18 - Durkheim on Socialism

Summary

Why is it necessary in a book on the subject of the collective consciousness of society to discuss Durkheim's views on socialism? It is because to very many people living in France at the end of the nineteenth century, including the overwhelming majority of Durkheim's own students, socialism seemed like the perfect ideology to fulfil the role of the new morality – the new collective consciousness of society – that Durkheim was seeking for an industrializing society like France at the beginning of the twentieth century (Fournier 2012, 210). In his book on Socialism – yet another one of his lecture series collected together by his students and published after his death, this time in 1928 – Durkheim himself points out that the very ideology of socialism proper, as distinct from communism, had arisen at the same time as the development of capitalist industrialization and he therefore argued that it was imperative to study socialism in this context (1967, 44). What is more the ideology of socialism had developed in France and it was principally due to philosophers of the Enlightenment and then of the French Revolution – from Rousseau through Saint-Simon to Proudhon – that the world acquired this particular set of beliefs. Here then is an ideology concerning the reorganization of industrial society which seems to have a unique association with the development of industrialization itself. What is more this is an ideology which also has very strong moral overtones of social solidarity and community – of fraternity in fact – in which the capitalist owners of industrial society are criticized for their self-interested and immoral behaviour.