1994 - durkheim's 'division of labor in society'. a sexagenarian postscript

"Durkheim's "Division of Labor in Society" ": A Sexagenarian PostscriptAuthor(s): Robert K. MertonSource: Sociological Forum, Vol. 9, No. 1, Special Issue: The 100th Anniversary of Sociology'sFirst Classic: Durkheim's "Division of Labor in Society." (Mar., 1994), pp. 27-36Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/684937 .

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1994

"Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society": A Sexagenarian Postscriptl

Robert K. Merton2

KEY WORDS: sociological reductionism; indices; positivism; metatheory; opportunity structure.

INTRODUCTION

As originator and editor of this issue of Sociological Forum, which commemorates the centenary of Durkheim's path-making Division of Labor, Edward Tiryakian must take full responsibility for having invited this semi- Shandean postscript to an article of mine published 60 years ago. My marching orders were simple and direct. I am to inform "the 1994 reader of the circumstances that led me to write" that piece on the Durkheim masterwork and to reflect briefly on some of its substance. A sizable as- signment to be crowded into a limited space.

The question of how I came to write that paper can be readily, if not briefly, answered. And, rightly enough for this occasion, the answer links up with the earliest times of the Eastern Sociological Society, which spon- sored the recent plenary session that provides the chief contents of this commemorative issue. Seen in this long retrospect, the paper can be said to have originated in February 1933 when Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, the renowned sociological theorist and founding Chairman of the Harvard Department of Sociology,3 summoned his research assistant, then midway in a second year of graduate study, to his office in Emerson Hall. Sorokin

1As usual, I am indebted to Harriet Zuckerman for vetting the manuscript. 20ffice of University Professors, Columbia University, New York, New York, and Russell Sage Foundation, New York, New York.

3A Department of Sociology established tardily at Harvard only a year and a half before (in 1931) to replace a once-pioneering but then evidently obsolescing Department of Social Ethics.

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0884-8971/94/0300-0027$07.00/0 ? 1994 Plenum Publishing Corporation



announced that, contrary to plan, he would not be able to deliver an invited

paper on recent French sociology to the April meeting of the Eastern So-

ciological Conference. (Evidently, it had not yet evolved into a Society.) Would I be good enough to do the paper in his stead?

Though rather unnerved by the prospect, I recognized that my mentor was not so much putting a question as voicing a strong and unforgiving expectation. And. so I nervously agreed to what proved to be the first of several such strenuous occasions for taking up one's scholarly work that were being provided by the rapidly expanding opportunity structure of the Harvard Department of Sociology. Abandoning any pretense at attending lecture classes, I spent my days and evenings in Widener Library studying the great abundance of sociological works issuing from Emile Durkheim himself and from what was variously known in France as

the Durkheim school, the French school of sociology, the genetic sociologists, the ethnographic sociologists and the group of L'Annde sociologique [which] include such eminent figures as MM. L. Levy-Bruhl, Bougle, Fauconnet, Hubert, Mauss, Halbwachs, and Davy. (Merton, 1934a:537)

So, too, I was reading in the not inconsiderable flow of important theoretical and empirical work stemming from that early advocate of methodo-

logical individualism, Gabriel Tarde, and reading as well in the less interesting and far less consequential work of those other sociologists, such as Gaston Richard and Renee Worms, who were dedicating themselves to polemics leveled against the holistic Durkheimian sociology and, in some notorious cases, erupting in vicious diatribes directed against Durkheim himself.

In this continuing remote retrospect, I gain the impression that Sorokin's assistant was engaged in emulating his teacher's own mode of

wide-ranging theoretical colligation as evidenced in Contemporary Socio-

logical Theories (1928), the book that had led my undergraduate self at

Temple College to seek graduate study with him.4 For now, all these many years later, I learn from my own research assistant, Jennifer Lee, that this short paper read to the Eastern Sociological Conference in 1933 and published the next year in just nine pages, drew upon no fewer than 46 books

