necessarily phenomena out.
Right?
We know labeling theory; you may have heard about it.
You label something as criminal or abnormal, simply because it's
probably unusual in society.
But what was abnormal in one society may become absolutely
normal in another society.
So you have to be extremely careful, right,
with the notion of normal and abnormal.
Let's say being gay, until fairly recently,
was seen--I mean, except antiquity,
but for most human societies and most cultures,
being gay is seen as a kind of abnormal behavior.
Today very few people will think about this,
at least in a country like the United States,
that somebody gay is abnormal.
Right?
So what sexual behavior is normal or abnormal depends on
the times.
Right?
It's really not the job of the social scientist to be able to
decide what kind of sexual behavior should be called normal
or abnormal.
The best we can do, why on earth some people call
some sexual practices abnormal and others normal?
Why is there differences in a society, accepting some kind of
sexual behaviors and not others?
Right?
That is a question what social scientists could study.
Anyway, this is I think clearly a problem for contemporary
social scientists with Durkheim's work.
But anyway he did believe that he is capable to show that some
abnormal developments do take place.
He was especially, as I pointed already in last
lecture out, on the transition from
mechanical to organic solidarity,
and when that happened, then pathologies could emerge.
And again, put it into the social context.
Durkheim is writing in the 1890s and early 1900s.
He's in Bordeaux, and then he's moving to Paris,
the city of the sin, right, and he sees all the
signs of social pathologies.
Right?
Alcoholism and homelessness and prostitution and theft and
crime, which was inexistent or much rarer in rural France,
just a couple of decades ago.
So he's confronted, right, with massive phenomena,
which is being seen as abnormal or pathological,
and he identifies them as the results of the transition from
mechanical to organic solidarity.
Well pathologies can have two different roots.
And what we normally understand from Durkheim,
that he identifies pathologies from the absence of rules.
That's what the term anomie refers to.
But interestingly enough--I have the citations for you,
and if you have read the text carefully you found the
citations as well-- he actually also does consider
that pathologies can also result from the overregulation,
right, of too forced division of labor.
I think it's very intriguing to see this.
Because we normally counterpose Marx's theory of alienation and
Durkheim's theory of anomie as Durkheim is complaining there is
not enough regulation in society,
while Marx is arguing there is too much regulation in society.
And I will give you a number of citations now from Durkheim
which actually will show that the difference between Marx and
Weber is not such gigantic as we initially may have thought,
or generally would assume.
Durkheim is quite sensitive to some of the Marxian analysis,
even to the Marxian notion of alienation.
He doesn't use the term, but he gets very close to it.
So let me just move on further and talk about pathologies which
are coming from the absence of rules.
Well, and I will briefly say this interesting idea that in
fact division of labor can be the source of solidarity.
As I said, this is counterintuitive.
We did believe that solidarity comes from relatively
small-sized communities where people are relatively similar,
share the same values and the same system,
same norms, and then they will have solidaristic feelings
towards each other.
When people are very different, they are competing on the
marketplace, they are strangers in the
cities, they don't know each other,
they subscribe to different values,
or they even don't know what values they should obey because
they are confused.
They just left the village and ended in the big and sinful
city, and they don't really quite know can I do here
anything?
Is there any control over me, or none?
It's all up to me what to do?
Even stealing is alright; selling my body is alright.
I see other people who do that.
Why don't I do it?
They are not being caught.
I probably will not be caught either.
So that is a kind of, right, under these
circumstances, when there are no similarities,
why on earth-- we will be solidaristic?
We don't know other people.
And we have these stereotypes that in urban industrial society
we are not solidaristic.
Right?
There are the usual stereotypes.
You say you go to New York City, right, and there is
somebody who is dying on the streets, and other people are
just stepping over that person.
Right?
Who cares?
You can die on the street and there will be hundreds of
passengers going by and let you die.
It's actually not true. Right?
If you ever have seen anybody feeling ill in Times Square,
there are usually a lot of people who rush over,
that say, "Are you all right?",
or this kind of stuff.
But anyway.
But you know the stereotype.
Right?
It's a usual stereotype about cities.
Anyway, so it's puzzling why a society which is so different,
anonymous, and such a high division of labor,
can be solidaristic.
Then he defines various pathologies.
And interestingly, pathology one sounds very
similar, very close to Marx.
