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The Challenge of Durkheim and Simmel Author(s): Kurt H. Wolff Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 63, No. 6, Emile Durkheim-Georg Simmel, 1858-

1958 (May, 1958), pp. 590-596Published by: University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2772989Accessed: 06-10-2015 09:12 UTC

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THE CHALLENGE OF DURKHEIM AND SIMMEL

KURT H. WOLFF

ABSTRACT

Two newly published works-a Durkheim translation and a collection of Simmel writings in German -provide the starting point for an assessment and a comparison of them as men and philosophers. Con- sideration is given to their philosophical aims, as well as to their proximity to, and distance from, contemporary sociologists. Simmel is held to be far less time-bound than Durkheim. His aim is preponder- antly theoretical and ahistorical; Durkheim's, predominantly practical and historical.

The recent publication of two books-a new Durkheim translation and a German collection of writings by Simmell-is not by way of commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the authors' births, but we can hardly be prevented from trying to relate these works to such a com- memoration. On this occasion may we not ask, anew, who were these men, what did they attempt to do, what did they accom- plish, and, also, who, in their eyes, are we and what are we trying to achieve?

We must remember about both Durk- heim and Simmel, it seems to me, a whole avalanche of things: possibly that they are our fathers and our tyrants and, aside from being sociologists, that they are men and philosophers. I begin with the last element in this complex because they may just manage to lord it over us if we ignore them as men and philosophers and tend to take them at their face value as sociologists.

In the first place, they are philosophers by training and (though Simmel more clearly than Durkheim) by profession; in their writings it is stated publicly. But this is only the most "sociological" sense of the

predication. More relevant, their work in sociology is based on philosophical assumptions, raises philosophical questions, and has philosophical aims. The first two of these characteristics, of course, apply to all scientific, hence also to all sociological, work; but the last, a matter of intent, does not. Thus it may be well to remember all three. As to "philosophical assumptions," it is enough to recall that Kant was a major influence on both Durkheim and Simmel, even though he did not furnish them with quite the same viatica. "Philosophical questions" refer to characteristically Kantian queries-ontological, moral, epistemological queries-concerning the nature of reality and of those parts of it (such as society, religion, the individual, history) that our authors singled out, and our relation to reality, particularly the relation of knowledge. "Philosophical aims" include the establishment of sociology as a science, demanded by the time-the same time-in which Durkheim and Simmel lived, even though they differed in their conceptions of, as well as in their involvement in, both the sociology to be founded and the time which argued such a goal. The goal, of course, they share with most of the earlier practitioners of our discipline, but it is no less philosophical or less worthy of rein- spection for that.

Durkheim's Professional Ethics and Civic Morals is the translation of Lecons de sociologie: Physique des mwurs et du droit (1950), "a course of lectures given by

1 Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. By Emile Durkheim. Translated by Cornelia Brookfield. Pref- ace by H. N. Kubali. Introduction by Georges Davy. ("International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction.") London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.

Briicke und Tiir: Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft. By Georg Simmel. In collaboration with Margarete Susman. Edited by Michael Landmann. Introduc- tion by Michael Landmann. (With a bibliograph- ical appendix.) Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler Verlag, 1957.

590



CHALLENGE OF DURKHEIM AND SIMMEL 591

Durkheim between the years 1890 and 1900 at Bordeaux and repeated at the Sor- bonne, first in 1904, and then in 1912, and revised some years before his death" (Pref- ace, p. ix). While this information makes it fairly certain that this material precedes Durkheim's last major work, the Elemen- tary Forms, it is not specific enough to locate it within the chronology of his three earlier important books, all of which ap- peared in the 1890's, although part of the manuscript (p. x) stems from 1898-1900, that is, it is later than the Division of La- bor, Rules, and Suicide. Still, most of what this book tells us about the development of Durkheim's thought requires the assem- bling and sifting of internal evidence, a task I shall not broach.

The book consists of eighteen chapters, three on professional ethics, six on civic morals, one on murder, one on theft, three on property, and four on contract. Its concern, characteristic of Durkheim, is mixed: orderly exposition and plea-among other things, for professional groups and for accepting and acting on an evolutionary view of history or social change. We have problems, we are in trouble, Durkheim says; what are these problems; what must we do? Where do we come from, and might this tell us how we should move? "One of the gravest conflicts of our day" is between the "national ideal" and the "human ideal," between "patriotism and world patriotism" (p. 72). It could be solved if "civic duties" were to become "only a particular form of the general obli- gations of humanity," which would be in line with evolution (p. 74): "it is human aims that are destined to be supreme" (p. 73); societies could "have their pride, not in being the greatest or the wealthiest, but in being the most just, the best organized and in possessing the best moral constitu- tion" (p. 75). This, to Durkheim, appears more feasible than does a world society, a solution of the problem only "in theory"; and a "confederation of European States" is dismissed as just another "individual State," not "humanity" (p. 74).

