Western Intellectual Traditions of Social Cohesion

Abstract

Contemporary writing on social cohesion - both from policy-makers and academics - suffers from a considerable intellectual amnesia. Mention is rarely made of the historical precursors of modern concepts of social cohesion, except in the occasional passing reference to the works of Durkheim, and it would be easy to conclude from reading these accounts that social cohesion is essentially a contemporary issue. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The problem of social order has deep roots in political philosophy, going back to the ancients. It was also the central concern of the new discipline of sociology which grew up in the nineteenth-century Europe, in writings stretching from August Comte and Henri Saint-Simon through to Emile Durkheim, Herbert Spencer, and Ferdinand Tőnnies. Social cohesion, or in French terminology, social solidarity, were the key concepts in endless theoretical debates throughout the century, as social thinkers sought to understand what social forces and institutions might hold newly industrialized societies together in the absence of the traditional sources of moral authority, which had been weakened by industrial and political revolutions. It was the sociologists, and particularly those in the French positivist tradition stemming from Comte, who most explicitly addressed the issue, and gave us the terms we now use to conceptualize the phenomenon.