Journal of Classical Sociology

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 2(2): 203–223 [1468–795X(200207)2:2;203–223;028448]

Religion and the Changing Intensity of

Emotional Solidarities in Durkheim’s
The Division of Labour in Society (1893)

Jonathan S. Fish University of Leeds

ABSTRACT This article re-reads the six evolutionary stages contained in The
Division of Labour so as to uncover the key importance of human emotion in
Durkheim’s early views on the nature and social role of religion. This important,
yet hitherto neglected, thematic link in Durkheim’s early writings will be used to
defend Nisbet’s (1972[1966]) belief that it is the religious and emotional
foundations of order that provide the true germinative link between Durkheim’s
early and later work, and not structural functional differentiation, as commenta-
tors like Wallwork (1984, 1985) had otherwise suggested.

KEYWORDS emotion, mechanical solidarity, morality, organic solidarity, religion

Introduction
The last 10–15 years of sociological scholarship have witnessed a renewed interest
in Durkheim’s understanding of the link between religion and collective emotion
– or the non-rational side of social life. Much of this interest, which has its roots
in a series of older studies, centres upon Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (1995[1912]), where there is a complex and imaginative engage-
ment with the non-rational dimensions of social life and its key importance for the
author’s analysis of how religion and society are constituted. This interest is
particularly evident in pieces by Bouglé (1926), Caillois (1950) and, more
recently, Collins (1988), who identifies The Elementary Forms as a key text in what
he refers to as the ‘underground wing’ of Durkheim’s writings. Despite often
been characterized as a positivist, Durkheim developed a deep concern with
society as a moral, religious force, which stimulated in people an effervescent
propulsion towards actions of either social cohesion or dissolution.
 It will, no doubt, surprise many to learn that Durkheim’s interest in the
significance of emotional energies for the maintenance, development, or decay of
societies is also discussed in Talcott Parsons’s various (1964[1944], 1968[1937],
1978[1973]) readings of The Elementary Forms (Fish, forthcoming). More recent
pieces by Mellor (1998), Shilling and Mellor (1998), and Gane (1988) also pick
up on the same themes. These analyses, however, have done little as yet to prompt
a similar interest in the author’s earlier text, The Division of Labour in Society
(1964[1893]). One exception to this tendency is a paper by Fisher and Chon
(1989), which situates the intensity of collective emotions in mechanical societies
and their subsequent diminution in modern organic societies, in the context of a
broader discussion of the relationship between Durkheim’s cumulative writings
and the social construction of emotions.
The general neglect shown towards the link between religion and emotion
in mainstream commentaries on The Division of Labour can be explained through
a variety of reasons. The issue of religion became sidelined in readings of The
Division following Durkheim’s admission that he only began to recognize
the ‘essential role played by religion in social life’ after 1895 (Durkheim,
1975[1907]: 606–7).
Part of the reason for the neglect of human emotion has to do with The
Division’s failure to mention the non-rational importance of collective efferves-
cence in the social construction of religious and moral orders. The absence of this
concept has, perhaps, led many commentators to assume that human emotion
either did not figure or was, at best, only a peripheral concern in Durkheim’s early
writings. Durkheim’s (1984[1893]) rejection of the concept of homo duplex,
which provided a biological-psychological foundation for his later (1995[1912])
insights on collective effervescence, also goes a long way towards consolidating
the above assumption. Rather than supporting the homo duplex model’s identifica-
tion of a ‘double centre of gravity’, or natural split in the make-up of human
beings between rational thought and non-rational passions, The Division, says
Hawkins (1977), chose instead to depict individuals as plastic, malleable creatures
whose variable wants, needs and values, though having a biological and psycho-
logical substratum, were nevertheless the product of social forces (Hawkins, 1977:
233–5).
Once the absence of collective effervescence is combined with The Divi-
sion’s rejection of the homo duplex model, it is easy to understand why so many
commentators shelved the issue of emotion so as to concentrate on Durkheim’s
more enduring (1984[1893]) interest in establishing a ‘science of morality’, and
his conception of sociology as the ‘scientific counterpart of socialism’ (Durkheim,
1984[1893]: 32).1
The present article challenges this general discounting of The Division by
offering a thoroughgoing and systematic re-reading of it in the light of both the
sociological problems of religion and human emotion. I will argue that emotional
factors (like feelings of joy, elation, and sorrow) are of particular importance in