Well there is crisis in the system, and there is increasing
class conflict, and this class conflict is
pathological.
And the second one, well--and again something which
is not all that different from old Karl Marx--
division of labor can be too excessive,
and too much division of labor can lead to pathological
consequences.
And finally his unique contribution,
that pathology can come from the lack of regulation,
and that's what he calls anomie.
Now let me work on this, and also the concept of anomie
a little more.
So here it is: the division of labor as a
source of solidarity.
Right?
He said, well normally the division of labor produces
social solidarity.
Well but it can happen that there are the opposite results.
Right?
So therefore, he said, "When we know
when division of labor creates social solidarity,
then we will be better equipped to figure out when actually
social solidarity has pathological consequences."
And as you can see from the citation, he directly cites the
medical metaphor.
Right?
"Here, as elsewhere, pathology is a precious
ancillary to physiology."
So you start with the physiology of society.
You identify when it works normally, and then you will be
able to show when it is pathological.
Right?
That's the fundamental idea.
And this is, in a way, how he tries to get
off the hook of the problem that he's actually capable to tell
what is pathological.
All right, now the first pathology is actually about
class conflict.
He said, well--and I think Marx would not have been particularly
unhappy with this citation, right?
"As labor becomes increasingly divided,
there are commercial crises, there are bankruptcies,
there is hostility between labor and capital,
and then all these conflicts become more frequent."
Right?
"Well in traditional societies, in mechanical
solidarities, well these class conflicts were
rare and unusual."
Well today they are not all that unusual.
And he uses the term working class.
Right?
He said, "Part of the working class do not really
desire the status assigned to them." Right?
Well not quite the theory of exploitation,
but certainly an expression that too high level of division
of labor, in absence of other,
can create intense class conflict,
which is a pathological consequence of high division of
labor.
Then he goes on and he writes about "excessive division
of labor."
Well he has not read the Paris Manuscripts;
which was not published, of course, for fourteen more
years after he died.
But, yes, you have read the Paris Manuscripts,
and you can see these interesting parallels.
"The individual will isolate himself in his own
activity.
He will no longer be aware of the collaborator who worked at
his side on the same task.
He has even not longer any idea at all what the common task
consists."
Well is not this miraculous?
He could not have the faintest idea that a work called the
Paris Manuscripts exists.
Right?
And here what is being described is getting very,
very close to the idea of alienation, right?
And in fact comes very close to the Marxian notion of
alienation--not the Hegelian one, the Marian notion.
Because he roots it into excessive division of labor.
Too much market, right, too much competition,
creates this situation.
So I think this is miraculous.
And very often these sentences are kind of skipped over as a
kind of throwaway line, by Durkheim.
It isn't.
It is very important to identify what his unique
contribution is.
And this is indeed the emphasis that a pathology can occur out
of the lack of regulation, and lack of regulation means
anomie.
Well he said, "Well it is not necessary
for social life to be without struggle."
Struggle in itself is not that bad at all.
"The role of organic solidarity is not to abolish
competition, but to moderate it." Right?
Well I just want to remind you, this in a way reminds us to
Adam Smith, right?
His sympathetic theory of human nature.
Right?
Well, unlimited competition is not right.
Right?
Unlimited egoistic behavior is not right.
We have to be sympathetic to the other person.
Right?
We are struggling for recognition by others.
Right?
That is the idea where there is a similarity in Durkheim's and
Adam Smith's analysis.
But then he continues.
"But in some cases", and this is crucial,
"the regulatory process which moderates competition
either does not exist at all, or not related to the degree of
development of the division of labor."
It is insufficient.
There are either no regulations, or not enough
regulations.
"If then division of labor does not produce solidarity,
it is because the relationship between organs are not
regulated.
And this is what I call anomie."
Right?
And again you see the social context?
This is exactly coming from the empirical reference point:
Rural young people get on the train and then get off the train
in Gare Lazare, Saint Lazare,
and then they walk into the street in wild Paris,
the sinful city of Paris, and they are lost.
Suddenly their value system, what they were told back home
in the village, collapses.
Right?
Back in the village they knew exactly what they are supposed
to do.
Everybody knew them, and they also knew if they are
breaking the laws, right, of the community,
they will be immediately punished.
Because there will be gossip spreading around,
and get back to home, and mom and dad will exactly
hear what you have done on the street,
what you were not supposed to do.
