19 - Professional Ethics

Summary

If socialism then, other than in the severely restricted sense that Durkheim defined this concept, could not serve as the basis of a new collective consciousness for France, or any other industrial society for that matter, at the beginning of the twentieth century, what could? Was there something else – some other institution perhaps apart from state socialism – which could regulate social and especially economic life? In what sometimes seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid having to concede to socialism the title of the new collective consciousness of industrial society, Durkheim tried to develop a new foundation for morality based on two other ideas that he wrote about extensively: his theory of the professions and his writings on human rights and individualism.

According to Robert Bellah, ‘Durkheim's most serious and comprehensive suggestion for social reform [was] the proposal for the establishment of professional groups, which would be developed considerably further in the preface to the second edition of The Division of Labour in 1902’ (1973, xxvii); and, citing Jean-Claude Filloux, he goes on to say that ‘it is clear that more generally the occupational group was Durkheim's alternative to socialism or rather, in the words of one recent French writer, Durkheim's socialism’ (xxx). While Marcel Mauss, in a footnote to the final page of Durkheim's book on Socialism, says that Durkheim's theory of professional groups, which was intended to lay the foundations for a new morality, was co-jointly inspired by social science and by socialism (1967, 285).