Abstract
Chapter 2 compares the views of Émile Durkheim and Gaston Richard on solidarity, which both see as the general manifestation of the relation in society. The comparisons deepen at each thematic level the authors use in order to reflect upon solidarity—corporations, professions, cooperation and obligation. At each of these levels, the similarities and the differences between both authors are stressed. Durkheim and Richard link solidarity to the question of social cohesion. But if Durkheim understands solidarity as the condition of social order, Richard understands it as the condition of a resistance against society.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This describes Richard’s research programme which he reformulates at the end of his career as follows, “I had to seek, better than in my juvenile essay on the origin of the idea of law , the conditions of a harmony between cooperation and legal order, which itself is based on the harmony of active solidarity and the responsibility of the members of society” (Richard 1935, 14).
- 3.
Richard defines his genetic method as the study of the structure and the modifications of the rules observable in social groups (Richard 1898a, 392–394).
- 4.
Richard attributes this distinction between altruistic and egoistic utilitarianism to Wilhelm Wundt (Richard 1903a, 151).
- 5.
Richard mentions the difficulty of such a link between duty and law in Comte’s sociology , “When Comte, in his Discours sur l’ensemble du positivism, says that everyone has the right to do his duty only, he and the sociologists with him have been led either to deny any compulsory duty or to consider all social duties as equally enforceable. The social consequence of the idea of law is that certain duties can be imposed on the moral agent by force , while the fulfillment of other ones depends on his good will” (Richard 1912a, 92). And Richard concludes: “Comte’s attitude and that of those contemporary French thinkers who have accepted his ruinous legacy seems very dangerous. This doctrine does not only contradict itself regarding the nature of an autonomous and specific sociology , but it also could lead to scientific skepticism, and to an alteration, if not an eclipse, of the idea of law ” (ibid. 295–296).
- 6.
For Richard, Comte’s discourse on women is similar to the ones of Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who think highly of patriarchy: “a wife, if we believe them, can refine the man only if she herself remains humble, subject to him, without legal guaranties, in short, she is eternally subject to the condition which patriarchy has defined for her” (Richard 1909a, 409).
- 7.
- 8.
The Rector of the University of Bordeaux also recognised the important tasks awaiting Richard, “‘succeeding to Mr. Durkheim is a very hard task. Monsieur Richard, thanks to his tirelessness, is not exhausted. He is a modest and straight person’” (Fournier 2007: 521).
- 9.
Cf. the letter of Lapie to Bouglé of 30 October 1904, leads the reader to “think that Durkheim would have preferred Lapie, instead of Richard, to teach sociology at Bordeaux” (Pickering 1979, 166) when Lapie writes to Bouglé, “Did I tell you about my visit to Durkheim on Saturday, the 4th of October? He has committed me to teaching sociology , and he declared that ‘after what he knows about me, I am quite capable to do it according to the positive method’. Translation: let Richard become professor of philosophy and wait until my chair is vacant in Bordeaux in order the take it” (Mauss et al. 1979, 42).
- 10.
According to Richard, “sociology has taken from theology, correcting it, the idea of human solidarity, and it has used it to shed light on the social facts” (Richard 1892, vii). Richard specified his idea in 1903, saying that “the relations between solidarity and responsibility were the subject of discussions between the supporters of Saint Augustine and those of Pelagus, later between the Arminians and the Gomarists, still later between the Jansenists and the Molinists when they discussed the major problems of the transmission of sin, and of the possibility of salvation by grace. The social sciences have secularized these questions” (Richard 1903a, 131).
- 11.
Richard says, “We know that in the language of jurisprudence, solidarity only refers to some collective responsibility . Montesquieu uses the term in this sense in a passage of l’Esprit des lois” (Richard 1912a, 82).
- 12.
As we shall see later on, Richard has all the more reason to quote Durkheim as the coming of the corporation describes, for Durkheim too, the transition from a society that is organised along the (real or symbolic ) relations of consanguinity, towards a society where there is more individualisation, and which is organised along the relations between the actors and their territory (Durkheim 1893a (1922), 161).
- 13.