4Not, be it noted, to seek graduate study with Talcott Parsons. For, as I have observed about "the young Parsons" elsewhere (Merton, 1980a:69), up to 1931, "Parsons had no public identity whatever as a sociologist. He had published just two articles deriving from his dissertation [Parsons, 1928-1929] and these had appeared in the Journal of Political Economy, a journal it is fair to suppose not much read by undergraduates in sociology bent on deciding where to do their graduate work. True, the year before, Talcott had translated The Protestant Ethic into exceptionally, clear, direct, and most unTeutonic English prose. But this achievement too would scarcely draw the attention of aspiring young sociologists to him. And now, I do no injustice to Pitirim Sorokin's memory by reporting that although we students came to study with the renowned Sorokin, a subset of us stayed to work with the unknown Parsons."

28 Merton



Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society: Postscript

and 16 articles (most of them in the then still untranslated French).s A rather extended foundation for a modest structure of sociological gloss and exegesis.

Nevertheless, it was that first published paper of mine6 which evidently led Ellsworth Faris, the exacting editor of The American Joural of Sociology, then the official journal of the American Sociological Society (not yet Association), to invite me to do an analytical article on the newly translated De la division du travail social. That is the paper (Merton, 1934b) which is reprinted in this centennial commemoration of what Edward Tiryakian has described as "Sociology's First Classic."

A MULTIDIMENSIONAL GLOSS AND EXEGESIS

As I re-read that aged paper, possibly for the first time since its publication 60 years ago, I find myself noticing its several dimensions. It begins by touching upon (1) the quality of the translation, then proceeds to (2) metatheoretical aspects and contexts of the pioneering book and to (3) its methodological assumptions and one major research technique (empirical indicators) while (4) sketching its principal problematics and substantive ideas. The last of these having since received extended comment, I shall confine myself to abbreviated observations on the first three. (Nor shall I comment on the prose style of that early paper except to conclude from phrasings such as "this hegemonic protagonist of the sociologistic school" and "ineluctable necessity" that its author had apparently been infected by the inimitable Veblenian prose, once kindly described, in Veblen's own time, as "unnecessarily studied and anachronistic").

The Translation

The paper opens with a rebuke to the translator: "In a pedestrian, and somewhat infelicitous, fashion, Durkheim's De la division du travail so-

5This previously unnoticed 3-to-1 ratio of books to articles takes on retrospective interest in light of the article by Alan Wolfe, "Books vs. Articles: Two Ways of Publishing Sociology," appearing recently (1990) in this very journal.

6Faute de mieux, "Recent French Sociology" appeared in Social Forces, the official journal of the nearby Southern (not the Eastern) Sociological Society, since it would be another half-century before Sociological Forum was brought into being. And now, this reminiscent piece inevitably brings to mind the memorable fact that, back in the latter 1930s, Robin Williams, the distinguished founding editor who soon established Sociological Forum as a journal of the first rank, was a graduate student in a course titled "Social Organization," the first course I ever taught at Harvard.

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cial has been accorded a belated translation, 40 years after its initial publication." At the time I had no way of knowing, of course, that the editor, Ellsworth Faris, would be writing a nasty, brutish, and short review of the book in the same issue of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS).7 The tenor of that review finds expression in its opening paragraph:

Elsewhere in this issue of the Journal appears an article on Durkheim's Division of Labor, and this review may well be brief. Published when the author was thirty-five years old, the work accepts as accurate the crude misconceptions of the 1880's concerning the life of primitive man as set forth in the books of those who were no more competent to describe them [sic] than a botanist would be to write a treatise in his field without ever having seen a plant. (Faris, 1934:376)

Continuing in this vein for better than a page, the review takes no notice at all of the basic theoretical contributions of the work; perhaps, as he hints, Faris regarded discussion of that matter as having been preempted by the article. However, the editor and the graduate student did agree, independently and thoroughly, on one aspect of the book: the dismal quality of the translation. But what was described in the opening sentence of the article as a "pedestrian and somewhat infelicitous" translation was much

enlarged upon in the devastating final paragraph of the review:

As to the translation, it is hard to speak with restraint. Incredible as it may seem, the author actually translates conscience by the English word "conscience" throughout8 ... there was hardly a page of a score of pages taken at random which did not contain a mistranslation, sometimes a complete reversal of meaning .... (377)

