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In 1776, Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with the observation that "the greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour, and the greatest part of the skill, dexterity, and judgement with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour. " 1 Despite the numerous economic advantages thus derived, however, Smith insisted that the division of labor was not itself the effect of any human wisdom or foresight; rather, it was the necessary, albeit very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature -- "the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. " 2 Common to all men, this propensity could be found in no other animals; and, subsequently encouraged by the recognition of individual self-interest, it gave rise to differences among men more extensive, more important, and ultimately more useful than those implied by their natural endowments. More than a century later, Durkheim could observe, apparently without exaggeration, that economists upheld the division of labor not only as necessary, but as "the supreme law of human societies and the condition of their progress. 3 Greater concentrations of productive forces and capital investment seemed to lead modern industry, business, and agriculture toward greater separation and specialization of occupations, and even a greater interdependence among the products themselves. And like Smith, Durkheim recognized that this extended beyond the economic world, embracing not only political, administrative, and judicial activities, but aesthetic and scientific activities as well. Even philosophy had been broken into a multitude of special disciplines, each of which had its own object, method, and ideas. Unlike Smith, however, Durkheim viewed this "law" of the division of labor as applying not only to human societies, but to biological organisms generally.
Citing recent speculation in the "philosophy of biology" (see the works of C. F. Wolff, K. E. von Baer, and H.
Milne-Edwards), Durkheim noted the apparent correlation between the functional specialization of the parts of an organism and the extent of that organism's evolutionary development, suggesting that this extended the scope of the division of labor so as to make its origins contemporaneous with the origins of life itself. This, of course, eliminated any "propensity in human nature" as its possible cause, and implied that its conditions must be found in the essential properties of all organized matter. The division of labor in society was thus no more than a particular form of a process of extreme generality. But if the division of labor was thus a natural law, then (like all natural laws) it raised certain moral questions.
Are we to yield to it or resist it? Is it our duty to become thorough, complete, self-sufficient human beings? Or are we to be but parts of a whole, organs of an organism? In other words, is this natural law also a moral rule? If so, why, and in what degree? In Durkheim's opinion, the answers of modern societies to these and similar questions had been deeply ambivalent -- i.
e. , on the one hand, the division of labor seemed to be increasingly viewed as a moral rule, so that, in at least one of its aspects, the categorical imperative" of the modern conscience had become: Make yourself usefully fulfill a determinate function" 4; on the other hand, quite aside from such maxims endorsing specialization, there were other maxims, no less prevalent which called attention to the dangers of over -specialization, and encouraged all men to realize similar ideals. The situation was thus one of moral conflict or antagonism, and it was this which Durkheim sought first to explain and then to resolve. This in turn calls for two final observations. First, the method of this explanation and resolution was to be that of the so-called "science of ethics"; for Durkheim was convinced that moral facts like the division of labor were themselves natural phenomena -- they consisted of certain rules of action imperatively imposed upon conduct, which could be recognized, observed, described, classified, and explained. Second, this explanation itself was but a preliminary step to the solution of practical social problems; for Durkheim always conceived of societies as subject to conditions of moral "health" or "illness, " and the sociologist as a kind of "physician" who scientifically determined the particular condition of a particular society at a particular time, and then prescribed the social "medicine" necessary to the maintenance or recovery of well-being.
Durkheim's problem thus defined, his solution fell quite naturally into three principal parts: 1. the determination of the function of the division of labor; 2. the determination of the causes on which it depended; and 3. the determination of those forms of "illness" which it exhibited. The Function of the Division of Labor The word "function, " Durkheim observed, can be used in two, quite different, senses: 1. to refer to a system of vital movements (e.
g. , digestion, respiration, etc. ) without reference to the consequences of these movements; or 2. to refer to the relationship between these movements and the corresponding needs of the organism (e. g. , digestion incorporates food essential to replenish nutritional resources of the body, while respiration introduces the necessary gases into the body's tissues; etc. ). Durkheim insisted on the second usage; thus, to ask "what is the 'function' of the division of labor?" was simply to ask for the organic need which the division of labor supplied. But at first sight, the answer to this question seemed all too clear; for, as Smith had already observed, the division of labor improves both the skill of the worker and the productive power of society, and thus its "function" would simply be to produce and secure those economic, artistic. and scientific advantages subsumed under the word "civilization. " Against this, Durkheim presented two arguments.