Richard says: “The picture of the corporate regime is sufficient to show that it bears in itself the cause of its decomposition. Alone, it testifies to the emergence of the enterprise regime” (Richard 1897, 101).
- 14.
Richard details this general rule relating to the evolution from corporation to enterprise and industry by assuming the following three conditions: “1° it was necessary that industrial activity was no longer granted by some authority in the form of monopolies; 2° that the authority would no longer attribute to itself the right to protect consumers from the craftsmen but would allow them to choose their suppliers themselves; 3° that the master craftsmen, becoming individual entrepreneurs, would no longer exert any paternal authority on their workers but became tied to them by reciprocal or bilateral contract ” (Richard 1897, 102).
- 15.
Durkheim comments on this lack of adaption as follows: “In principle , so long as artisans and merchants drew their custom more or less exclusively from the town-dwellers or the immediate neighbourhood alone, that is, so long as the market was mainly a local one, the guild, with its municipal organization, sufficed for every need. But it was no longer the case once large-scale industry had sprung up. Not being particularly urban in any way, it could not conform to a system that had not been designed for it. In the first place, its locus was not necessarily the town. It can even be installed far from any existing population settlement, whether rural or urban. It merely seeks the spot where it can be best supplied and from where it can spread out as easily as possible. Next, its field of activity is not confined to any particular region and it draws its customers from anywhere. An institution so wholly involved in the commune as was the old corporation could not therefore serve to frame and regulate a form of collective activity so utterly alien to communal life ” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 23).
- 16.
As Durkheim puts it: “The ties that arise from living together have not their source so deeply in men’s hearts as those arising from blood relationship” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 146).
- 17.
To Durkheim, this means nationalisation—or even internationalisation—of the corporations which would then be constantly in contact with the state, of which “the state cannot fail to be aware” (Durkheim 1909, 219).
- 18.
Indeed, according to Richard, “Professional organization is necessary to civil society and in fact, has never been outlawed since the end of the Roman Empire” (Richard 1903a, 225).
- 19.
Durkheim writes more extensively on this topic in his Leçons de sociologie (cf. Durkheim 1890–1900 (1995), 55–56).
- 20.
Durkheim illustrates this with the example of the unequal distribution of wealth: “the hereditary transmission of wealth suffices to render very unequal the external conditions for the struggle, since it gives to some the benefit of advantages that do not necessarily correspond to their personal value . Even today, among the most cultured peoples, careers exist that are totally closed, or more difficult to enter for those blighted by misfortune” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 296).
- 21.
This argument can be found almost everywhere in Richard’s works , as for example here: “The hierarchy of the classes is only a transient phenomenon of anthropological origin . Very harmful in less complex societies and in little differentiated communities , it loses its importance when the relationships of cooperation become more complex, when the individual’s competence has more value , and when exchange between human beings becomes universal” (Richard 1912a, 331). On Durkheim’s side, we have almost the same reasoning: “if the institution of class or caste sometimes gives rise to miserable squabbling instead of producing solidarity, it is because the distribution of social functions on which it rests does not correspond, or rather no longer corresponds, to the distribution of natural abilities” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 294). Therefore, what is needed is “to eliminate external inequalities as much as possible”, which would be a “work of justice…still more absolute as the organized type of society develops” (ibid. 297–298).
- 22.
This allows a better understanding of what Richard says against Durkheim when speaking of professional solidarity: “Let us make a distinction , absent in Durkheim’s work , between inter-professional and intra-professional solidarity. Only the first one would deserve the name of organic solidarity but only exists to the extent in which the state succeeds in subordinating the corporate interests to the sustainable requirements of national solidarity; the second one is a new form of solidarity by similarity ; it is based on the analogy of interests, and on the identity of professional habits . To what extent can this intra-professional solidarity, which is a collective egoism only, be compatible with national solidarity, or, if one prefers, with civic solidarity?” (Richard 1925a, 261).
- 23.
Let us quote Durkheim more extensively: “To co-operate, in fact, is to share with one another a common task. If this task is subdivided into tasks qualitatively similar, although indispensable to one another, there is a simple or first-level division of labour . If they are different in kind, there is composite division of labour, or specialization proper” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 97).