I recall having been concerned, when describing the "infelicitous translation," that the translator, George Simpson, might be mistakenly iden- tified as George Eaton Simpson, my onetime mentor at Temple College who, not long before, had inducted me into the mysteries of sociology. And

upon reading Faris's onslaught, that concern promptly intensified into

angst. But happily, all that changed after 1984, following upon a new translation by W. D. Halls which Lewis A. Coser rightly describes, in his sterling

7That lead review, on pages 376-377 (Faris, 1934), cites the book strangely, as though it had been written by the translator; thus: "Emile Durkheim on the Division of Labor in Society. By George Simpson." Apparently, the severe editor Faris recognized his usage as anomalous, not to say downright misleading, for he went on to explain: "(Translation of Durkheim's De la division du travail social with an estimate of his work.)" I mention this detail only because I found that in his capacity as editor, Faris had imposed what I took to be this thoroughly misleading mode of citation upon my own article.

8But as Talcott Parsons (1934:309n) would observe in his first masterwork, The Structure of Social Action, presumably without recalling the Faris review: "The French word conscience may be translated either 'conscience' or 'consciousness.' . . . The predominant use of 'consciousness' in English translations is clearly indicative of an interpretative bias. It seems best here to leave it untranslated."

30 Merton




introduction to the book, as "the first exact, adequate and satisfying translation of this key work" (Durkheim, 1893/1984:ix).9

Metatheoretical Aspects

As noted, in writing my own paper on the Division of Labor I did not know, of course, that Faris would be mounting an egregious attack in the very same issue of the AJS that had him dismissing the book in these words:

Not to be severe with a writer who, forty-one years ago, accepted as true what is now known to be untenable, it would seem that extended discussion of an argument based on abandoned premises might be considered an unnecessary expenditure of energy. (Faris, 1934:576)

And yet, evidently in his capacity as a fair-minded editor of the Jour- nal, Faris went on to publish a relatively extended discussion of the Durk- heim argument by a graduate student who, I have reason to suspect, had expended quite a bit of energy in explaining why he considered it "one of the peak contributions of modern sociology."

However, in light of the regnancy of positivist thought in the early 1930s, I am surprised to note the great extent to which that paper, like its predecessor, "Recent French Sociology," focused critically on Durkheim's and Durkheimians' uncritical tacit and explicit acceptance of positivism. In- deed, the earlier paper criticizes the effort of that rather ambivalent Durk- heimian, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, "to establish a radical difference between the 'primitive' and the 'civilized' mentality" as an unfounded positivistic assumption and goes on to assert with something of a rhetorical flourish:

Nor has M. L6vy-Bruhl troubled himself to investigate the degree of currency of the "pre-logical" in "civilized" cultures,-certainly superstition has not softly and suddenly vanished away even before the enlightened Boojum of Positivism. (Merton, 1934a:543)10

9Apropos the Faris and Parsons comment on the translation of conscience and by way of swift and slight examples of the two translations, the title of Chapter III in Book Two of the Division of Labor is translated by Simpson as "Progressive Indetermination of the Common Conscience and Its Causes" and by Halls as "The Progressive Indeterminacy of the Common Consciousness and Its Causes." The two translations generally differ far more in precision of nuance than this single example suggests. Three decades later, Simpson himself observed: "The translation of Division of Labor in Society that I made in my salad days is inadequate." George Simpson, Emile Durkheim (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1963), p. ix. 0It speaks to the largeness of spirit of the editors of Social Forces back then that they should have allowed the ironic phrase "enlightened Boojum of Positivism" to remain intact. It is not now and was not then often the case, particularly during the Great Depression, that social science journals would include allusions to writings such as Lewis Carroll's immortal The Hunting of the Snark (1876). Still, it might be said in defense of that graduate student that his ironic critique of Levy-Bruhl's method of "one-sided illustration" went on to the following footnoted quotation of what amounted in effect to an ancient's call for the use of a control group in social experimental design: "Does not M. Levy-Bruhl's method suggest

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In like fashion, the critical reading of the Division of Labor notes that it too was "deep in the current of the positivistic thought that stemmed from Comte" but goes on to concede that the book represented a

revolt against the individualistic-utilitarian positivism that [found] its prototypes in the systems of Hobbes and Locke....

