17 - Interdependence and the Division of Labour in Society

Summary

Have you ever wondered why Durkheim devoted quite so much of his attention to the question of the division of labour in society – the subject matter of his first book and something that we might well have thought was of little or no interest to anyone other than economic historians of the industrial revolution? The answer to this question is that, incredible though it may seem to us today, when he first came to consider the problem of social solidarity in France in the late 1880s, Durkheim actually seems to have believed that a highly developed division of labour would, by itself and as a by-product of its normal working, somehow be able to create the sophisticated secular collective consciousness that he thought was required for a modern industrializing society like France at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Writing in France at the end of the nineteenth century in what was then still an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, no one with any familiarity with pre-industrial society could fail to be struck by the contrast between the way in which labour was organized in industrial societies and the way it had been organized before this. Nothing, it must have seemed to the young Durkheim, could be a more distinctive feature of industrial society than both the division of labour within the manufacturing processes itself – the kind of thing described in detail by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in the famous example he gives of pin making ([1776] 1970, 109-10) – and the even more remarkable division of labour in society generally into ever more specialist occupations, nationally as well as internationally, with some societies already being highly industrialized while others had as yet little or no industry at all.