Emile Durkheim was born on 1858 and died in 1917 at the age of 59. He was a well know French sociologist who rose to fame in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He wrote the books on The Division of Labor and Suicide. Along with Karl Marx and Max Weber, he is credited as being one of the principal founders of modern sociology. He was famous for his views on the structure of society, he focused on how modern and traditional societies evolved and functioned. Durkheim's concepts of society were founded on the theory of norms, values, and structures of society. This outlook of society where the difference from other sociologists of his time. Durkheim believes that it is possible to create a particular type of society where all individuals can find freedom and happiness while work gets done; however, Durkheim believes that humans are enslaved to their desires. In this essay, I will talk about on Durkheim's theories concerning the relationship between the individual and society in which he/she lives. I believe that Durkheim really understood the relationship between the individuals and society because he understood the human nature is deeply flawed and only thinks of themselves. He argues human natures desire is created to be unlimited, that we are not satisfied and that we always want more then we have.
Durkheim talks about how self-interest and desire play a key role in society and how individuals are willing to go the too far length to get such desire. Durkheim states in his book Suicide on page 209 "The more one has, the more one wants since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs." He explains that human nature unlike other animals even after our biological needs are meet and fulfilled we desire more and more. Durkheim states that there is a relationship between an individual and society. Society is defined as people who interact in such a way as to share a common culture which can be ethnic or racial, based on gender, or shared beliefs, values, and activities. Durkheim says that this shared common culture is what controls our desires and that the natural insatiability of the human desire can only be held in check by external controls which is societal control. Furthermore, he explains that Society enforces limits on human desires “a regulative force must play the same role for moral needs which the organism plays for physical needs.” (p. 209) Durkheim goes on to explain that for a regulation to work properly that it must be moral and not physical because he explains “Physical restraint would be ineffective; hearts cannot be touched by physio-chemical forces.” (p.209). Therefore, for a society to be well-regulated, social controls must limit and control an individual inclination or natural tendency to behave in a particular way so that “Under this pressure, each in his sphere vaguely realizes the extreme limit set to his ambitions and aspires to nothing beyond.” (p. 210) Durkheim then continues to say that an individual’s connection to society is based on a moral constitution because if the individual respects the society in which he lives in then he will accept what limits are given to him and not feel right to ask for more.
Durkheim writes “wherever a contract exists, it is submitted to a regulatory force that is imposed by society (The Division of Labor in Society p. 325). He states that when an individual submits to a regulatory force then he has submitted his liberty and freedom through a contract which binds him to the society and the society holds them accountable for the thing they do. Durkheim says that the only way that humans can find freedom is if they are freed from their desires. He believes that desire is endless, unlike animals they are not satiated when their needs and even desires are met. He writes, “It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss” (Spaulding p.208). Our human nature wants and want and wants so much that these desires lead us to unimaginable things, that’s why Durkheim believes that imagination is problematic. Our imagination makes us unhappy because it makes us desire something will never have, it expands our horizons to things that will never be realistic whether it’s materials or a different job/career/position. He believes that inequality will always remain; some people are born to be electricians so there’s no use in dreaming of becoming a jazz player. One might ask, how does one discipline the limit their desires? From my understanding of the text, I feel that Durkheim answers to this question would be to basically submit ourselves to society which would limit our imagination and desires we then would move on from as a society rather than individuals. Unlike Marx understand how we could be anything we wanted and still have a functioning society which is crazy because then we would never achieve the thing we have in the past thousands of years. Durkheim’s believes like parents to children, children need structure because they are not capable of doing something alone. Parents are the main controlling force in a child’s life and they control what they eat and how they play and what school they go too etc. Durkheim is saying that since humans as an individual want more and more that they cannot be alone rather they need society to make the decisions that they can’t make for themselves and control our desires. To be free, we need to limit our wants, and society is the only thing that can help us achieve that limitation. Personally, I agree with some parts of this concept proposed by Durkheim, because there are some unbelievably ridiculous individuals who just don’t know when to stop and they need something or someone to intervene, but I also disagree because there are some people who have a reasonable control over their desires. Humans should not only be satisfied with what they have, but they should also acknowledge that they’ll never have more because their rights only limit them to that amount; so much for liberation, when your rights are unreasonably limited.