Despite this departure, Durkheim is described as still "too much the positivist" (Merton, 1934b:319-320).1" These judgments no doubt manifest the theoretical influence of Parsons's "oral publications" in the cognitive mi- cro-environment at Harvardl2; for though the author declares that "I am

deeply indebted to Dr. Parsons for much of the viewpoint here expressed," he was able to cite only one article by Parsons (1934) bearing directly on the subject (an article that had appeared in print just months before).13

I notice, too, that my critique of Durkheim's argument goes on to question his "radical sociologism." His strong sociologistic perspective was taken to involve a kind of sociological reductionism that, the research for "Recent French Sociology" (Merton, 1934a:538, 541, 544-545) evidently persuaded me, Durkheim had introduced in emphatic cognitive-and-organizational op- position to the psychological reductionism of the radical psychologism emerg- ing in France. This sociological counter-reductionism I interpreted from a sociology-of-knowledge perspective as being for Durkheim

the one way of maintaining the autonomy of sociology as an independent discipline, and it is to this dominant preoccupation that many of his conceptions are due. (Merton, 1934b:320)

the critical pertinency of the anecdote related by Diogenes Laertius concerning Diogenes [Diagoras?] the Cynic who, when shown the votive tablets suspended by those who had escaped shipwreck 'because they had made their vows,' inquired: 'Where are the portraits of those who perished in spite of their vows?'" This anecdote with its methodological moral has been often retold. For examples, see the quotations from Cicero, Francis Bacon, and Laplace in Sills and Merton (1991), and for a current formulation of the methodological import of the anecdote, see Kruskal and Mosteller (1979:117).

llAs was frequently the case, Durkheim's Regles de la mdthode sociologique, published two years after the Division du travail social, explicitly formulated the epistemological and methodological tenets that were largely tacit in the preceding work. His commitment to positivism appears repeatedly; for example, in passages like this: "Since objects are given to us only by sense perception [sensation], one can conclude: that to be objective, science ought to begin with concepts formed from perception, not independently of it. It ought to borrow the elements of its initial definitions directly from perceptual data." And again: "But sensory perception may easily be subjective. It is also a rule in the natural sciences to discard those perceptual data [donnenes sensibles] that are too subjective [qui risqueit d'etre trop personnelles dt l'observateur] in order to retain only those presenting a sufficient degree of objectivity. Thus, the physicist . . . " (Durkheim, 1895/1927:54-55).

12To many of us in a print and multimedia culture, the concept of "oral publication" will seem a flagrant oxymoron. But see more on the concept in Merton (1980b:1-35). On the primary diffusion and development of knowledge in cognitive microenvironments, see Merton (1979:76-94; 1994).

13For a fine collection and appraisal of the early work which includes that article, see Charles Camic's edition of Parsons (1991).

32 Merton




Rejecting the two kinds of reductionist theories as both underdeter- mined by the facts (if I may adopt that anachronistic term to describe an

argument being advanced in the 1930s), those first papers of mine press for an integration of sociological and psychological theory. In retrospect, I sense there the beginnings of a theoretical orientation that found symbolic expression, a dozen years later, in my frequently declared preference for the inclusive term "social theory" rather than the segregative term "sociological theory." Indeed, in a recent account of his experience as a graduate student at Columbia in the early 1950s, James S. Coleman notes that I was then offering a course "in the logic of theory construction," which now leads me to recall that it was assigned the odd-appearing but quite deliberate title "Social Theory Applied to Sociology" (Coleman, 1990:18-19).