The first, which reveals Durkheim's deep, if ambivalent, debt to Rousseau, was that, if the division of labor has no other role than to render "civilization" possible, then there would be no reason to grant it the status of a "moral" fact -- of rules of action imperatively imposed upon conduct. On the contrary, if the average number of crimes and suicides is employed as the "standard of morality, " Durkheim argued, we must conclude that immorality increases as the economy arts, and sciences progress. At its very best, therefore, civilization would be morally indifferent; and if its productions were the sole function of the division of labor, then it, too, would participate in this moral neutrality. Durkheim's second argument was that, if the division of labor has no other role than to make civilization possible, then it would have no reason for existence whatsoever; for civilization, by itself, has no intrinsic value; rather, its value is derived entirely from its correspondence to certain needs. But these needs, Durkheim argued, are themselves the product of the division of labor. If the division of labor existed only to satisfy them, its only function would be to diminish needs which it itself had created.
And this made little sense to Durkheim, for, while it might explain why we have to endure the division of labor, it would hardly be consistent with the fact that we desire occupational specialization and push it forward relentlessly. For the last to be intelligible, we must assume that the division of labor satisfies needs which the division of labor has not itself produced. What, then, are these "needs" satisfied by the division of labor? As a first step toward an answer, Durkheim posed a paradox as old as Aristotle -- that, while we like those who resemble us, we are also drawn toward those who are different, precisely because they are different. In other words, difference can be as much a source of mutual attraction as likeness. The key to resolving the paradox, Durkheim suggested, lies in recognizing that only certain kinds of differences attract -- specifically, those which, instead of excluding one another, complement one another: "If one of two people has what the other has not, but desires, in that fact lies the point of departure for a positive attraction. " 5 In other words, we seek in others what we lack in ourselves, and associations are formed wherever there is such a true exchange of services -- in short, wherever there is a division of labor.
But if this is the case, we are led to see the division of labor in a new light 6 -- the economic services it renders are trivial by comparison with the moral effect it produces. Its true function, the real need to which it corresponds, is that feeling of solidarity in two or more persons which it creates. Thus, the role of the division of labor is not simply to embellish already existing societies, but to render possible societies which, without it, would not even exist; and the societies thus created, Durkheim added, cannot resemble those determined by the attraction of like for like. Rather, they must bear the mark of their special origin. The last point laid the immediate foundations for the next step in Durkheim's argument. Thus far, he had shown only that, in advanced societies, there is a social solidarity derived from the division of labor, something already obvious from two facts: that the division of labor does produce a kind of solidarity, and that the division of labor is highly developed in advanced societies.
The question which remained was both more important and more difficult to answer: To what degree does the solidarity produced by the division of labor contribute to the general integration of society? This question was important because only by answering it could Durkheim determine whether this form of solidarity was essential to the stability of advanced societies, or was merely an accessory and secondary condition of that stability; and it was difficult because an answer required the systematic comparison of this form of solidarity with others, in order to determine how much credit, in the total effect, was due to each. Such a comparison in turn required a classification of the various types of solidarity to be compared, and here Durkheim faced one of the most formidable obstacles to his science of ethics: the fact that, as a "completely moral phenomenon, " social solidarity did not lend itself to exact observation or measurement. Durkheim's way of surmounting this obstacle was to substitute for this internal, moral fact an "external index" which symbolized it, and then to study the fact in light of the symbol. This external symbol was law -- i. e. , where social life exists, it tends to assume a definite, organized form, and law is simply the most stable and precise expression of this organization.