This series of arguments shows how Durkheim's academicism handicaps his practical concern: the consideration of a European union leading to world society is dropped because Europe is not the world. But his practical concern does not leave him alone: as long as there is no world society, there can be no world morality, since "man is a moral being only because he lives within established societies" (p. 73), "civilized," quite generally, meaning "socialized" (p. 25). This blunt equation reflects Durkheim's "sociologism," a limita- tion often criticized-and once more in this book, in Georges Davy's interesting lq- troduction (esp. p. xliii). Durkheim himself, however, has his doubts about the exalted place he has given society. He does not feel at ease with its large modern variety (cf. pp. 15-16, 60-61), and his doubts go back to his first book. Even there, he tries to find grounds on which to ap- plaud the development from "mechanical" to "organic" and to argue the moral nature of the division of labor but finds his optimism dampened by the realization of anomie and in need of a fresh impetus, provided by the vision of a society reor- ganized on the basis of professional groups.

The argument in favor of professional groups is restated in the first three chapters of this new book, but it appears in many other places in the book as well. It culmi- nates in some practical proposals (pp. 3 7 ff.; see also 94-97) which are in keeping with Durkheim's evolutionary conception of social change. Social change itself-which must always be preceded by careful reflection (p. 90)-has brought us to the age of democracy, which he characterizes in this way: the democratic state is distinguished by "(1) a greater range of the government consciousness, and (2) closer communica- tions between this consciousness and the mass of individual consciousnesses" (p. 88); democracy is the political system by which the society can achieve a consciousness of itself in its purest form. The more that deliberation and reflection and a critical spirit play a considerable part in



592 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the course of public affairs, the more democratic the nation. . . . [Democracy] is the form that societies are assuming to an increasing degree [p. 89].

Reflection, furthermore, increases readiness to change, while "sacredness," to uise the term employed by ILoward Becker in a similar proposition, makes change difficult (pp. 84, 87). Finally, democracy "is the political system that conforms best to our present-day notion of the individual" (p. 90), which is that of the "autonomous" individual who understands "the necessi- ties he has to bow to and accept[s] them with full knowledge of the facts" (p. 91).

Durkheim believes that history tends toward such autonomy (pp. 56, 68, 112). His optimism is supported by his conception of the state. The state is the "social brain" (p. 30) which "decides for" the society (p. 49) but "does not execute anything"; its "principal function" is "to think" (p. 51). It increases its functions and consciousness along with the development of individualism (p. 57). This "in its essence individualist" (p. 69) view is to overcome the "mystic" conception, accord ing to which the state has aims higher than the individuals' on whom at best it may shed some rays of its glory (pp. 54, 64). Yet, if the state "is to be the liberator of the individual, it has itself need of some counterbalance; it must be restrained by other collective forces" (p. 63), that is, by professional groups.

This analysis, these assessments, Durk- heim insists, are superior not only to the Hegelian mystique (p. 64) but also to the views of classical economists and Socialists alike (pp. 10, 15, 29, 122, 216). Neither economists nor Socialists, for instance, see the state for what it is, "the organ of moral discipline" (p. 72); nor would a shift from private to collective ownership of the means of production solve our basic problem, which is the infusion of moral rule into economic life (p. 30). This is an instance of Durkheim's conviction that the examination of our past shows us that things are as he sees them. Nevertheless,

the right to say that this or that form . . . must disappear, requires more from us than merely showing that these forms conflict with an earlier principle. There still remains to demonstrate how they were able to establish themselves and under the influence of what causes, and to prove that these same causes are no longer actually present and active. We cannot demand that existing practices be put down on the score of an a priori axiom [pp. 124-25].

Here we have in a nutshell Durkheim's conception of social change, including its far-reaching confusion. It commissions causal explanation to decide on how things are and hang together but smuggles the "Ought" back into the "facts" by giving causal explanation a second task, that of serving as a recipe for practice. The classical case of this confusion is Suicide, which opens with rigorous causal analysis; then, in effect, abandons the law of one-cause- one-effect laid down in the Rules; and ends up in a vision, plausible and troubled, of the relations among types of social cohe- sion and types of suicide and in practical questions of policy. Durkheim confuses or mixes history with social change, interpretation with explanation (on this cf. Davy, toward the end of his Introduction), practice with theory, ontology with meth- odology, plea with exposition. Once these dichotomies are espoused, once the two elements in each of them are separately torn out of reality, as they are by Durk- heim's positivism and in his strenuous ef- fort to establish a scientific sociology, their synthesis is impossible, its only deceiving hope being verbal legerdemain.2

