3° | Durkheim: the discovery of social facts Introduction: background; Comte and positivism. Durkheim's rules: the objectivity of social facts; considering social facts as things; the use of sta~ tistics to identify social facts; the normal and the pathological—the nor- mality of crime. Suicide as a social fact: its underlying causes. What can we take from Durkheim: criticisms of Durkheim's methodology and discussion. Introduction Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method (1895/1964) is a classic text in the best sense, and for generations of students it has represented their first contact with sociology and provided material for the first essay question they have had to answer: ‘Is sociology a science?’. Thirty years ago many sociologists—and many non-sociologists—assumed a fairly simple model of scientific activity and explanation, one which generally goes under the name of positivism, and Durkheim has been taken as the archetypal sociological positivist. There is a degree of truth in this but not the whole truth. What is positivism? Historically the term is associated with Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who was a central, but not the only influence on Durkheim. Like most nineteenth-century philosophers and social theorists, Comte saw history as progress, in his case through three different stages: the reli- gious, the metaphysical, and the scientific, the last of which he thought we were entering. Each stage rejected and replaced the way of thinking about the world that characterized the previous phase. The religious phase involves, as one might expect, the explanation of the world by the supernatural, and its most developed form is monotheism, the belief in one God as a final cause. The metaphysical stage is a transitional stage—gods are replaced by abstract forces such as nature—and this develops into the positive, scientific stage. In Comte’s view, the problem with the metaphysical stage is that it is negative: it sets itself against the traditional order and leads to a constant questioning of ideas and relations, leading to anarchy, a constant argument about how society should be organized. It is bound up with one strand of Enlightenment26 What is society and how do we study it? thought—that as rational beings we gain our freedom by such constant ques- tioning. It enables us to overcome superstition and irrational oppression. Comte—and much nineteenth-century sociology—can be seen as representing a conservative reaction to this strand of thought, an attempt to stop the process of questioning. Comte argued that there was no solution to the constant argu- ment about what society should be like—the negative approach; instead we should find out what it is like—the positive approach. Hence positivism. There was in Comte the idea that we could gain firm positive knowledge about the world. In the twentieth century the strand of Enlightenment that Comte was arguing against has reasserted itself at the heart of positivist philosophy. The work of Karl Popper (1959) has demonstrated that we cannot positively prove something to be always the case. If, for example, I wished to prove that all swans were white in a ‘positive’ sense I would have to show that every swan that has existed or does or will exist is white and that of course is impossible. Without such proof, however, it is always possible that we can find a black swan. Popper’s response is to argue that science is concerned not with establishing absolute forms of knowledge, but with establishing that knowledge claims are false (in this example by trying to find a black swan). Science should always be question- ing knowledge claims. Comte, however, was unaware of the eventual reversal of his project. His aim, through observation, classification, and analysis, was to find the laws of society. If we know what society is, we will no longer need to argue about what it should be; knowing the laws of society, like knowing the laws of nature, enables us to predict what will happen and therefore to control what will happen. Then we will be able to restore social order. Although Comte himself can be seen as representing a conservative reaction to Enlightenment thought and to the unrest that followed the French Revolution, such ideas are not necessarily conservative: indeed in the nineteenth century they influenced George Eliot and her partner and they can be found at the roots of British reformist socialism through the Fabian Society. I don’t think anybody today would go all the way with Comte, but common-sense versions of many of Comte’s ideas underlie much bread-and-butter social-policy research—on poverty and crime, for example. We can also find in Comte’s work a notion that became very important to Durkheim, that of society as a whole—that no one part of a society can be stud- ied separately from the others but must be seen in the context of its relationships to all other parts. Durkheim's rules A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which isDurkheim: the discovery of social facts 27 general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations. (Durkheim 1964: 13) SOCIAL FACTS AND OBJECTIVITY Durkheim sees his first task as stating exactly what it is that sociology is about, what it studies. One way of thinking about the social world seems to imply that it includes everything, and many modern approaches that go under the name of ‘social