Law reproduces the principal forms of solidarity; and thus we have only to classify the different types of law in order to discover the different types of solidarity corresponding to them. This proposal encountered two immediate difficulties. The first was that some social relations are regulated not by law, but by custom; moreover, custom is frequently at odds with law, and thus may express an altogether different form of social solidarity. Here Durkheim resorted to one of his favorite (and least convincing) defenses -- i.
e. , the distinction between the normal and the pathological. The conflict between law and custom arises where the former no longer corresponds to existing social relations, but maintains itself by habit, while the latter corresponds to these new relations, but is denied juridical expression. But such conflict, Durkheim insisted, is both rare and pathological; the normal condition is one in which custom is the very basis of law, in which custom alone can manifest only secondary forms of social solidarity, and thus in which law alone tells us which forms of social solidarity are essential. This purely arbitrary distinction, incidentally, reveals not only a profound discomfort with the ethnographic study of primitive societies, but a concerted effort to rationalize this discomfort as well. The second objection was that social solidarity does not completely manifest itself in any perceptible form whatsoever, for law (and even custom) are but the partial, imperfect manifestations of internal psychological states which are thus the more appropriate focus for our investigations. Durkheim's response contained three interrelated arguments; first, that we can determine the nature of social solidarity scientifically only by studying its most objective and easily measurable effects (such as law); second, that, while solidarity "depends on" such internal states, these are not equivalent to social solidarity itself; and, finally, that these states themselves depend on social conditions for their explanation, a fact which explains why at least some sociological propositions find their way into the purest analyses of psychological facts. 7 How, then, do we classify the different types of law?
If the classification is to be scientific, Durkheim argued, we must do so according to some characteristic which both is essential to laws and varies as they vary. This characteristic is the sanction -- i. e. , "Every precept of law can be defined as a rule of sanctioned conduct. Moreover, it is evident that sanctions change with the gravity attributed to precepts, the place they hold in the public conscience the role they play in society. " 8 These sanctions, Durkheim then observed, fall into two classes: repressive sanctions (characteristic of penal laws), which consist in some loss or suffering inflicted on the agent, making "demands on his fortune, or on his honor, or on his life, or on his liberty, and deprive him of something he enjoys. " 9; and restitutive sanctions (characteristic of civil, commercial, procedural, administrative, and constitutional laws), which consist "only of the return of things as they were, in the re-establishment of troubled relations to their normal state. " 10 The two types of law thus classified according to their characteristic sanctions, Durkheim was now in a position to determine the types of solidarity corresponding to each. The first of these Durkheim called mechanical solidarity -- that type of solidarity characterized by repressive sanctions.
And since acts calling forth such sanctions are (by definition) "crimes, " then the inquiry into the nature of mechanical solidarity became an inquiry into the nature of crime. What, then, is "crime"? While acknowledging that there are many kinds of crime, Durkheim was convinced that they all contained a common element; for otherwise the universally identical reaction to crimes (repressive sanctions) would itself be unintelligible. Nonetheless, the enormous variety of crimes suggested that this common element could not be found among the intrinsic properties of criminal acts themselves; rather, it had to be found in the relations which these acts sustain with certain external conditions. But which relations? After some characteristic annihilation's of competing proposals, Durkheim concluded that the only common element in all crimes is that they shock sentiments which, "for a given social system, are found in all healthy consciences. " 11 And this also explains why penal (as opposed to civil) law is "diffused" throughout the whole society rather than centralized in a special magistrate -- the sentiments to which penal law corresponds are immanent in all consciousnesses. 12 But what about acts like incest -- acts which provoke widespread aversion, but are merely "immoral" rather than "criminal"?