Durkheim was moved by two forever muddled inspirations-the improvement of our society and the development of an in-

2 Another element in Durkheim's makeup as a sociologist is his conservatism, shown in the present work in some of the conceptions mentioned, as well as in his poor grasp of power and stratification and his respect for the status quo (cf. Lewis A. Coser, "Durkheim's Conservatism and Its Implications for His Sociological Theory," to be published in a volume commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Durkheim's birth [Ohio State University Press, 1958]). I must also abstain from talking about what are, from a theoretical and sociological standpoint,




strument carefully and passionately forged to be inadequate to the task. He was a man who either eats his cake or his bread and is poor: reformer, historian, philosopher; or keeps it and starves: theorist, scientist, sociologist. In his search for what he could believe in as real, he found himself incapable of accepting anything but Society. He sanctified it as the source of all that he loved-religion, morality, knowledge; he sanctified it as the Reality behind all these realities-and mustered all the more fer- vor dissecting it in his "piacular" rites of the scientist who longs for a lost sacred world.

Something of this sort may suggest Durkheim's philosophical aims. In less em- phatic metaphors, he wanted to design a society and wished his fellow men to accept it-a secular society, to be embraced with sacred passion. This is one of the numerous ties that connects him with his predecessor, Comte, and distinguishes him from his contemporary, Weber, who af- firmed secularization as definitively as Durkheim did but who suffered from his clearer knowledge that one meaning of such affirmation is to accept "the fundamental fact" of being "destined to live in a god- less and prophetless time."

Do we not recognize ourselves? Do we not have aims similar to Durkheim's and perhaps similarly confused? Is not Durk- heim thus one of our fathers, and must we not emancipate ourselves from him? And is this not painful because we love him and, in outgrowing him, must go through the pain that was his own? Is he, then, not one of us, a little older, to be sure, since he helped to push us to where we are?

II

With Simmel matters are quite different. We hardly know him yet. We are just dis- covering, thanks to new translations, that

there is more to him than the invention of formal sociology, which the critical and enthusiastic Albion W. Small presented to the readers of his American Journal of So- ciology in the 1890's and which has long since demonstrated its academic respecta- bility in one history of sociological thought after another. But, as yet, there are only a few of us for whom he is among the fathers. Emancipation is still far off because we have not even gone through domination and love. Perhaps we can take another road, learning from the history of our relations with Durkheim.

Simmel reminds us of things we tend to forget but would gain from remembering. The central concern of Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and many other nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociologists and philosophers was the time in which they lived, particularly as the promises of liberalism and the Enlightenment were being broken, ever more incontrovertibly, before their eyes. Unlike theirs, Simmel's concerns only included that over his historical period. It was not primary. A remarkable sociologist, he was, much more clearly and purely than Comte or Weber or any of those referred to (or than many professional philosophers), a philosopher, a man who "wonders," and who wonders even about received notions of which, since he was an unusually alert, perceptive, sensitive person, he had a wealth at his disposal.

He was far less deeply time-bound than Durkheim, although, of course, his time influenced him. Thus, for instance, he thought that people who were on their way to self-realization and abhorred the de- tours which led them outside themselves hated "culture" (p. 90): here a nineteenth- century bourgeois notion of "culture" is slipping in. He thought that it is the nature of the inner life to seek artistic ex- pression in self-contained forms which con- trast with its dynamic and perhaps torn character (p. 99): this is directed against expressionism-he thought that it is the essence of art to present the human body in a way which shows it controlled and

the most challenging chapters of the present book, those on property and, above all, on contract, the latter fully justifying Parsons' praise of Durkheim's treatment of the subject (cf. The Structure of So- cial Action [Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949]).




unified by mind or soul (p. 132); this would disqualify much twentieth-century art. Or he thought that it is inherent in the sociology of the meal for the dinner table not to exhibit "the broken, differentiated, modern colors but the broad, glossy ones which relate to wholly primary sensitivi- ties: white and silver" (p. 248). Simmel occasionally mistook matters of his time as timeless, but such a confusion is not con- stitutive of his achievement as Durkheim's very different one is of his. It rather reminds one of a distracted professor's pet notions or absent-mindedness.