constructionism’ do precisely this; sociological theories of sexuality or of the emotions, for example, talk as if biology and psychology have no relevance (Craib 1995). This sets in train a sociological imperialism which implicitly makes all other sciences, including the natural sciences, redundant. Durkheim's aims for sociology were much more modest—and rightly so, since when he was writing in 1894, the closest sciences to sociology—psychology and biology— were much more highly developed than the social sciences. We would do well to bear that modesty in mind, because in many ways it is still appropriate. Some modern writers seem to think that sociology must explain everything or it can explain nothing, and that there is no alternative in between. Durkheim’s intention was to distinguish sociology from biology and psycho- logy, particularly the latter. What distinguishes a social fact is that it is imposed upon us from the outside, that there is a large degree of compulsion about it. It is worth examining this in some detail. | have often heard people saying things like ‘Well, society makes us do this or that, or teaches us to believe this or that.’ But if we think about this for a while it clearly is not true—we have some sort of choice. It might be true in one sense that society expects each of us to get mar- ried and have children, but lots of people fail to do so or choose not to do so— and they are not excluded from society, and they do not find social life impossible, although they might occasionally feel or be made to feel different or odd. On the other hand, if I decided to speak dog Latin rather than English, I would be unable to continue life as a member of this society for very long. Clearly degrees of constraint and freedom vary and there is always a degree of choice, but there is also a degree of constraint. Social facts exercise a particularly high degree of constraint. Having defined social facts as the proper concern or object of sociology, Durkheim instructs us to consider social facts as if they were things. By such an instruction, he is trying to distinguish sociological analysis from what we might call speculative theorizing. We all have common-sense ideas about the social world and how it works, and the temptation is to focus our thinking on those and build theories around them. Durkheim’s warning here is also a warning to take heed of facts, the reality of the society we are studying which remains independent of our ideas about it, A recent example which struck me is the way28 What is society and how do we study it? in which, for some thirty years, people have argued that living together before marriage is a way of finding our whether a couple are suited to each other, thus avoiding a terrible mistake; yet the most recent available evidence (Buck et al. 1994) shows that couples who live together before marriage are much more likely to get divorced than those who don't. It is this sort of simple, but pro- found, mistake that Durkheim is talking about. He argues that our everyday thinking and speculating about the world are geared to the purpose of making us feel ‘in harmony with our environment. In other words, it is wishful think- ing. It is often worthwhile thinking about political arguments in this way, as a means of making people—the speaker and the audience—feel comfortable, protecting them from reality. This is not what sociology is about. Durkheim insists on the difference between scientific concepts and what he calls ‘pre- notions’—our common-sense ideas and prejudices. The injunction to treat social facts as things is to distinguish them from such ideas, or ideologies. He is not saying that we should treat them objectively, which modern students often assume—thinking of objectivity as a state of mind, a way of looking at what we study. Social facts remain the same, however we look at them; they are objective in the sense that they are like objects, and they do not change if we think of them differently, just as my desk would remain a desk, even if I thought it was a rhinoceros. Objectivity is a quality of objects, not an attitude of mind. As examples of social facts which are fairly clearly things in this sense, Durkheim cites the law, embodied in codes set out in books, or statistical evi- dence about, for example, suicide. A social fact cannot be accepted as such until we find some external embodiment or identifying feature; it can only constrain us if it has an existence external to us. A scientific investigation needs to be directed at a limited number of clearly defined facts, and defining facts through our pre-notions does not work. We could, for example, try to define crime by reference to some moral law—a crime is that which runs counter to morality, yet morality varies from society to society, if not from individual to individual. However, all societies have a legal system or at least they have laws, and operate various forms of punishment when those laws are broken. It is here that we find the external feature of a crime that enables us to identify it as a social fact—the fact that it is punished. The criminal nature of the act is not some feature inher- ent in the act itself; it is in the fact that it is punished. The definition meets three of Durkheim's criteria for the identification of social facts. The definition must be clear of common-sense pre-notions—that is why it is surprising; secondly, it must be general: we cannot start from individual manifestations of a phenome- non; and, thirdly, there is external constraint: if I want to kill my grandmother in order to inherit her wealth, I cannot rewrite the law to excuse the action. It is a crime whether I like it or not.Durkheim: the discovery of social facts 29 THE NORMAL AND THE PATHOLOGICAL Even now, a century after Durkheim was writing, I suspect that this way of defining crime is surprising to new students, as it might be surprising to many people who take part in popular arguments about crime and punishment. One implication, for example, is that the same act can be a crime in one society but not in another. A second implication is the idea that crime is normal. When Durkheim goes on to distinguish between the normal and the pathological, his borrowing of an organic analogy from biology becomes most evident. Societies are like organisms, and in this context he talks about types of societies as species, individual members of which can be identified as normal or pathological. Unlike many thinkers of that period, and now, Durkheim took the position that it was possible to argue from is to ought, that on the basis of an analysis of what exists it is possible to develop an argument about what should exist. Basically something is normal if there is a lot of it about. Of course it is not quite as simple as this. We must take into account the type of society and its stage of develop- ment—a social fact is normal when it is ‘present in the average society of that species at the corresponding phase of its evolution’ (Durkheim 1895/1964: 64). Evidence for this is to be backed up by an analysis which shows how the social fact is bound up with the social life of that type of society. We can return to the striking idea that crime might be a normal social fact. I say striking because for Durkheim the normal is also the healthy, because it is an important part ofa functioning society. The notion that crime might be healthy would not, I suspect, be acceptable to many contemporary political parties who make law and order a central part of their platform. It is normal and healthy because, in the first place, the committing of a crime and its punishment help to mark out and reinforce social boundaries, and so contribute towards a cohesion of a society, and, secondly, because it is a mechanism of social change: it can challenge those same boundaries. A contemporary example would be the pub- lic relationship between homosexuals at least one of whom is under the age 18— currently an offence in the United Kingdom, but under a law which, happily, is likely to be changed. SOCIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION The purpose of all the life sciences, insists Durkheim, is to describe the normal and the healthy, to distinguish it from the pathological; we discover what the normal body is like and how it works by looking at the bodies around us—there is no point in speculating about what it should be like (three legs and two live pethaps?). He goes on to discuss, comparatively briefly, how we may classify and comes to the conclusion that we should start with the simplest societies those of one segment, one clan or kinship group; it is as if the societies30 What is society and how do we study it? simplest society is like a single cell and more complex societies like more com- plex organisms. The explanation of social facts has two dimensions: we should look for their efficient cause, which | would understand as a historical explana- tion, how and why this education system developed, and for their function in relation to the whole of the society, how it contributes to the continuing exist- ence of society. The function of an institution does not explain its appearance— a trap into which modern functionalism too easily falls—but might help account for its continued existence once it has appeared. He outlines a comparative method by means of which the histories of different societies may be studied. In all such comparisons, within or between societies, ‘Concomitant variation alone, as long as the variations were serial and systematic rather than isolated and spasmodic, was always sufficient to establish a sociological law’ (Jones 1986: 75). For example, if we can establish that the suicide rate varies directly with types of social cohesion (see below), we have a sociological law. Of course, Durkheim did not always employ his own method of concomitant variation—in fact, much of his later work is concerned with ideas, with a ‘col- lective consciousness’, but we shall see that this, too, is a social fact. Suicide as a social fact Some of these changes are apparent in Durkheim’s study Suicide (1897/1952) but with some pushing and shoving it can be used as an example of the methods he outlines in The Rules, In the latter, he talks about social currents as well as social facts: these are general feelings which can run through a society or a large group. They emerge from the collective and move to individuals rather than the other way around. | suspect that most people have had the experience of being pulled along with the crowd into something they would not otherwise have done—even if it is only into getting drunk at a Christmas party. However, he clearly states all the way through that we must concern ourselves with social facts, not wishful thinking, and that social facts must be explained by social facts. Thus in Suicide