Methodological Assumptions and Research Techniques

The 1934 anatomizing of the Division of Labor makes much-I would now say, too much-of the tension between Durkheim's retained positivism and his theoretical commitment to deal with the subjectivity of ends and goals. True, Durkheim maintained that it was such extrasocial, objective demographic processes as "dynamic or moral density"-i.e., the growth and increased density of populations with their typical increase of social inter- action-which brought about the division of labor and the correlated organic solidarity (Merton, 1934b:325ff.). But he had no great theoretical difficulty in locating socially derived values, beliefs, and ends in his evolving sociological explanation of the great transition from mechanical to organic solidarity. Still, it is of interest that, as noted in the critique, Durkheim soon retracted the causal emphasis on "material density" of population, declaring that "we were wrong, in our Division of Labor, in presenting material density too much as an exact expression of dynamic density" (Durk- heim, 1895/1927:140n).14

4This passage was quoted from the first French edition of the Rules of Sociological Method since the excellent Solvay-Mueller-Catlin translation of Les regles de la mnehode sociologique into English was still five years in the offing. We students of Durkheim back then had no other option; we could read him only in the original French. Nor was that altogether to the bad; reading more slowly, we probably read such masterworks more intensively and intently in the original than we would have done in translation. Furthermore, we were not misled by others' faulty translations; when we erred in our readings, we at least had the perverse satisfaction of knowing that the errors were our own. And we had the distinct pleasure of being in direct touch with the author's unmediated texts. But, of course, all these sentiments about erroneous readings obtained more readily back in those days when we were not being variously assured on all sides that texts are altogether labile and can have as many reasonably assigned meanings as there are readers.

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Emphatic criticism was leveled against another aspect of Durkheim's methodology. One "fundamental weakness" of that methodology, the paper argued, resides in its adopting the principle and engaging in the practice of arguing by elimination of alternative hypotheses, theories, or explanations, in the manner proposed by Descartes (1637/1902:64ff.). Thus, it is said that Durkheim

eliminates certain possible explanations of a particular set of social phenomena by demonstrating that the logical consequences of the rejected theories are not in accord with observed facts. He assumes that the possible number of explicative theories is determinable (x), and that having eliminated x-1 explanations he is left with the necessarily valid solution. (Merton, 1934b:327)

And of course, that surviving theory invariably turns out to be Durk- heim's own, not alone in the Division of Labor but in the later consequential works as well. However, the critique goes on to argue,

the fallacy of this method lies in the initial assumption that one has exhausted the totality of possible explanations. The elimination of alternative theories in nowise increases the probabilities of the other alternatives.

The kind of criticism of the Cartesian principle as adopted by Durk- heim has been reiterated from time to time. A half-dozen years later, it

appeared in a thoroughgoing dissertation on Durkheim written by Harry Alpert (1939:87-88) at Columbia (some years before I arrived there) and it was materially elaborated in the much later magisterial monograph by Steven Lukes (1973:31-32).

It is of some retrospective interest that despite its strong critique of the positivistic epistemology underlying the Division of Labor, that early paper of mine gave strong approval to at least one methodological and

procedural expression of positivism: the systematic use of empirical indices of conceptualized "social facts" which are not directly observable. Just as Tarde was arguing the case for indices, both social and psychological, in his Laws of Imitation (1890/1903:114ff.), so Durkheim was arguing for social indices, first, in the Division of Labor and then in much of his later work

(Durkheim, 1895/1927:55-58; 1897/1930: passim). Thus, in the Division, he observes in terms readily translatable into our contemporary technical vo-

cabulary of indicators, indices and variates:

[S]ocial solidarity is a wholly moral phenomenon which by itself is not amenable to exact observation and especially not to measurement. .. [W]e must therefore substitute for this internal datum, which escapes us, an external one which symbolizes it, and then study the former through the latter. (1893/1984:24)

The graduate student evidently resonated to Durkheim's early recog- nition of the importance of identifying indicators and devising indices of

conceptualized social realities as a basic procedure in theory-based empirical inquiry. However, one notices that that cordial judgment of the proce-

34 Merton




dure in general was somewhat tempered in the critical discussion of Durk- heim's specific "use of repressive and restitutive law as indexes of mechanical and organic solidarity, respectively" (Merton, 1934b:325-327). There, the student-critic had the temerity to claim that Durkheim had simply failed to demonstrate the assumed close and reliable association between the two types of solidarity and two types of law. What the critic failed to note, however, and what might have given him comfort, was that in a later important article, "Deux lois de l'evolution penale" (1901), Durkheim himself modified his earlier position that the declining intensity of repressive (or penal) law had resulted solely from the decline of mechanical solidarity and the growth of organic solidarity. Nor, must it be said in conclusion, had the critic's older self noted Durkheim's later theoretical concession on his own; he came upon that now established social fact only years later, on pages 258-259 of Steven Luke's "historical and critical" study of Durk- heim (1973).