Durkheim replied that "crimes" properly so-called have an additional distinctive property not shared by simply "immoral" acts: the sentiments they offend must have a certain average intensity. And again, this greater intensity of sentiments responsive to crime as opposed to immoral acts is reflected in the fixity of penal law over time, by contrast with the great plasticity of moral rules. Finally, the sentiments responsive to criminal acts are also more well-defined than those nebulous sentiments evoked by immorality. Durkheim's definition of crime thus led directly to his notion of the conscience collective -- "the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average citizens of the same society" 13 -- which Durkheim then endowed with quite distinctive characteristics: it forms a determinate system with its own life; it is "diffuse" in each society and lacks a "specific organ"; it is independent of the particular conditions in which individuals find themselves; it is the same in different locations, classes, and occupations; it connects successive generations rather than changing from one to another; and it is different from individual consciences, despite the fact that it can be realized only through them. A "crime, " therefore, is simply an act which offends intense and well-defined states of this conscience collective, a proposition which describes not simply the "consequences" of crime, but its essential property: "We do not reprove it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we reprove it. " 14 But aren't there acts which do not offend the conscience collective, but which are nonetheless severely sanctioned by the state? And are there then two distinct types of crime?
Durkheim insisted there are not, for the effects called forth by criminal acts are the same in either case, and the same effect must have the same cause. Durkheim was thus led to argue that the state derives its authority from the conscience collective, and becomes its directive organ and its symbol but, while the state never completely frees itself from this source of its authority, it does become an autonomous, spontaneous power in social life. The extent of the state's power over the number and nature of criminal acts depends on the authority it receives from the conscience collective; and this authority can be measured either by the power the state exerts over its citizens, or by the gravity attached to crime against the state. As Durkheim would show, this power was greatest and this gravity most pronounced in the lowest, most primitive societies; and it was in these societies that the conscience collective enjoyed the greatest authority.
In effect, therefore, Durkheim argued that crime is characterized its capacity to provoke punishment. But if this was the case, crime ought to explain the various characteristics of punishment, and any, demonstration that it did so would augment the plausibility of Durkheim's initial argument. What, then, are the characteristics of punishment? Disregarding the conscious intentions of those applying it, Durkheim insisted that the characteristics of punishment are what they have always been -- its mood is passionate; its function is vengeance, even expiation; its intensity is variable or "graduated"; its source is society rather than the individual; its cause is the violation of a moral rule; and its form is "organized" (unlike the "diffuse" repression of merely immoral acts, its implementation is the act of a definitely constituted body or tribunal). In short, punishment is "a passionate reaction of graduated intensity that society exercises through the medium of a body acting upon those of its members who have violated certain rules of conduct. " 15 How are these characteristics to be explained?
Durkheim first observed that every state of conscience is an essential source of life, and everything that weakens such a state "wastes and corrupts" us; thus we react energetically against those ideas and sentiments which contradict our own. But the ideas and sentiments offended by crime, Durkheim argued, have particular features which in turn explain the special characteristics of punishment: i. e. , because these sentiments are held with particular strength, the reaction is passionate; because these sentiments transcend individual mental states, mere restitution is unacceptable, and revenge and even expiation are called for; because the vivacity of such sentiments will nonetheless vary, the intensity of the reaction will also be variable; because such sentiments are held collectively, the source of the reaction will be society rather than the individual; and because these sentiments are well-defined, the reaction to their violation will be organized. Having begun by establishing inductively that "crime" is an act contrary to strong and well-defined states of the conscience collective, therefore, Durkheim confirmed this definition by showing that crime thus defined accounts for all the characteristic features of punishment; and since the whole point of Durkheim's inquiry into the nature of crime was its promise to reveal the nature of mechanical solidarity, we might reasonably ask what has been thus revealed. Durkheim's answer was that the cause of mechanical solidarity lies in the conformity of all individual consciences to a common type, not only because individuals are attracted to one another through resemblance but because each is joined to the society that they form by their union; inversely, the society is bound to those ideas and sentiments whereby its members resemble one another because that is a condition of its cohesion.
