The Disavowal of the Social in the American Reception of Durkheim

Abstract

In the last decade or more, the central texts of structural theorizing – Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber – have become part of a seemingly outdated problematic of class, history and society, and this has led to the erosion of some of the most central concepts of sociological theory. Terms such as the ‘social’ and the ‘structural’ no longer seem able to identify materially existing collectivities, their mode of existence or their specific system of social relations. The central objective of this article is to examine some of the claims put forward by postmodern theorists (Baudrillard, 1983; Deleuze, 1979; Rose, 1996) concerning the rise of new spatializations and the era of the ‘post-social’ by a return to the inaugural texts of Émile Durkheim (1938, 1951, 1964, 1968). My purpose is to see whether or not Durkheim broke with the language of totality that is often ascribed to him by postmodern theorists and to assess to what extent the claims of poststructuralist theorizing are based both on a misreading of the textsof structural theory (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, etc.) and on a historical tendency to disavow the social. It is argued that the conception of the social put forward by 19th-century social theorizing has not been well understood nor readily accepted either as an independent domain of treatment or as a subject matter differentiated from other subject matters. The reception texts of the Chicago school of sociology in the 1920s (Park and Burgess, 1921) and of the Harvard theoryschool of the 1930s (Parsons, 1968; Sorokin, 1928) are examined in order to discern whether these schools accepted the social as an object of theoretical attention or whether they in fact excluded it from the disciplinary matrix as they formed their own theoretical frameworks. Some textual evidence is drawn upon to support the thesis that the social became an object of theoretic disavowal during the time when Durkheim's fundamental sociological writings were being received in America.