- 24.
Durkheim repeatedly illustrates this in The Division of Labour in Society. See, for instance, “So far as we can judge the state of the law in the very lowest societies, it seems to be wholly repressive” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 108).
- 25.
Durkheim’s assertions in this sense leave no doubt, as for example here: “penal law is not only of essentially religious origin , but continues always to bear a certain stamp of religiosity” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 77).
- 26.
The penalty , for Durkheim, has nothing to do with vendetta: “Private vengeance is…far from being the prototype of punishment” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 73).
- 27.
Speaking of the effect of social change on individual consciousness , Richard indicates that social actors and societies have a reciprocal purpose, and he adds: “This reciprocal purpose can be described as voluntary cooperation or organic solidarity” (Richard 1903c, 265). In the note, he comments: “We know that one of these expressions is preferred by Mr Spencer, the other by Mr. Durkheim” (ibid. note 1), before he concludes, expressing his criticism, “but they cannot be correctly explained by the mechanical laws of the division of labour ” (ibid. 265). For a similar observation, cf. Richard 1903b, 12–13.
- 28.
This element of will is typical of how Richard understands cooperation . There is, however, another element that can be used to distinguish cooperation from other forms of association , namely the fact that cooperation is linked to contractual exchanges of a material or non-material nature —a point on which Richard and Durkheim agree. “In general, the contract is the symbol of exchange” (Durkheim 1893b (2013), 98). For Richard, “The contract has neither a place in the foundation of the family , nor in that of the nation. Its place refers to production and exchange” (Richard 1892, 133). Therefore, even if cooperation is a phenomenon that is not absent in ancient societies, it is not at the origin of society, a point well underlined by Durkheim and Richard in their critique of Rousseau and his concept of the social contract.
- 29.
Durkheim expresses this most directly in his text Définition du fait moral, speaking of the “feeling of obligation , i.e. the existence of duty ” (Durkheim 1893c (1975), 282 note 21).
- 30.
The attention that Durkheim pays to the work of his German colleagues has often been underlined in literature in regard to the work of either the German economists (see particularly Jones 1994, 37–57; Nau and Steiner 2002, 1005–1024; Morchõn 2005; Steiner 2011), or the German philosophers and sociologists (for example Marica 1932; Alpert 1939; Lukes 1973; Filloux 1977; Alexander 1982; Gane 1984, 304–330; Watts Miller 1996, 31–42; Feuerhahn 2014, 79–98).
- 31.
Regarding Gumplowicz, Durkheim highlights this dependence by saying that “The moral is coming from law , and it follows all its variations. But in its turn, law gains power only if it is based on moral , or in other words, if it manages to push its roots into the heart of citizens” (Durkheim 1885b, 631).
- 32.
A very good example of Richard’s approximations is given on page 299 of his article Philosophie du droit. La contrainte sociale et la valeur du droit subjectif (Richard 1909b, 299). Here, we can legitimately think that duty is on the side of morals while law is on the side of obligation . However, at the end of the page, Richard says: “The obligation set by the law is always a coercive one, sanctioned by power , while duty coming from morals does not admit any constraint of this kind” (ibid.).
- 33.
As Richard says, “the fulfilment of the social function, or duty” (Richard 1903a, 117).
- 34.
In morals, this is what Richard was to call the moral law , which is a law of emancipation, “an ideal of autonomy, which we can consider at most as a limit that we shall never reach” (Richard 1903a, 116). It is an ideal or a “hypothesis” which enables us to examine whether morals changes human nature , and if one can observe the effects of such transformation in history (ibid.). Richard observes such effects not only in the history of the European countries, but also in China and India, for example.
- 35.
As Pickering says: “Durkheim keeps silent on that question. Maybe it was Durkheim’s will not to talk about that, in order to prevent an open controversy which would have led to dissension, and which would have lowered the spirit of his troops. His prestige in the academic world would have been diminished” (Pickering 1979, 168).
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Papilloud, C. (2018). Solidarity: Émile Durkheim, Gaston Richard and Social Cohesion. In: Sociology through Relation. Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65073-9_2
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