Edward Tiryakian's invitation to a brief retrospective has had at least one unanticipated consequence. For only now am I led to a further under- standing of the almost instant resonance I experienced upon encountering Paul Lazarsfeld as a Columbia colleague and learning about his highly so- phisticated theory and practice of social indexes (as summed up later in Lazarsfeld and Rosenberg, 1955; Lazarsfeld, 1959:30-78). Small wonder that with that early appraisal of indexes thus powerfully reinforced, I have since continued to cite Durkheim, and to expatiate relentlessly, on the methodological importance of couching sociological and social thought in terms of concepts and their empirically observable manifestations.

REFERENCES

Alpert, Harry and New York: Taylor & Francis (Fal- 1939 Emile Durkheim and His Sociology. mer Press).

New York: Columbia University Press. Descartes, Ren6 Carroll, Lewis 1902 Discours de la m6thode [pour bien 1876 The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony, conduire sa raison et chercher la v6rit6

in Eight Fits. London: Macmillan. dans les sciences]. (1637*) In OEuvres, Coleman, James S. vol. 6. Paris: L. Cerf. 1990 "Robert K. Merton as teacher." In Jon Durkheim, Emile

Clark, Celia Mogdil, and Sohan Mog- 1933 The Division of Labor in Society. dil (eds.), Robert K. Merton: Consen- (1893') George Simpson, trans. New sus and Controversy: 25-32. London York: Macmillan.

*Original publication date.

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Merton

1984 The Division of Labor in Society. (1893*) W. D. Halls, trans., with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. New York: The Free Press.

1927 Les regles de la m6thode sociologique. (1895 ) Paris: Alcan.

1930 Le suicide. (1897*) Paris: Alcan. 1901 "Deux lois de l'6volution p6nale."

L'annee sociologique 4:65-95. Faris, Ellsworth 1934 "Review" of Emile Durkheim, On the

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Kruskal, William H. and Frederick Mosteller 1979 "Representative sampling II: Scientific

literature, excluding statistics" Inter- national Statistical Review 45:111-127.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 1959 "Problems of methodology." In

Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. (eds.), So- ciology Today: Problems and Pros- pects: 39-78. New York: Basic Books.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Morris Rosenberg, eds. 1955 The Language of Social Research.

New York: The Free Press. Lukes, Steven 1973 Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work.

London: Allen Lane. Merton, Robert K. 1934a "Recent French sociology." Social

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1979 The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir. Carbondale: Southern Illi- nois University Press.

1980a "Remembering the young Talcott Par- sons." The American Sociologist 15:68-71.

1980b "On the oral transmission of knowledge." In Robert K. Merton and Ma- tilda White Riley (eds.), Sociological Traditions from Generation to Gen- eration: 1-35. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

1994 "Opportunity structure: The emer- gence, diffusion and differentiation of a sociological concept, 1930s-1950s." In Freda Adler (ed.), The Legacy of Anomie Theory, Advances in Crimi- nological Theory, vol. 6. New Bruns- wick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Parsons, Talcott 1928-29 "'Capitalism' in recent German

literature: Sombart and Weber." Jour- nal of Political Economy 35:641-661; 37:31-51.

1934 "Some reflections on the nature and significance of Economics" Quarterly Journal of Economics 48:511-545.

1937 The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw-Hill.

1991 Talcott Parsons: The Early Essays. Charles Camic (ed.). Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press.

Sorokin, Pitirim A. 1928 Contemporary Sociological Theories.

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1994 - durkheim's 'division of labor in society'. a sexagenarian postscript

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