To go beyond characterizing Simmel as a wonderer whose locale, rather infre- quently, intrudes, it is convenient to indi- cate the content of the twenty-eight pieces brought together in Briicke und Tur. In time, they range from 1896 to 1918, the year of his death. In content, they are placed under six headings: "Life and Philosophy," "History and Culture," "Re- ligion," "Aesthetics and Art," "Historical Figures," and "Society." Only three of them, or less than one-sixth--"The Field of Sociology," "The Metropolis and Men- tal Life," and "The Individual and Free- dom," all under "Society"-are available in English.3 Of the title essay, Michael Landmann, the editor, writes:

As one of the most beautiful examples of Simmel's way of letting himself be inspired by the nearest things [around him] and wresting their ultimate meaning from them,... ["Bridge and Door"] is placed at the beginning. The human capacity of "connecting" which it iso- lates and elucidates is so characteristic of Sim- mel hirnself that ... its title ... seemed suitable as that of the whole collection [p. 271].

Man, in the title essay, is presented as connecting and separating, building bridges and making doors, which can be opened and closed. Does the doorlessness of con-

temporary American living rooms symbo- lize or promote the disappearance of both privacy (separation) and-since doors can also be opened, while no-doors cannot- freedom? It is a Simmelian kind of ques- tion, although American homes were not among his "nearest things." Yet many items might and did become the occasion for his thought, which skipped time and place and could descend on any of them:

While the world surely determines what the content of our cognition shall be, but only because cognition determined beforehand what can be world to us, so fate surely determines the life of the individual, but only because the individual chose, by a certain affinity with them, those events on which it can bestow the meaning whereby they become his "destiny" ["The Problem of Destiny" (1913), p. 13].

For human life has a double aspect, causality and meaning, and, without both of them, "destiny" cannot emerge. Animals follow only causality; gods, only meaning; man alone must live with both. It is this same distinction between causality and meaning (also cf. pp. 51, 76, 86) which, in a sociological frame of reference, we know from Max Weber's very definition of sociology (causal explanation and understanding), and whose inadequate apprecia- tion I urged as a characteristic of Durk- heim's.

It plays a central role in Simmel's ma- ture view of history. His paper "On the Nature of Historical Understanding" (1918), relevant to an illumination of theories of understanding, including his- toricism, of the nature of the Thou, the mind-body problem, and the concept of secularization, in effect distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic understand- ing4 ("We should never understand the What of things from their historical devel-

3 See The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), pp. 3-25, 409-24, and 58-84; the last of these is a later and much longer version than the essay reprinted in Briicke wnd Tiir.

4 Except for terminology, this is very similar to Karl Mannheim, "The Ideological and the Sociolog- ical Interpretation of Intellectual Phenomena" (1926) (manuscript translated by Kurt H. Wolff), although to my knowledge Mannheim nowhere refers to Simmel in the context of his discussions of problems of interpretation or understanding.




opment if we did not somehow understand this What itself" [p. 77]). This dichotomy is related to the one just referred to (causality versus meaning), as well as to its variant, the objective versus the historical (psychological, meaningful):

Psychological development is controlled and made understandable by objective development, and objective by psychological. This signifies that both of these are only sides, methodologi- cally made independent, of a unity, of the his- torically understood event.... For life can be understood only by life. To this purpose, life lays itself apart in strata, each of which medi- ates the understanding of the others, and which, in their mutual interdependence, announce its unity [p. 83].

This passage, written in Simmel's last period, that of the philosophy of life, con- tains, in addition to the theme of the su- premacy of life, two others: what may be called the "autonomization of parts of a whole" and the "understandability of a whole only through its parts." These three themes are connected. For instance:

The Marxian scheme of economic development, according to which in every historical epoch the economic forces engender a form of production which is adequate to them, in which, however, they grow to magnitudes no longer manageable within that form but bursting it and creating a new one for themselves-this scheme is valid far beyond the economic sphere. . . , Creative life continuously engenders something which itself no longer is life, something life somehow runs up against, something which opposes it with a claim of its own, and which cannot express itself except in forms which are and mean something in their own right and inde- pendently of it ["Transformations of Cultural Forms" (1916), pp. 98-99].

That the part of a whole becomes an independent whole, growing out of and claiming its own right over against it; this, perhaps, is alto- gether the most basic tragedy of the spirit- a tragedy which in the modern era has reached its fullest development and has taken over the direction of the cultural process ["Philosophy of the Landscape" (1913), p. 143].