Furthermore, Durkheim talks about complete anomie when talking about individualism and society. Anomie is a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.
Durkheim talks about how societies may be characterized by greater or lesser degrees of regulations in a society. Moreover, different society may differ in the amount of anomie that affects them. Durkheim says that social changes may create anomie in a whole society or just in some parts of it. For example, Business crises may impact the higher ups in a society than those that live at the bottom of the social pyramid. In a society, Depression leads to a sudden downward progress, the people of that society experience a deregulation on their lives and a loss of moral certainty and customary expectation are no longer is sustained by the group to which they belong. Likewise, the rapid arrival of wealth may lead people to a quick raise progress and thus deprive them of the social support needed for their new lifestyle. Durkheim talks about how any new social structure that upsets previous ones carries a chance of anomie.
Durkheim argued that economic wealth carries with it dangers of anomic conditions because "Wealth, on the other hand, by the power it bestows, deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only” (Spaulding p.214) while "poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraint in itself.” (Spaulding p.214) Durkheim says that since the understanding of human desires depends upon the resources they have therefore the poor are restrained because they have less and therefore are less prone to suffer from anomie “ So the less one has the less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely. Lack of power, compelling moderation, accustoms men to it, while nothing excites envy if no one has superfluity.” (Spaulding p.214)
In addition, Durkheim believes that in order to find happiness, we need conscience collectiveness. We need to find a community to be part of; humans need to live for something bigger than their individuality. This system would wipe off the ideology of individualism, as we know it, in the West. Durkheim wants a society where people can be taken care of, a society where everything and everyone are working together. A society, unlike the one we have right now, where everything was shared interdependence. Durkheim believes that this system of feeling togetherness is an innate thing, a natural feeling otherwise known as organic solidarity. Organic solidarity is an ideology of the urban population and mechanical solidarity is a rural one, which corresponds to simple division of labor, an agrarian economy that was in the pre-modern society. With organic solidarity social cohesion was based on each individual’s dependence on every other in the society for survival. He uses the example of a cell in a living organism, all cells need to contribute to making the bodywork, if people work like cells, they’ll be happy because they’ll feel like they are needed. Moreover, our modern society is dysfunctional, sick and unhealthy because it functions as an abnormal labor division. Durkheim believes that, in order to achieve organic solidarity and organic equilibrium, we have to break the structure of society and a spontaneous division of labor needs to emerge, which is the ‘normal’ division of labor.
The division of labor that Durkheim talks about in his book is divided into two categories, forced and anomic. Forced division of labor is three types: slavery, caste, and class. We find all three types of forced division of labor in our society. Currently, we have human sex trafficking (slavery), a racial caste, and an economic class. Furthermore, the anomic division of labor reflects a lack of mutual adjustment among the parts of the social organism; individuals lose any sense of being integral parts of some larger whole because they’re isolated by their own tasks. This derives from the word anomie, which is a condition of normlessness. This is unregulated capitalism competition, an extreme condition of individualism, where every person is for himself or herself. Durkheim believes that this type of society is a broken structure, and that’s why everyone is unhappy in the workplace. In other words, his solution is that society needs to create a way for people to enjoy work (workers need to be interacting more) because work is not the problem; it is society that’s the problem. He believes in a society where people should be taken care of, a society, which creates a place where all individuals can reach their full potential. That’s why he believes that it is the task of sociology (as activism) to fix society if and when it’s broken.
Durkheim believes that humans cannot tolerate the idea of nothingness, they have an extreme fear of that perspective. That’s why they drown themselves in impermanent pleasures, that fear leads them to distract and divert from the problem. Durkheim believes that this is a problem, we shouldn’t live for the moment, but we should rather be worried about the future. For example, if we apply this to education, Durkheim would want people to pursue education because education should be important to our jobs.