Durkheim sets about showing first that, despite the fact that one might think that suicide is an individual act, it is a social fact. Sui stancy, and they vary in a systematic way over time and from society to society. Here, then, is the first of the criteria by which a social fact can be identified—its externality. One might think that constraint—the second criterion—might be more difficult to establish. How can somebody be constrained to commit suicide, particularly by a society which forbids suicide. It must be remembered that, when Durkheim was writing, it had only recently ceased to be the practice to punish the bodies of suicides. The constraint that Durkheim is talking about here is different from the constr murder; it is the constraint of a ‘social current’ which pushes the individual ide rates show a remarkable con- nt that, for example, might stop us committing towards a particular action. He talks about a ‘suicidogenic current’ present inDurkheim: the discovery of social facts 31 cach society, to which we are all subjected. The determinant—the social fact— which governs the strength of the suicidogenic current in a society can best be described as the form and strength of the social integration of a society. He identifies four types of suicide dependent upon different degrees and forms of integration, two pairs at opposite ends of a continuum. The two most virulent suicidogenic currents in European society produced anomic and egois- lic suicide. Anomic suicide occurs when the rules that govern social life fail and we are left not knowing how to behave, or what is appropriate; this often hap- pens during periods of rapid social change, which will be reflected in individual lives, perhaps through the sudden gain or loss of wealth. There is nearly always «period of anomie, of greater or shorter length, on the break-up of a long-term intimate relationship, and it is not unknown for suicide to occur in such situa- tions. In any case, the important point is about the comparative absence of social integration, a situation where people do not know what to do because the old rules seem no longer to apply, and there are no obvious new rules, At the opposite end of the continuum we have the situation where the social rules or norms are very powerful and apply rigidly—such as when an Indian widow might be compelled to throw herself on the funeral pyre or her dead husband— the practice of suttee. Durkheim calls this fatalistic suicide. Egoistic suicide is a matter less of the level of integration than of its type. His argument seems to be that we can be integrated into a society in two ways. In the lirst we are integrated as individuals who are similar to each other, sharing the same sort of ideas—it is what we share with those around us which is important. \n extreme variant of this in modern society—at least in Durkheim’s time— would be the army, and it would be here that we would find incidents of what Durkheim called altruistic suicide, putting one’s own life at risk to save another. The alternative form of integration occurs when we are integrated into our society not as sharing common features with others but as individuals, respon- sible for our own individual fates, our own actions, This is not, as it might appear, a fragmentation of society, but it places greater responsibility for social cohesion on the individual, and Durkheim’s argument is that in such societies the individual does not receive the collective support that he or she might receive in others types of society and is more vulnerable to isolation and suicide. the statistics that he looks at in this connection show systematic differences in suicide rates between, for example, Protestant communities, with their empha- sis on the individual conscience, and Roman Catholic communities, with their emphasis of confession and forgiveness through the community leader, the priest, and systematic differences between the married and the unmarried. What can we take from Durkheim? As Mike Gane (1988) has pointed out, it is customary to dismiss much of Durkheim's methodology in modern texts; from the introduc tory Lee and32 What is society and how do we study it? Newby (1983) to the more sophisticated study by Lukes (1973), Durkheim's notion of a social fact is regarded as inadequate, and in the case of suicide his statistical methods have been questioned; through the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a much more systematic attack on Durkheim’s whole enterprise, par- ticularly as it was manifested in Suicide. It seems to me that these criticisms are well worth looking at, but some of them are too easy. In the first place it is argued that his criteria for the identification of social facts are vague. The nature of externality, for example, is ambiguous: is lan- guage, one of Durkheim's central examples of a social fact, internal or external, and how exactly does it constrain us? I have to speak English if 1 want most of the people around me to understand me, and there is a sense in which the lan- guage limits what I can say, but it also enables me to say things without setting in motion some strict process of determination. I can and do choose the words I put on this page; I might choose them badly, but I am not forced to write them. There are interesting issues arising around these arguments. First of all, it seems to me that the ambiguity is probably necessary and we need