It is noteworthy and characteristic of Simmel that, despite its strong tie to Hegel-

Feuerbach-Marx's "alienation," Simmel does not apply his idea of the autonomization of a part to an interpretation of his time, as Durkheim did with the concept of anomie, which is no more closely related to "alienation." Rather, less time-bound philosopher that he was, he chooses that conceptual aspect of "alienation" which he could best put to epistemological purposes, the illumination of the process of understanding. Hence the connection with the second theme, the understandability of a whole only through its parts: "Perhaps the nature of our activity to us is a mysterious unity which, like so many other unities, we can grasp only by splitting it up" ("On the Metaphysics of Death" [1910], p. 32). Or in respect to the problem of understanding a philosopher and his work:

When we infer an innermost personality from ... [its] achievement, and again understand the achievement through the personality, this [pro- cedure] may well be circular. But it is one of those circles which are unavoidable for our thinking; it . . . merely [corresponds to] the complete unity of the phenomenon which expresses itself in the fact that each of the elements into which we split it up becomes understandable only through the other ["On the His- tory of Philosophy" (1904), p. 41].5

This suggests the last of the themes that I wish to call attention to in this wholly fragmentary sample, designed only to lead the reader to Simmel's work itself. It is that of relatively autonomous and irreduc- ible attitudes toward the world, or the theme of "worlds," connecting Simmel with Husserl and later developments in phe- nomenology, especially in the work of Al- fred Schutz.6

The great categories of our inner life-Is and Ought, possibility and necessity, wish and fear

5 Cf. also pp. 102-3 and 149 and cases collected in Donald N. Levine, "The Structure of Simmel's Social Thought," and Rudolph H. Weingartner, "Form and Content in Simmel's Philosophy of Life," papers to be published in a volume commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Sim- mel's birth (Ohio State University Press, 1958).

6 Cf. Weingartner, op. cit.




-form a series through which pass the objective contents of consciousness, the logically fix- able conceptual meanings of things. These categories may be compared to the various states which one and the same chemical substance can adopt, or to the multiplicity of musical in- struments on which one and the same melody, but every time in a particular tone color, can be played. Perhaps it is only different accompany- ing feelings which show us the same objective content now as being, now as non-being, now as an Ought, now as hoped for-or more cor- rectly: these feelings mean that that content now is one and now the other. According to its over-all posture, our soul responds to the same content or perception with completely different attitudes, thus giving us completely different meanings of it ["Contributions to the Episte- mology of Religion" (1902), p. 106].

Or:

In and of themselves, religion and art have nothing to do with one another ... because each of them by itself alone expresses, in its particular language, the whole of existence. One can conceive of the world religiously or artistically, practically or scientifically: it is the same contents which each time, under a different cate- gory, form a cosmos of a consistent and incom- mensurable character. Our soul, however, with its short-lived impulses and its limited ability, is incapable of developing any of these worlds as wholly as it ideally demands. Each of them remains dependent on the haphazard stimuli which permit now this, now that, portion of it to grow up in us. But it is precisely the fact that these world images lack the self-sufficient rounding out called for by their objective content which creates the deepest vitalities and psychic patterns, because it urges each of these images to take from the others impulses, contents, and challenges which, were it completely developed, it would find in its own inner structure ["Christianity and Religion" (1907), p. 140].

III

If Durkheim's philosophical aim is to infuse morality into the society of his time, thus being predominantly practical and historical, Simmel's is to understand the world and is, above all, theoretical and

ahistorical. If it is true that we feel closer to Durkheim because our aims resemble his more than they do Simmel's, it is also true, I think, that in a sense we need Simmel more urgently than Durkheim. Being deep- er-seeing and more self-conscious, he has, on a systematic, theoretical, ahistorical view, more for us to tackle. Our indebtedness, as sociologists, to Durkheim has been driven home to us with poignancy and conviction, notably by Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton, and some of Simmel's achievements in sociology have recently begun to be ap- preciated, rediscovered, and made use of in various fields, especially in the study of small groups and the phenomena of secrecy and secret societies. But I have tried to com- ment on Durkheim and Simmel less as sociologists than as men, endeavoring to show some of their philosophical concerns as the concerns of men who lived in a given time and place and who, as men, also to an ex- tent transcended them.

Together they challenge us to do right by them and to do better. More specifi- cally, we may want to identify Durkheim's confusions and avoid them, being as fully aware as we can of their seriousness and pregnancy, and we may wish to pay more attention than Simmel did to the relation between a theoretical and a historical pre- occupation. Both, though in different ways, also invite us to reconsider our own and sociology's philosophical premises. Of course, we can learn from them many more things in respect to which we want to do them justice or surpass them. But, unfor- tunately or fortunately, even the narrow, selective focus of the present allusive ob- servations may serve to remind us that there is no textbook which teaches us how to approach them or go beyond them- how, if you will, to commemorate them. They are a challenge to us, too, as men, to the best in us, and on this ground, let us try to remember, as sociologists.

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY



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