The ideal of the person: Recovering the novelty of Durkheim’s sociology. Part I: The idea of society and its relation to the individual

Abstract

For Durkheim, sociology, as a new kind of science, is part and parcel of the constitutional process of modern societies. This conception of sociology rests on two fundamental theses. First, society, as a normative realm made up of ideas, and especially of ideals, is an ontological novelty: it shows itself in the constitution of individuals, since human beings are persons able to think and act only as long as they are social individuals. Second, modern society is an historical novelty, constituted by an ideal of the person which asks and enables each social individual to become a fully autonomous being. The aim of this paper is to clarify these two basic foundations of Durkheimian sociology. Part I focuses on the first thesis: Durkheim’s reconstruction of the sociological tradition as a conceptual struggle toward the idea of society, conceived as a new order of reality. It examines the social philosophy Durkheim developed in order to account for the relation between society and the individual; the conceptualization of the human individual as social in The Division of Social Labor, its later development in the framework of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Part II, to be published in a second volume, will focus on the second thesis.