Contractual thought and Durkheim’s theory of the social: A reappraisal

Abstract

Emile Durkheim developed his sociology in part by pointing to the insufficiency of contractual explanations of society. This article examines several iterations of ‘the contract’ in light of the rediscovery of Durkheim’s (2011 [1894–1895]) lectures on Hobbes’ De Cive. By viewing these recovered lectures alongside his canonical texts, we find three ways in which Durkheim distinguished his sociology from political and economic understandings of the social, in contrast with the contractarianism of Hobbes, the contractualism of Rousseau and the ‘contractual solidarity’ of Spencer. In his accounts of these thinkers, Durkheim explicates both his philosophical anthropology and his ontology of the social. Whereas contractual explanations of society treat the social as artificial and/or a mere aggregate formation, the social for Durkheim arises spontaneously and exists as a sui generis formation. Through the clarification of these conceptual coordinates, the nature of the social and its relationship with the political for each of these four thinkers come more fully into view. The article concludes with a consideration of the problem of the dissolution of society, pointing to a limit point or horizon for what is thinkable within Durkheimian sociology.