Durkheim thus introduced an idea which would assume increasing importance in his later work: the duality of human nature. Briefly, in each of us there are two consciences -- one containing states personal to each of us, representing and constituting our individual personality; the other containing states common to all, representing society, and without which society would not exist. When our conduct is determined by the first, we act out of self-interest; but when it is determined by the second, we act morally, in the interest of society. Thus the individual, by virtue of his resemblance to.
other individuals, is linked to the social order. This is mechanical solidarity, which, as we have seen, is manifested through repressive law; and the greater the number of repressive laws, the greater the number of social relations regulated by this type of solidarity. The very nature of restitutive sanctions, however, indicates that there is a totally different type of social solidarity which corresponds to civil law; for the restitutive sanction is not punitive, vengeful, or expiatory at all, but consists only in a return of things to their previous, normal state. Neither do violations of civil laws evoke the milder, more diffuse disapproval of merely moral transgressions, in fact, we can imagine that the laws themselves might be quite different than they are without any feeling of moral repugnance being aroused.
Durkheim thus concluded that such laws, manifested in restitutive sanctions, could not derive from any strong state of the conscience collective, but must have some other source. An indication of this source was afforded by an examination of the conditions under which such rules are established. Briefly, there are some relationships (typically, those involving contractual obligations) which the consent of the interested parties is not sufficient to create or to change; on the contrary, it is necessary to establish or modify such relationships juridically, by means of law. While contracts are entered and abrogated through the efforts of individuals, therefore, they have a binding, obligatory power only because they are supported and enforced by society. Most important, the contractual relations thus regulated are not "diffused" throughout the society; they do not bind the individual to society, but rather bind special parties in the society to one another. The cooperative relations thus formed create what Durkheim called organic solidarity, which is derived not from the conscience collective, but from the division of labor.
For, where mechanical solidarity presumes that individuals resemble one another, organic solidarity presumes their difference; and again, where mechanical solidarity is possible only in so far as the individual personality is submerged in the collectivity, organic solidarity becomes possible only in so far as each individual has a sphere of action peculiar to him. For organic solidarity to emerge, therefore, the conscience collective must leave untouched a part of the individual conscience so that special functions, which the conscience collective itself cannot tolerate, may be established there; and the more this region of the individual conscience is extended, the stronger is the cohesion which results from this particular kind of solidarity. Durkheim had thus postulated two distinct types of social solidarity (mechanical and organic), each with its distinctive form of juridical rules (repressive and restitutive). In order to determine their relative importance in any given societal type, therefore, it seemed reasonable to compare the respective extent of the two kinds of rules which express or symbolize them.
The preponderance of repressive rules over their restitutive counterparts, for example, ought to be just as great as the preponderance of the conscience collective over the division of labor; inversely, in so far as the individual personality and the specialization of tasks is developed, then the relative proportion of the two types of law ought to be reversed. In fact, Durkheim argued, this is precisely the case. Despite the flimsy ethnographic evidence supporting such generalizations, Durkheim argued that the more primitive societies are, the more resemblances (particularly as reflected in primitive religion) there are among the individuals who compose them 16; inversely, the more civilized a people, the more easily distinguishable its individual members. 17 Durkheim's discomfort with the ethnographic literature was still more evident when he turned to the nature of primitive law. Relying on Sir John Lubbock's Origin of Civilization (1870) and Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology (1876 - 85), he suggested that such law "appears to be entirely repressive" 18, but insisting that such observations necessarily lack precision, Durkheim instead pointed to the evidence of written law.
Moving from the Pentateuch to the "Twelve Tables" (451 - 450 B. C. ) of the Romans to the laws of early Christian Europe, therefore, Durkheim argued that the relative proportions of repressive to restitutive laws are precisely those which his theory would lead us to expect. 19 When we reach the present, therefore, we find that the number of relationships which come under repressive laws represents only a small fraction of social life; thus, we may assume that the social bonds derived from the conscience collective are now much less numerous than those derived from the division of labor. But one might still argue that, regardless of their number, the bonds which tie us directly to our societies through shared beliefs and sentiments have greater strength than those resulting from cooperation; and to this hypothetical objection, Durkheim had two independent answers. First, he felt that, regardless of their undeniable rigidity the bonds created by mechanical solidarity, even in lower societies, were inferior to those created by organic solidarity in their more advanced counterparts. Here, again, Durkheim's ethnographic resources were limited to a few passages cited from Spencer, Fustel de Coulanges, and Theodor Waitz's Anthropologie der Naturvolker (1859); but the source of this conviction, in any case, was less empirical than theoretical. Where, as in lower societies, the conscience collective is virtually coextensive with the individual conscience, each individual "contains within himself all that social life consists of, " and thus can carry "society" wherever he wishes to go; inversely, the society, given its rudimentary division of labor, can lose any number of its members without its internal economy being disturbed.