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Durkheim’s (1964[1893]) text, since it is their symbolic representation through
religion which enables individuals to become sociable human beings in the first
place. Not only will this project extend the number of Durkheim’s texts that are
capable of being read in an emotional light, it will also help to reaffirm Nisbet’s
(1972[1966]) interpretation of theoretical continuity in the author’s work, from
the rival view put forward by Wallwork (1984, 1985).
Wallwork asserts that Durkheim’s later writings on religion, such as The
Elementary Forms (1995[1912]), did not change so much as re-express
The Division’s central thesis: ‘that the individual gradually emerges as an autono-
mous being from group tyranny, as societies develop in the direction of increasing
structural functional differentiation and dynamic pluralism’ (Wallwork, 1985:
211). It is true that Wallwork (1984, 1985) captures one of the key elements,
which make up Durkheim’s general thesis in The Division. Structural functional
differentiation is closely intertwined with this text’s analysis of the historical,
religious, and moral evolution of Western societies from the time of the simple
horde (Wallwork, 1984: 45).
This said, it remains difficult to substantiate Wallwork’s broader claims,
given his own over concern with The Division at the expense of textual references
to The Elementary Forms. The only time Wallwork mentions (or alludes to) The
Elementary Forms is in a short footnote when defining the sacred and in the
closing sentences of his 1985 article – both of which are cursory and thus devoid
of any real exegesis or critical engagement with the text itself (Wallwork, 1985:
211–16). This imbalance necessarily makes his argument too partial and undevel-
oped to specify in any kind of detail this alleged connection between Durkheim’s
early and later writings.
More importantly still, when Wallwork does correctly identify The Divi-
sion’s interest in functionalism and rationalization he all too often neglects those
emotional changes, which accompany it over the course of human history.2 Nisbet
(1972[1966]), however, offers an alternative view to that of Wallwork. Rather
than identifying structural functional differentiation as the overriding concern in
Durkheim’s work, Nisbet draws attention to the author’s persistent interest in the
religious and emotional foundations of order. It is only when we re-assert
the value of Nisbet’s interpretation of Durkheim that we are provided with the
true germinative link between The Division and The Elementary Forms.
Durkheim’s (1984[1893]) interest in religion and human emotion emer-
ges out of his wish to discover scientific laws, which reveal the specific conditions
of existence of determinate historical moralities, that is, of social facts. As
Durkheim puts it:

[The Division of Labour] is pre-eminently an attempt to treat the facts of

the moral life according to the method of the positive sciences. . . . Moral
facts are phenomena like others; they consist of rules of action recogniz-
able by certain distinctive characteristics. It must, then, be possible to

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 observe them, describe them, classify them, and look for the [scientific]
laws explaining them. (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 32)

Defining Religion in The Division of Labour

One key feature which links Durkheim’s early and later writings on religion is his
emphasis upon transcendence. In The Division, religion is seen to involve the non-
rational feeling of being in relationship with ‘an infinitely more intense and vast
consciousness than that possessed by the individual’, of ‘something sacred, which
we feel more or less confusedly outside and above us’ (ibid.: 100). The Division
also introduces an idea that Durkheim would later build upon in The Elementary
Forms; namely that a belief in God, or gods, is not a necessary criterion for
religion. The kind of transcendence that Durkheim has in mind is social rather
than theological in nature: ‘offences against the gods are offences against society’
(ibid.: 92–3). Individual support for society’s moral values, says Durkheim, can
only be gained through religion:

[Religious forces] dominate us; they are, so to speak, something superhu-

man and, at the same time, they bind us to objects, which are outside of
our temporal life. They appear to us as an echo of a force which is foreign
to us and which is superior to that which we are. (ibid.: 100)

Conceptual Elements in The Division of Labour

Durkheim’s analysis of western social evolution reveals six different types of
society on the basis of their increasingly complex structural functional organiza-
tion and religious unity. These are as follows: (1) the horde, (2) the tribe
composed of clans, (3) the tribal confederation, (4) the ancient city-state, (5)
medieval society, (6) the modern industrial nation. Durkheim refers to the first
three of these stages as examples of ‘mechanical solidarity’. The last three stages
illustrate ‘organic solidarity’.
These terms were problematic for Durkheim, because he was unclear
about what was meant by mechanical and organic solidarity as ‘ideal types’ (ibid.:
174). One major source of confusion related to the fact that only those hypothet-
ical societies found at either end of the evolutionary tree represented these ‘ideal
types’. In addition, there were no existent societies in which both types of
integration were not present: ‘they are two aspects of one and the same reality’
(ibid.: 129). Taken together, these two problems served to obscure the six stages
mentioned above, which in turn influenced Durkheim’s later decision to abandon
the idea of mechanical and organic solidarity altogether (Nisbet, 1972[1966]:
86). At the original time of writing, however, he claimed that we may legitimately
refer to a given society as being integrated on the basis of mechanical or organic
solidarity, if we can establish that one of these forms of cohesion predominates

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over the other in securing the practical and emotional solidarity of the group
under scrutiny.

Mechanical Solidarity
(1) The Horde
Durkheim’s analysis of religion in the simple horde (or self-sufficient band) is
necessarily somewhat vague given the absence of any empirical data to back it up.
This hypothetical category was assumed to occupy its place at the dawn of history
only because the author took his logical thought process back one stage from the
simple clan (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 174–81). Despite this lack of available
evidence his general account still remains important by revealing the first stage out
of which later religions are thought to arise. According to Wallwork’s (1984: 47)
reading of The Division, there are four principal characteristics of simple religion:
its pervasiveness, emotional intensity, concreteness, and precise regulation.
Human emotion occupies a central place in Wallwork’s list because of the
way in which feelings and sympathies are standardized by religion in order to
ensure social order. To this extent religion is part of an all-powerful and pervasive
common conscience, which must dominate over personal emotions before indi-
vidualism can be reduced to a minimum (ibid.: 46). Religion generates the
emotional intensity needed for individuals to resemble one another by comprising
all and extending to all:

It contains in a confused mass, besides beliefs properly religious, morality,

law, the principles of political organisation, and even science, or at least
what passes for it. (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 135)3

Religious gatherings and unwritten repressive laws are used to protect shared
religious beliefs from any possible rise in individual differences (Wallwork, 1984:
46).4
Although religion and morality are not really distinguishable from one
another at this early stage they, nevertheless, remain strongly held by virtue of
being infused with sacredness. The earliest religion in Durkheim’s account is a
form of animism:

In the beginning the gods are not distinct from the universe, or rather,
there are no gods but only sacred beings, without their sacred character
being related to any external thing as their source. (Durkheim,
1964[1893]: 288)

Durkheim’s category of animism, which is broadly comparable to Comte’s

[1913[1830–42] understanding of fetishism in the theological stage of knowl-
edge, also anticipates the author’s later argument in The Elementary Forms that

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 religion is emotionally bound up with sacred things and not necessarily with
God.
Durkheim goes on to say that the environment in which a horde member
lives is:

Made up of beings of all sorts who fill the social horizon. The states of
conscience represented in them have the same character. First they are
related to precise objects, as this animal and this tree, this plant, this
natural force etc. Then, as everyone is related to these things in the same
way . . . consequently, the common conscience has a defined character.
(Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 287)

As with sacred religious objects, the moral norms legitimated by them are also
precisely formulated. Emotional uniformity is therefore guaranteed through the
way in which moral norms predetermine the exact detail of how an individual
should eat, dress, and the gestures he/she must make (ibid.). At this point,
Durkheim does not link such behavioural codes to ritual, nor does he contrast the
‘sacred’ lack of individuality in certain kinds of ritual with the individual’s
‘profane’ sense of being different from others in ordinary life (Wallwork, 1984:
47). This situation arises because Durkheim has yet to appreciate the importance
of collective effervescence in moulding and renewing these emotionally vital
moral and behavioural codes in the first place.
While Durkheim is correct to identify the pervasiveness of religion, critics
like Bellah (1970: 29) point out that stability in simple society is achieved through
its fluidity and flexibility, not repression and excessive prescriptiveness as the
author had originally supposed. Bellah’s criticism should, however, only be read as
a challenge to the manner in which religious-moral absolutes are held, not the
underlying emotional similarities, which provide it with the inner strength to resist
significant innovation in the first place. This point needs to be recognized if we are
not to take Bellah’s remarks out of context.

(2) The Simple Clan

Religion in this second stage shares the general characteristics of horde animism
while, at the same time, highlighting the beginnings of progress and the emo-
tional weakening of primitive religious consciousness. At this point in history the
previously undifferentiated horde loses its independence and becomes a clan, or
an element in a larger differentiated tribe, formed of segments. Ancient Hebrews
in the Pentateuch and the first forms of the Athenian Phatry are examples of
simple clans. Each clan has its own distinctive set of shared beliefs about a
common origin and name, which takes precedence over blood relatedness as the
emotional basis for solidarity itself (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 175–7). The struggle
for clans to acquire distinctive characteristics so that they don’t ‘lose themselves in

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one another’ gives rise to a process of structural functional differentiation in its
crudest forms (ibid.: 177; Wallwork, 1984: 48).
Several major developments are involved in this process: the need for clans
to specialize in a given function, to settle in a particular territory, and finally, to
embrace the need for political authority in the person of a chief (Durkheim,
1964[1893]: 179–81, 183, 195–6). The chief gains power by means of religious
legitimation, which confers upon him a superhuman aura through which to
counter the threat of war with other opposing clans. More generally, chiefs are
bestowed this power from the group because of its need for a moral exemplar to
defend those emotional similarities contained within it. Once the power of the
chief is organized it becomes autonomous, allowing him a level of personal
activity not previously known. For Durkheim, this represents the first positive step
in the direction of individualism and the possible formulation of a new set of
[moral] initiatives that might break the [emotional] equilibrium of the present day
(ibid.: 195). The capacity of simple clan-based societies to adapt in the face of
these changes does not, however, simply depend upon the presence of any new,
individualistically minded political chief, as Wallwork (1984: 48) seems to suggest.
The chief must curb all outlandish tendencies before his personal activities can
appeal to the widespread and serious minded re-structuring of emotion needed to
legitimate those different moral initiatives that he wishes to put in motion. To
exclude, or minimize, the importance of emotional intensity on this matter would
be to forfeit a true understanding of what Durkheim was actually trying to say.
Durkheim’s analysis of clan-based religion also involves a link with totem-
ism that is not otherwise found in his description of the horde:

The animals or plants of the species, which serve as a clan totem, are the
objects of worship, but that is not because a principle sui generis comes to
communicate their divine nature from without. This nature is intrinsic
with them; they are divine in and of themselves. (Durkheim, 1964[1893]:
288)

While this last statement appears to contradict Durkheim’s argument that col-
lective representations are imbued with the external force of society (Durkheim,
1995[1912]: 227), its mention of the word sui generis nevertheless anticipates the
author’s later belief that clan members express their emotional feelings, moral
identity and reliance upon one another through totemic symbols. Closely con-
nected with this 1893 idea of totemism is Durkheim’s belief in the descent of
clans from a common tribal ancestor. The primal founder not only helps to further
kinship links between different clans, it also adds a spiritual and transcendent
dimension to concrete religious objects like the totem (Durkheim, 1964[1893]:
288). These developments, in their turn, allow religious tradition and its capacity
for inspiring emotional agreement about moral rules to become further entren-
ched within the clan itself.

FISH RELIGION & THE CHANGING INTENSITY OF EMOTIONAL SOLIDARITY 209

 Durkheim’s stated link between the clan and totem is, however, open to
criticism. Lowie (1925) and Evans-Pritchard (1965) make a valid point when
noting that ‘there are peoples with clans and no totems and peoples with totems
and no clans’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1965: 67). This is clearly a perennial problem that
will not go away and one for which it is difficult to provide any kind of satisfactory
answer.