to think about what Durkheim was trying to do and what he was trying to persuade us towards. It is clear, within the context of his general sociology, that one of the things that he was interested in was the way in which a society is reproduced within us or through our actions. In contemporary terms this sort of issue arises in debates about, for example, the way in which the personal is political—in, for example, the feminist argument that the way men and women behave in rela- tion to each other on a personal level reproduces the features of patriarchy, the inequalities of power in the wider society. Society is always both inside and out- side—and Durkheim was well able to recognize this, as we shall see later when we look at his conception of the conscience collective. If we turn to modern arguments about Suicide, other things emerge. One argument is that suicide statistics do not reflect anything ‘real’ in the outside world but are themselves a social construction, a result of the procedures by which sta’ s are collected—the theories which organize them (see Hindess 1973) or the social context in which they are collected. Jack Douglas’s The Social Meanings of Suicide (1967) pointed out that we might expect lower suicide rates in Roman Catholic communities because suicide is a sin, and officials would be reluctant to identify deaths as suicides. Douglas in fact makes a sweeping cri- tique of Durkheim's methodology, arguing that he appears to be talking about objective phenomena ‘out there’, but his explanations assume not some simple causal process in which something called ‘society’ forces itself on individuals but a process of interpretation of shared beliefs—that, if more people commit sui- cide in an economic crisis, or if more Roman Catholics than Protestants com- mit suicide, then this is as a result of individuals interpreting the meaning of their situations and beliefs. Douglas is of course quite right, but I think he misse what Durkheim is trying to do: it is not only in respect of stati that suicide can be seen as a social fact; it is in relation to socially established and ical regularitiesDurkheim: the discovery of social facts 33 ared belief systems—the conscience collective. The statistics can be seen as the face appearance; they are signs and, if they show regularities, there might be some underlying social, causal process at work—and that cause could lie in the form of social cohesion and/or in socially established belief systems and/or the construction of the statistics themselves. What I am suggesting here is that Durkheim is not quite the strict positivist in the modern sense that his critics take him to be. Modern positivism has gone beyond Comte in attempting to root knowledge in sense experience and to establish general laws in a rigorous way. If we read Durkheim as trying to do this, then the criticisms hold, but if we regard him as developing more realist argu- ments—looking for underlying causes of surface phenomena—he can be defended. In this context, his insistence that social facts should be regarded as things is an insistence on the existence of underlying structures or processes which affect the way in which individuals behave to some degree independently of their will—the structures or processes or beliefs push us in one direction rather than another, limit our choices, and sometimes perhaps force us to do things. Not many people can resist the force of, for example, a patriotic war, and hot many people become voluntarily unemployed, except in a very limited sense of taking up a redundancy offer. In other words, what is valuable is Durkheim's insistence that there is such a thing as society and that there are various ways in which it imposes itself upon us; it is there and it works on us, whatever we might think about it. ‘There is something else to be learnt about the nature of argument in social theory: that precise definitions are rarely not part of the game and, although we need to be as clear and precise as we can, it is possible to define an idea out of existence. When one writer criticizes another for being imprecise, it is often— but not always—a criticism of somebody for thinking, and there is always a degree of ambiguity in thinking. There are types of theoretical argument which open things up and other types of argument which close things down; it is not \lways easy to decide which is appropriate, but, in the case of Durkheim's argu- ments about social facts, the criticism of lack of precision closes down possibil- ities, The notion of a social fact, in a strong or a weak form, has been at the centre of sociology—even the development of a ‘postmodern society’ must be explained as a social fact, although not many of its proponents would accept this, Further reading From Durkheim's original work, The Rules of Soc iological Method (1895/1964), chapters 1, 2, and 3 are @ good starting point, followed by his preface to the second edition; you should also try to look at Suicide (1897/1952)—especially parts 2 and 3—as the classic sociological text34 What is society and how do we study it? For an oversimple but important criticism of Durkheim’s method, see Jack Douglas, Social Meanings of Suicide (1967), and for a more conventional discussion, see $. Lukes, Emile Durkheim (1973), chapter 10. For a good modern discussion of positivism in soci- ology, see C. A. Bryant, Positivism in Social Theory and Research (1985).