Now you are in Paris.
Nobody has the faintest idea who you are.
And even you don't know what other people expect from you.
Right?
It looks like this is the realm of freedom;
you can do anything. Right?
Well back home in the village, if you were engaged you better
do not hold hands with another partner on the street.
Right?
and to her parents or his parents, and your parents
immediately, and there will be a scandal.
Well if you are walking on Boul'Mich,
you can do anything.
You can hold the hand of anybody.
You can kiss anybody. Right?
Nobody knows who you are. Right?
So that's it.
That is the problem, right?
Of anomie, that people enter in a society in which they are
lost.
Well let me just labor a little longer on the idea.
And here again see that even the notion of anomie,
it's probably--I don't know whether,
how much he's making his argument too complex,
or Marx's idea of alienation was too complex.
But you can see here again some similarities,
even between anomie and the Marxian notion of alienation.
He said, "The division of labor may reduce the worker to
the role of a machine.
He's not aware of where the operations required of him are
leading, and he does not link them to any aim."
Whoa.
"Every day he repeats the same movements,
with monotonous regularity, but without having any
understanding-- interest in understanding of
them."
Well, how interesting. Right?
That's where, in Durkheim's thinking,
the lack of norms or values, the collapse of the value
system, leading to.
And for him--of course, that's a big difference--
the solution is to fix the system of values,
right, to fix the system of norms, and then you solve the
problem of anomie.
But he also said that, "Look, anomie is not an
inevitable consequence of the division of labor."
Right?
Well he has a conception that division of labor can be forced,
and can be excessive.
Right?
There must be elements in the collective conscience which
moderate, right?
The competitive elements of the division of labor.
But if those institutions--cultural,
legal, moral, ethical institutions--are in
place, then in fact the division of labor will not produce
anomie; it only will produce such if
there is no such systems.
But then he said, "Do not read me as a
romantic.
I don't want to idealize the village community,
where these boys and girls, in Gare Lazare,
are coming out of the train." Right?
"I don't want to send them back to the rural village.
I'm not advocating a return from organic solidarity to
mechanical solidarity.
All what I am showing, under what circumstances there
are pathological consequences, right, in organic solidarity.
And therefore we have to find the proper medication,
the proper cocktail of drugs, by which we can cure this
disease."
Right?
That is the key idea.
Well now another very interesting argument;
which is usually neglected in reading Durkheim.
He said, "Look, there are pathologies in
society which are coming from overregulation and forced
division of labor."
Well this is already in The Division of Labor.
But a crucial text is in fact the so-called "Second
Introduction into The Division of Labor."
Durkheim received a lot of criticism of the First Edition
of The Division of Labor--was criticized of
being too conservative politically.
And that's when he wrote the "Second Introduction to
The Division of Labor."
And if you are interested at all in Durkheim,
you have to read the "Second Introduction"-
the introduction to the Second Edition of The Division of
Labor.
Because here he tries to offer some,
quote/unquote, progressive solution to the
problems of anomie, and the nature of solidarity in
organic societies-- how to overcome the problem of
class conflicts in modern society.
And there his idea is that really these solidarities--
this is the idea he develops in the introduction to the Second
Edition-- that we are becoming
solidaristic within our professions.
These are the professional organizations in which we will
find our identities and solidarities.
So he actually sees the good society as evolving into a
multiplicity of professional organizations,
in which people fit into these professional environments,
and do have a strong professional identity and
solidaristic attitudes towards the profession.
This is, right, a radically different idea,
right, from the--it's not dealing with markets,
not messing up with the markets, or not messing up too
much with the markets, to put it this way. Right?
Professional organizations, if they are effective,
they do mess up with the markets.
Right?
American Medical Association does mess up,
because it's a kind of trade union,
right, which makes sure that the doctors' interests are being
particularly represented.
Anyway, this is the "Second Introduction."
But what is interesting in this citation is that he said,
"Well, pathology can emerge actually from an
excessive level of regulation, or forced division of
labor."
And he introduces another notion here, and this is
fatalism.
So there are these two different pathologies of modern
societies.
One is emerging in the transition from mechanical to
organic solidarity, given the absence of commonly
shared values, and that's anomie.
And there is another possible--on the other end of
the scale you have too excessive regulation,
and then people become fatalistic because then they
think there is nothing what they can do.