(3) The Tribal Confederation

This third sub-stage is little more than an advanced or developed type of clan
(Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 182–3, 185–6). Its appearance represents the first
glimmerings of organic solidarity in the sense that tribes now start to assume a
very basic division of labour within the larger confederacy (Wallwork, 1984: 49;
1985: 208).5 These rational changes also lead to a more widespread fracturing of
human emotion than that which might otherwise come from the new initiatives
of a clan chief. It is worth remembering that in the clan, such initiatives only
represented a potential for emotional and moral change, not a wholesale guaran-
tee that such changes would occur. The appearance of structural functional
differentiation in tribal confederations is important because it translates this
potential for change into actual change.
The rudimentary division of labour contained within it helps to ensure this
transition by allowing ‘classes and castes [to] . . . arise from the multitude of
occupational organisations being born amidst the pre-existing familial organis-
ation’ (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 182). Tension quickly mounts between these two
types of organization once each class or caste is allowed to develop its own
morality. Not only does this diversification of morality have the knock-on effect of
stratifying previously stable emotional energies, it also leads to a releasing of spirits
or gods from the concrete religious objects within which they are now thought to
reside (Wallwork, 1984: 49). This kind of move propagates the belief that spirits
or gods are immanent in the world by existing outside of those particular objects
to which they are more specifically attached (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 288).
Durkheim does not, however, offer any explanation for this situation beyond the
assertion that new religious beliefs simply reflect structural alterations (ibid.: 289).
It is only when this point has been reached that traditional religious symbols like
the totem become seen as too particular to one group or clan to inspire
widespread emotional and moral consensus in this new stratified social climate.
This sub-section has shown that despite the initial appearance of structural
functional differentiation in the clan and tribal confederation, natural sympathies
towards individuality were overshadowed by feelings of deep respect for sacred
beings and gods (Wallwork, 1985: 210). The need to maintain strong emotional
similarities between people was guaranteed through another more implicit theme
in Durkheim’s Division of Labour. It was because individuals resembled one
another that they were able to feel charity towards those other like-minded folk

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around them. The principle of charity became seen as the appropriate basis of
morality in all mechanical societies, irrespective of their particular stage
of development (Shoenfeld and Meštrovic, 1989: 115–16).

Organic Solidarity
Organic solidarity remains distinctive through its weakening of the previously
strong conscience collective found in mechanical solidarity and the intensity of
emotional attachments that accompany it. This change comes about for a variety
of reasons. The increase in geographical size and population density in
organically-based societies brings with it an increased specialization and diversifi-
cation of occupation functions whose particularity weakens the earlier united
world-view of small, traditionalistic communities. Exciting new work opportun-
ities attract individuals away from their places of birth, which in turn, weakens
tradition by displacing those earlier defenders of it, the older generation, who are
no longer in a position to transmit, inculcate, and enforce those emotional
similarities generated by ‘ancestral custom’. Urbanization also contributes to the
general weakening of the collective conscience found in mechanical solidarity
through its large metropolitan areas, which mitigate tribal surveillance of individ-
ual behaviour. It was, argued Durkheim, only at this point in history that organic
solidarity, with its increasingly complicated systems of thought and experience,
stress upon interdependence and acceptance of differences, became the more
prominent type of social organization (Marske, 1987: 2, 6). Stages 4–6 in
Durkheim’s evolutionary scheme correspond to the development of organic
solidarity.

(4) The Ancient City-State

This fourth stage is marked by the fusion of several territorially-based tribal
confederations (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 181–6). Cities emerge through this
development and become the symbolic and institutional control centre for
ecclesiastical, political and military life. The rise of the new city-state and urban
ethos took over the former political functions of kinship groups while, at the same
time, setting up new institutions devoted to encouraging the need for a height-
ened rational division of labour (Wallwork, 1984: 50–1; 1985: 208–9).
With this flourishing of interdependent specialization, religion becomes
partly separated from the political realm and more of a complex phenomenon
than in clans or tribes (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 142). Although family-based
religions continue to live on, the emotional attachments engendered by clan-
based ancestor worship are now removed from collective cultural support and
confined to small domestic circles. This weakening of intense emotional similar-
ities is further accompanied by legal changes, which abandon those formerly
repressive sanctions used to enforce shared religious beliefs in mechanical societies

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 (ibid.: 156–7). Not only do these changes in the law remove a significant obstacle
against the furtherance of individual differences, they also help to create the space
needed for a comprehensive moral framework to emerge in support of those new
institutions proclaiming the virtues of specialization in ancient society.
Hand in hand with the rise of these differentiated institutions is the
growth of civil religion in the city-state. Religion is now increasingly abstract, less
controlling of everyday life and less emotionally intense than in earlier clan or
tribal-based religions. Different kinship and ethnic ties, as well as local traditions,
lead religious symbols and norms to become ever more general so as to include
everybody. These religious changes, which have their historical base in tribal
confederacies, are further accompanied in ancient society by ‘transcendental
progress’, whereby gods are more sharply differentiated from and intervene less in
human affairs (ibid.: 288–9). In Durkheim’s view, this widening of the dichotomy
between the supernatural and natural remains problematic by weakening the
emotional intensity of religion to the point where it is prevented from doing
justice to the fervent quest for salvation in the ancient world (Wallwork, 1984:
51).
The above-mentioned separation was upheld in Athens and Rome by
political authorities whose role was to maintain those civil religious traditions
believed to be essential for social cohesion. These included: a shared belief in high
gods, the right of asylum, protection of the sacred olives and temples from
profanization, respect for the dead and the regular performance of priestly rituals,
feast days, sacrifices and games. Foreigners were permitted to hold on to their
own ‘strange divinities’, but only so long as they did not interfere with or weaken
the national religion (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 160–1; Wallwork, 1985: 209). In
my view this defence of national religion makes Durkheim’s analysis of early
organic solidarity appear contradictory by implying the continued need for
emotional similarities despite those wider transcendental changes going on in the
ancient city-state at that time. For this reason emotional intensities cannot be as
weak as Durkheim originally supposed.

