Abstract
In this chapter, connections of Durkheim’s and Westermarck’s views on animals to their wider sociological thinking are analysed. Durkheim’s emphasis on human–animal difference and duality of human nature and Westermarck’s views on similarities between humans and other species and continuity of their characteristics are discussed. These views are reflected in these two sociologists’ visions on human social behaviour and society—what these phenomena are about and how they should be studied. These visions in turn affect how these sociologists see the importance of boundaries for the study of society and human social behaviour: if they see that there should be connections and what kind of connections between the study of different human societies and human and animal societies.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, Westermarck 1932/2010, 173, 175.
- 2.
Sometimes Durkheim writes about societies of animals, but in most of his texts he writes about society and real social life as uniquely human phenomena. When he writes about animal societies he makes clear that they are fundamentally different from human ones, which form a new level of reality: “The great difference between animal societies and human societies is that in the former, the individual creature is governed exclusively from within itself, by the instincts (except for a ‘slight degree of individual education, which itself depends upon instinct). On the other hand human societies present a new phenomenon of a special nature, which consists in the fact that certain ways of acting are imposed, or at least suggested from outside the individual and are added on to his own nature: such is the character of the ‘institutions’ (in the broad sense of the word) which the existence of language makes possible, and of which language itself is an example. They take on substance as individuals succeed each other without this succession destroying their continuity; their presence is the distinctive characteristic of human societies, and the proper subject of sociology” (Durkheim 1917 in Durkheim 1895/1982, 248).
- 3.
See Udehn 1996, 113.
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Tuomivaara, S. (2019). Different Ideas of Humans of Durkheim and Westermarck. In: Animals in the Sociologies of Westermarck and Durkheim. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26863-3_8
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