Right?
Anomie is when you can say, "Anything goes;
I can get away with anything.
Right?
Or you are desperate, because you don't know what on
earth you want to do with yourself.
Fatalism is when you think well I have no control over my life.
I am over-regulated. Right?
And then you become fatalistic.
It doesn't matter.
Nothing matters because it's overregulated.
Okay.
Now let me just very briefly compare these three ideas of
Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.
Well I hope I did not confuse you too much with some of the
citations, which are quite counterintuitive.
But it's important to see the sophistication of the analysis.
The bottom line, after all, is he said,
"Look, my unique contribution to the study of
pathologies of modern society is the theory of anomie,
which says that temporarily, in this transition,
we have a problem of absence of rules.
This will be overcome, because there is no reason why
a properly moderated competition and division of labor could not
create actually very high levels of solidarity."
And the mechanism, he suggests in the "Second
Introduction," is creation of professional
organizations and slotting people into professional
communities, as such.
They are not going back to the villages,
but they will be sort of belonging to professional
communities and having solidaristic ideas and
identities there.
So this is kind of the bottom line.
He is sensitive to the problems what Marx is talking about.
He understands that yes, modern society does create
class conflicts, and this is a problem because
the working class very often feels ill-treated--
doesn't use the term exploited, but is unhappy with the
position assigned to it.
So he sees this is a problem.
He also sees the problem that excessive division of labor may
create a sense of--he doesn't use the term,
but really what he means--alienation.
Right?
And he also is quite aware that too much regulation also can
create a pathological state of mind: fatalism.
So but the major contribution is, as I've said,
anomie is insufficient regulation in society.
This is his unique contribution.
Well alienation, as we have seen,
is more like fatalism, right, in Durkheim.
It comes from too much regulation.
And then we have Weber's notion of disenchantment,
right, the loss of the enchanted garden.
This is all coming--the kind of mood or feel,
the human condition under modernity.
Right?
These are three different takes.
For Weber, it is the loss of magic, right,
and in a way the conversion of the dance and all-sided human
relationships into instrumental relationships.
I think I briefly mentioned in the lecture on alienation,
and probably also lecture on Weber,
that this is actually very similar to the ideas of Georg
and who developed the theory of reification.
Weber is developing the theory of disenchantment,
what is the problem of modernity.
That we lost the enchanted garden--
that we are too rationalistic, too cold,
from Hegel to Marx, and invents the idea of
reification.
And they happen to both live at that time in Heidelberg,
time, in his twenties,
was a frequent guest in the Weber house,
in the salon run by Marianne Weber.
unique interpretation of Marx's theory of alienation--
that human relationships are becoming reified--
and Weber's notion of instrumentalization of life,
which is I think distinctly different both from the theory
of anomie and alienation.
Okay, a final note on Durkheim's theory of human
nature; what was his theory of human
nature?
And here we can see a sharp distinction between Marx and
Weber.
Marx, mainly following Rousseau's line,
basically believed that--he did not have the notion of state of
nature any longer; by the mid-nineteenth century
people got tired and got rid of it.
But he used the term species being--what is the essence,
human essence?
Well he said essentially humans are fine.
It is the society which is the problem, not the individual.
So this is exactly the Rousseauian inspiration in Marx.
Society corrupts.
In the state of nature we were good--and Marx even adds--I
think I already made this point, but let me underline one more
time.
He goes beyond Rousseau.
Because Rousseau saw the noble savage as a savage,
as an individual who has to be brought into society.
At that point Marx disagrees with Rousseau.
He sees we were born in society; we are social by nature. Right?
So we are not only good, but we are also social.
And it is society which corrupts us, which creates us
egoistic individuals who will compete with each other and will
kill each other.
Right?
This is exactly the opposite, right, of Hobbes,
and a big step beyond Rousseau's theory of human
nature.
Now Durkheim is actually much closer to Hobbes in his notion
of human nature, because he believes,
right, that social pathologies emerge when there is a vacuum of
control over people.
That's when you have crime and suicide and prostitution and
whatever.
And therefore he had a skeptical view of human nature.
Unless we are controlled, then we can be evil.
Right?
That is the fundamental issue.
Right?
What you have to fix is making sure that individuals develop
the proper value system.
Thank you very much, and have a wonderful
Thanksgiving's break.
Yes, see you the last week of the semester.