(5) Medieval Society

During the fifth societal type, which occurred in the middle ages, two structural
changes are seen to occur. First, there is a greater rational differentiation of major
institutions responsible for government, religion, education and economics in
medieval society than in the ancient world. The second structural feature of
medieval society relates to how its institutions are less self-sufficient than before
and more interdependent with outlying territories and cities (Wallwork, 1984:
52–3).
To remain in line with these changes, religion needed to become even
more abstract than before so as to cover all the differentiated institutions and
individuals existing at this time. It is for this reason that Christianity is made up of

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‘articles of faith which are very broad and very general’, that challenge formerly
precise moral recommendations about behavioural conduct by putting in their
place a new form of rule which predominates over the minds and hearts of people
(Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 289). Continuous with this last point is Christianity’s
wish to repress only those behavioural infractions that might challenge its
fundamental principles, not ones of minor importance, as in earlier societies (ibid.:
163). This broad abandonment of repressive sanctions was, however, only one
aspect of Christianity’s attempt to build upon the previous efforts of the ancient
city-state. Medieval Christianity also sought to reaffirm the ancient need for a
comprehensive moral framework, by making the idea of the human ‘person’ and
love of humanity ascendant over formerly patriotic and tribal affections (ibid.:
290). By stressing these two moral predicates in a general way, Christianity was
able to leave greater room for individual reflection, with many ethical decisions
now being left to the believer’s own conscience and rational deliberation (Wall-
work, 1984: 53; 1985: 209).
Individuals were now ‘less acted upon’ than before, because of the
importance now accorded to autonomous feelings of emotion, which lay at
the very heart of personal decision-making itself. Although people in medieval
society appear to resemble one another through a shared belief in the human
person, this in no way heralds a return to the former strictures of mechanical
solidarity. Moral similarities in this fifth stage are diluted through the varying
levels of emotional intensity generated by individuals when attempting to commu-
nicate the value of humanity as a religious idea. It is the autonomous nature of
such feelings that prevents medieval people from being totally dominated by the
common conscience in the same way as those living in mechanical societies. This
free play of individual decision-making is made sacrosanct through the Christian
God’s abandonment of the world to humans and their disputes. The kingdom of
the Christian deity is deemed to be ‘no longer of this world’ and thus incompre-
hensible by being far above human affairs (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 289). Not
only does this emphasis give spiritual legitimation to the importance of the human
person, it also separates religion and politics more completely than in the ancient
city-state (ibid.: 163).

(6) Modern Industrial Society

The sixth stage in Durkheim’s account is characterized by the liberation of
functionally specialized institutions from those territorial constraints found in the
medieval world. This point in history, which is marked by the industrial revolu-
tion, shows an interest in the way large-scale urban institutions take up responsi-
bility for business and commerce, often across national boundaries and continents
(Wallwork, 1984: 54–5). The multiple rise of these international institutions
remains valuable in Durkheim’s eyes by ensuring that no one single group is
capable of tyrannizing the individual (Wallwork, 1985: 210). Individuals now

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 become emancipated through large-scale institutions, which group people not
according to their relations of lineage, caste or class, but by the nature of the
specific activity or ‘occupational role’ which they perform in society (Durkheim,
1964[1893]: 182).
The religion of modernity is the ‘cult of the individual’, which consists of
a shared belief in the sacredness of the human person, but without supporting
rites. The absence of religious rites, says Durkheim, highlights a key difference
between the modern cult’s way of expressing and maintaining the value of
individuality when compared to that of Christianity in the medieval period. The
necessary condition for respecting individuality in the modern cult is simply that
the individual acquire their ‘own way of thinking and acting’ (ibid.: 137). At this
point, the need to resemble everyone else is exchanged for the presentation of a
‘singular and personal appearance’ and use of one’s own reason to apply social
rules to particular circumstances (ibid.: 130–31). These two ends could only be
achieved through the different occupational roles found within large-scale institu-
tions themselves. Once this had occurred, the only ideology capable of uniting
people would be one based on what they all share, namely their common
humanity. It is only with the strengthening of those collective sentiments regard-
ing individual personality that ‘all other [primitive] beliefs and all other practices
take on a character less and less religious’ (ibid.: 172). Not only is the human
person allowed to take centre-stage, he/she also becomes the object of a kind of
religion, or cult, which is erected on behalf of personal dignity along with its own
superstitions.
While this new cult retains Christianity’s transcendence and belief in the
eternality of the sacred, Durkheim nevertheless hoped that it would eventually
replace traditional religion, which he felt was rapidly becoming outmoded in the
modern world (Seidman, 1985: 115; Marske, 1987: 3). Before this could happen
the cult of the individual had to be understood, first and foremost, as the outcome
of non-rational human sympathies rather than rational reflection. The moral
demand that we should be treated as though we are equal could only become
operative if powerful emotions like compassion were allowed to transfigure
existent human differences (Pickering, 1979: 72).
These last remarks also add weight to Durkheim’s life-long belief that
Kantianism and Utilitarianism were misguided in their attempt to explain social
evolution as the sole outcome of rationality. Durkheim was opposed to these two
Enlightenment schools of thought on the basis of their narrow understanding of
the cult of the individual, which centred upon the ego’s capacity for maximizing
rational self-interest to the exclusion of all else. Utilitarians like Herbert Spencer
had prevented any forward movement on this issue by excluding all references to
the role of emotionally shared beliefs in his explanation of individualism. Durk-
heim’s early understanding of individualism thus assumed it to be common only
insofar as:

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 The community partakes of it, but it is individual in its object. It turns all
wills towards the same end, [but] this end is not social . . . It is still from
society that it takes all its force [but] it is not to society that it attaches us;
it is to ourselves. Hence it does not constitute a true social link. (Dur-
kheim, 1964[1893]: 172)

In a word, the cult of the individual, in its purely egoistic form, did not constitute
a true social bond. It was not until such later works as Individualism and the
Intellectuals (1969[1898]) and The Dualism of Human Nature (1973[1914])
that Durkheim explicitly outlined a moral role for individualism in the main-
tenance of social solidarity (Marske, 1987; Tole, 1993: 23).
Durkheim feared that the ‘negative’ (or false) kind of solidarity generated
by egoistic individualism would weaken collective emotional attachments between
people and so contribute to an ‘ensuing dissolution of society’ (Durkheim,
1964[1893]: 172). An over-concern with rational self-interest lay at the core of
Durkheim’s fear in this regard because of the way it inhibited the development
of rules appropriate to the recognition of shared human dignity and promoted
those existing social ills in Durkheim’s own day. In one sense, unfettered human
calculations did more to encourage the continuance of the previous ‘forced’
division of labour, which assigned occupational specializations on the basis of
birth and inherited wealth, rather than one spontaneously organized around
natural talents and proclivities.
To phrase the matter differently, egoistic individualism did not contain the
means for alerting or compelling personal consciences to take seriously the
medium to long term damage that might be done if large numbers of people
continued to be forced into occupations for which they had neither the motiva-
tion nor the aptitude (ibid.: 374–88). Pure rational self-interest also did much to
encourage anomie, that is a situation where the rapid and unbridled increase in
wants goes ungoverned to a point where the attainment of one object of insatiable
desire immediately widens the horizon for other objects to be attained and desired
again to infinity (Meštrovic, 1991: 88). While Durkheim believed anomie to be an
inevitable (or normal) aspect of progress he, nonetheless, saw it as an ‘evil’ that
causes humans to suffer a life without cohesion and moral regulation (Durkheim,
1964[1893]: 5).6
Durkheim’s solution to the problems of anomie and the forced division of
labour revolved around making emotionally sensitive understandings of the cult
of the individual ascendant over purely rationalistic analyses of this same concept.
Durkheim argued that individual societies could only bring this emotionally
focused understanding of individualism to bear on the problem of anomie by
communicating it in relation to their own particular circumstances. Durkheim
thus proposed a solution to anomie, which saw each society as having its own
form of ‘becoming’. This modern day malaise could only be remedied by looking

FISH RELIGION & THE CHANGING INTENSITY OF EMOTIONAL SOLIDARITY 215

 at those particular societies which experienced it (Durkheim, 1982[1895],
1968[1897], 1973[1900]).
The new, emotionally inspired moral code that Durkheim had in mind was
organized around the principle of justice (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 121–2). As
Durkheim says in this regard:

What we must do to relieve this anomie is to discover the means for

making the organs which are still wasting themselves in discordant move-
ments harmoniously concur by introducing into their relations more
justice by more and more extenuating the external inequalities which are
the source of the evil. (ibid.: 409)

While this emergent idea of justice consolidated the modernist rationalization of

occupational functions through its stress upon the need for external conditions
of competition to be equal, this in no way reduced it to being Utilitarian or
objectivist in nature. Rather, according to Durkheim:

It only asks that we be thoughtful of our fellows and that we be just, that
we fulfil our duty, that we work at the function we can best execute and
receive the just reward for our services. (ibid.: 407)

At one level this need to be ‘thoughtful to our fellows’, as a basis for justice,
highlights Durkheim’s belief in the primacy of warm human sympathies in tying
each of us to one another and to the group in which we take part. At another
level, this same point leads him to ‘reform’ the previous Utilitarian emphasis upon
rationality, by now subordinating it to the all consuming power of non-rational
human feelings and emotions. It was, believed Durkheim, only when rationality
had been ‘renovated’ in this way that certain heartfelt rules of justice could be
formulated which prevented individuals from being exploited and violated in their
daily relations. These rules of justice did not, however, amount to increased
normative controls on individual wants. They were intended as a more stringent
regulation of economic activities, in an attempt to reduce the effects of the
abnormal division of labour (Hawkins, 1977: 235).
Durkheim’s clear definition of justice as the opportunity to develop one’s
own capacities to the fullest does not, however, escape criticism. Commentators
like Sirianni (1984: 453) fault him for not wanting to change society if these
opportunities do not exist, even if that requires violence. She feels that Durk-
heim’s conceptualization of justice is inferior to Marx’s because Durkheim only
seeks a fit between social positions and natural aptitudes, not a radical restructur-
ing of the division of labour itself. The main problem with this view is that it
ignores Durkheim’s belief that even if opportunities for justice do not arise
immediately, the chances of them being realized in the medium- to long-term are
still high because of those powerful collective feelings which backed the ideal from
the start.