Thus, from both standpoints the bonds connecting the individual to society based upon the conscience collective are less resistant to dissever ation than those based upon the division of labor. Durkheim's second answer was that, as society evolves from a lower to a higher type, the bonds created by mechanical solidarity become still weaker. The strength of mechanical solidarity, Durkheim argued, depends on three conditions: 1. the relation between the volume of the conscience collective relative to the individual conscience; 2. the average intensity of the states of the conscience collective; and 3. the degree of definition of the states of the conscience collective.
As we have seen, intense and well-defined states of the conscience collective are the basis of repressive laws; and, since we have also seen that the proportion of such laws has declined, it seems reasonable to assume that the average intensity and degree of definition of the conscience collective have also declined. The same, Durkheim admitted, cannot be said about the relative volume of the conscience collective; for, while that "region" of the conscience collective manifested by repressive laws has no doubt contracted, that region of the same conscience expressed through less intense and more vague sentiments of custom and public opinion may in fact have expanded. But meanwhile, Durkheim argued, the volume of the individual conscience has grown in at least equal proportions; for, "if there are more things common to all, there are many more that are personal to each. " 20 The most we can say of the relative volume of the conscience collective, therefore, is that it has remained the same; for it certainly has not gained, and it may have lost. And if we could prove what we already have good reason to assume -- that the conscience collective has become both less intense and more vague over time -- then we could be sure that mechanical solidarity has become weaker over the same period. How could such proof be provided? Not by comparing the number of repressive rules in different societal types, Durkheim emphasized, for this number alone does not vary exactly with the sentiments thus represented.
Instead, Durkheim simply grouped the rules into classes corresponding to the types of sentiments aroused by their violation. The result was a list of "criminological types, " whose number would necessarily correspond to the number of intense, well-defined states of the conscience collective: "The more numerous the latter are, the more criminal types there ought to be, and consequently, the variations of one would exactly reflect the variations of the other. " 21 The conclusion of Durkheim's investigation, of course, was that a large number of criminological types -- those expressed by repressive laws governing sexual relations, domestic, and, most dramatically, religious life -- had progressively disappeared over the centuries; and this in turn suggested that the states of the conscience collective had indeed become less intense and more vague, and that mechanical solidarity was commensurately weakened. The notable exception here, as Durkheim was careful to point out, were those states of the conscience collective which have the individual as their object, as in the protection of the individual's person and rights. And this Durkheim (in effect) suggested, is indeed an exception which proves the rule; for it could become possible only if the individual personality had become far more important in the society, and thus only if the personal conscience of each individual had grown considerably more than the conscience collective itself. To this other proofs were added: the decline of religion (which, at this time Durkheim literally defined as strong, commonly held beliefs) and the disappearance of those proverbs and adages whereby "collective thought condenses itself. " 22 All conspired to make the same point: that the conscience collective had progressed less than the individual conscience, becoming less intense and distinct, and more abstract and indecisive. Will the conscience collective then disappear?
Durkheim thought not, at least in part because of the "notable exception" mentioned above -- it not only survives, but becomes more intense and well-defined, in so far as its object is the individual: "As all the other beliefs and all the other practices take on a character less and less religious, the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion. We erect a cult on behalf of personal dignity which, as every strong cult already has its superstitions. " 23 But while it is from society that this cult gathers its force, it is not to society, but to ourselves...
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Research essay sample on Division Of Labor Organic Solidarity