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 Durkheim (1964[1893]) identifies contract law as one major rule of
justice. In The Division of Labour, Durkheim sees contract law as a social
mechanism expressing the functional needs of society not as something directly
linked to the moral value of individualism. This last view of contract law would
only be developed in Durkheim’s later writings (Cotterrell, 1999: 119–20). In its
initial formulation contract law remained, in many ways, an exception to the
largely unemotional character of restitutive law (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 127–8)
through its potential for replacing utilitarian definitions of individualism with a
more sentimentally-based understanding of the dignity and worth of each individ-
ual person. Durkheim saw this potential as deriving from the fact that contract law
drew its inspiration from the collective emotional condemnation of:

Any kind of contracting where one party gets the lion’s share, where one is
exploited by the other because he is weaker, so that he does not receive the
fair price for his pains. The public consciousness evermore insistently
demands exact reciprocity in the services exchanged and recognising only
a very reduced form of obligation for those agreements that do not fulfil
this basic condition of all justice. (Durkheim, 1984[1893]: 320)

The encouragement of positive fellow feeling through contract law was also
extended through a second rule of justice relating to decentralized occupational
groups. Such groups were formed when:

A certain number of individuals . . . are found to have ideas, interests,

sentiments and occupations not shared by the rest of the population. [At
this point] they seek each other out, enter into relations, associate, and
thus, little by little, a restricted group . . . will be formed in the midst of
the general society. (Durkheim, 1964[1893]: 14)

Durkheim believed that occupational groups had the potential to curb anomic
and egoistic tendencies in a given nation by intercalating between the state and
the individual:

A whole series of secondary groups, near enough to the individuals to

attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag them, in this way,
into the general torrent of social life. (ibid.: 28)

Occupational groups would therefore be in a position to assert the modern ideal

of justice by recreating a sense of community with a warm and emotionally intense
life of its own. It was, believed Durkheim, only by ‘maintaining a spiritual
sentiment of common solidarity in the consciousness of all the workers’ that the
law of the strongest could be prevented from being brutally applied to industrial
and commercial relations (ibid.: 10).7 Yet, as Bellah (1973: xlviii) rightly points

FISH RELIGION & THE CHANGING INTENSITY OF EMOTIONAL SOLIDARITY 217

 out, this subordination of particular interests to the general interest was not to be
our fate; it is apparent that Western society has yet to see either the revival of
associational life, or the level of justice that Durkheim originally hoped for.
This negative situation is not helped by Durkheim’s ‘piecemeal’ treatment
of women in his 1893 classic. Many critics argue that if Durkheim had truly
believed in the principle of justice, he would have extended it to both men and
women. As it is, he chooses to exclude women from this moral principle when
scientifically endorsing their subjugation through traditional sex roles and rela-
tionships. Lehmann (1994) is one critic who shares this view. She argues that
Durkheim saw the sexual division of labour in his own day as inevitable and even
desirable. Thus:

Whether naturally determined or socially chosen, the sexual division of

labour is necessary. . . . You mustn’t fight Mother Nature: you can’t fight
Mother Nature, and you shouldn’t fight Mother Nature. [Durkheim]
implicitly delineates the futility of tampering with sex roles, of ‘messing
with’ nature’s creation. His science asserts simultaneously that this inter-
vention is impossible and that it is undesirable. (Lehmann, 1994: 34–5)

Durkheim’s unwillingness to apply the principle of justice across the sexes,

suggests Lehmann, remains a significant contributing factor, then, to explaining
why widespread social revival never quite got off the ground.
My own view of Lehmann’s criticism is that she treats Durkheim’s sex role
biases as if they overtake his non-rationally based vision of how justice, contract
law, and occupational groups might improve the cult of the individual in the
future when, in actual fact, the reverse was true. Although Durkheim never
overcame his conservative patriarchal biases he, nevertheless, developed a valuable
understanding of the modern importance of justice, which later scholars would
apply to women as well as to men. From a long-term perspective, then, Durk-
heim’s negative views on women are secondary to his socio-religious moral vision,
not ascendant over it as Lehmann suggests.
In summary, this sub-section has shown that the religious make-up of
societies displaying organic solidarity remains distinctive from those of a more
mechanical sort by not overshadowing natural sympathies towards individuality.
This modern day emphasis on individuality weakens those previously intense
emotional similarities that characterized religion in traditional societies, by allow-
ing individuals the freedom to make ethical decisions for themselves. Nowhere is
this weakening of collective emotion more apparent than in modern industrial
society, where the secular cult of the individual exists at the expense of social
solidarity. Durkheim’s solution to the problems of anomie and egoistic indi-
vidualism lay in his recommendation about contract law and occupational groups.
He believed that these two rules of justice would put the spark of emotional

218 JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(2)

warmth back into modern social relations in ways that overly rational, utilitarian
understandings of individuality could never do.
It should now be clear that if Wallwork’s (1984: 43) comments are correct
and The Division of Labour is the seedbed of nearly everything Durkheim wrote, it
is not because of the presence of structural functional differentiation so much as
the important link he establishes between religion and human emotion. Structural
functional differentiation is only a supporting theme in this regard. Although
Wallwork is correct to highlight the manifest importance of differentiation in The
Division of Labour (1893), there remains little evidence to suggest that this same
interest is also visible in Durkheim’s later work The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life (1995 [1912]).
If the two texts are linked it is through Durkheim’s ideas on the enduring
emotional importance of religion itself. It can be argued, for example, that The
Division’s analysis of expanding and contracting emotional attachments gave
Durkheim an initial set of insights that would later be transformed in The
Elementary Forms, when he looked at how the ‘religious’ nature of collective
effervescence provided a continuous source for creating and sustaining moral
values as a basis for social order across history. These different twists and turns in
Durkheim’s thinking lend support to Nisbet’s (1972[1966]) argument about his
wish to abandon The Division’s evolutionary scheme by the time of The Elemen-
tary Forms. While the religious expression of emotional attachments is less intense
in organic solidarity than in mechanical solidarity, its basic presence remains no
less of a source to the one than to the other. The only way Durkheim could testify
to the emotional continuity that existed between these two forms of solidarity was
by making collective effervescence ascendant over the original mechanical-organic
distinction, which only got in the way of recognizing this fact.

Summary
This article has examined how Durkheim’s interest in the sociological problem of
religion expressed itself in The Division of Labour in Society. Durkheim’s early
work remained distinctive by avoiding all references to how group emotion was
stimulated through collective effervescence. These details were put to one side so
that Durkheim could pursue a more general understanding of how religion
altered the intensity of emotional attachments in Western societies over time. In
societies where mechanical solidarity was dominant, the emotional intensity of
religion quashed individuality by forcing people to resemble one another. These
emotional similarities were consolidated through the worship of sacred beings,
gods, and ancestral predecessors, all of whom inspired moral feelings of charity
towards one’s neighbour.
These emotional similarities became weakened, however, in societies
dominated by organic solidarity, where a belief in the sacred importance of human
individuality was in evidence. This cultic principle appeared most strongly in

FISH RELIGION & THE CHANGING INTENSITY OF EMOTIONAL SOLIDARITY 219

 modern industrial society but was marred by the ‘forced’ division of labour and
high levels of anomie found within it. Durkheim argued that the idea of
individuality could only become a true basis for social cohesion if rational and self-
interested understandings of it were subordinated to those non-rational sym-
pathies that lay at its core. This ‘reformation’ of Enlightenment thought
depended upon the emotionally focused moral principle of justice replacing that
of charity in modern society. These accumulated insights led me to argue that
Durkheim’s understanding of the emotional importance of religion was the one
true germinative link between his early and later writings, not structural functional
differentiation as commentators like Wallwork (1984, 1985) had first supposed.

Notes
1. The elements that made up Durkheim’s scientific understanding of ethics quickly became the
subject of a great deal of discussion and debate, not only in philosophical and educational circles
but also by the general public. Deploige (1912), for example, offered a full-length volume, which
attacked Durkheim’s secular morality. See also Brunetière (1895) and Weill (1925). Durkheim’s
complex relations with socialism have also been the subject of a great deal of scholarly
controversy. See Filloux (1963) and Clark (1968a: 69, 1968b: 84).
2. To be fair, Wallwork does mention human emotion when (1) outlining Durkheim’s understanding
of mechanical solidarity in terms of the horde and when (2) describing how modernity’s religious
respect for the individual is part and parcel of a historical process that originated when people first
formed societies on the basis of their ‘natural sympathies’ for one another. Beyond this all
reference to human emotion ceases so that Wallwork’s own interest in structural functional
differentiation can be allowed to take centre stage. See Wallwork (1984: 46–7; 1985: 210).
3. The term mechanical solidarity is used to describe consensus in these conditions because
individual resemblances and social coherence remain analogous to the solidarity of like elements
or similar molecules in physical bodies. See Wallwork (1984: 46).
4. ’Repressive law’ is itself an external index of mechanical solidarity that is empirically observable in
the positivist sense.
5. An example here might be the Levites who assumed sacerdotal responsibility within the larger
confederacy of Israel.
6. Durkheim lists the following as indicators of anomie drawn from the time in which he lived:
industrial and commercial crises, especially bankruptcies; class struggle and the antagonism
between capital and labour; the absence of regulation in labour–capital relations; the movement
of economic activity from the family to the factory; the extreme rapidity of change; and a minimal
sense of collaboration amongst workers. See Meštrovic (1991: 93).
7. Durkheim’s belief that occupational groups might safeguard the principle of justice came from his
recognition that Roman ‘corporations of workers’ had a most favourable influence on the ethics
of its members, by uniting them through a common cult and common celebration. See Durkheim,
1964[1893]: 10–11.

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Jonathan S. Fish is currently completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Leeds. His thesis
looks at how Durkheim and Parsons’s ideas on the sociological problems of religion and emotion throw
new light on understanding the postmodern condition.

Address: Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Leeds, Hopewell House, Leeds
LS2 9JT, UK. [email: Jonathan@jsfish.fsnet.co.uk]

FISH RELIGION & THE CHANGING INTENSITY OF EMOTIONAL SOLIDARITY 223