Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology

Citation

Anderberg, E. (2013), "Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 40 No. 8, pp. 755-756. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSE-05-2013-0124

Even though Émile Durkheim has been granted a place among the classical economic sociologists, careful examinations of what he contributed to the discipline are scarce. Perhaps the effort it would take to untangle Durkheim's economic sociology, an enterprise that is likely to lead to the path of the followers who nourished the economic sociological seeds planted by Durkheim himself, is deemed better spent on Max Weber's more self‐evident contribution. Philippe Steiner's book, Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology, takes on the task of elucidating the Durkheimian heritage, including that of his three most important followers: Francois Simiand, Maurice Halbwachs, and Marcel Mauss.

The first two chapters of the book, the only two dealing more exclusively which Durkheim's own works, revisit what Steiner identifies as the scholar's two research programmes. The first consists of Durkheim's rather multifarious criticism of political economy, including his elaboration of the conditional and moral character of the economic fact, his rather special view of exchange, economic socialization, social justice and social worth, amongst other aspects. The second programme is identified as Durkheim's turn away from political economy and into the sociology of religion. This move did not represent an abandonment of economic sociology, but instead involved a theoretical reconfiguration of the foundations of economy. While the first research programme set out to remedy the flaws of political economy, the second consisted of a plan to demonstrate how the economy was religiously grounded. Neither of these programmes had proven their fruitfulness by the time Durkheim passed away.

In Chapters 3‐6, we follow the elaboration of the Durkheimian heritage through the work of Simiand, Halbwachs, and Mauss. One of the most pervasive features of this strand of economic sociology is the methodology – one based on the critique developed by Durkheim and shared by his theoretical adherents. Rather than subscribing to the naïve type of abstraction from imagination that political economists engaged in, the Durkheimians proceeded by extracting statistical regularities and then rationally explaining the social representations on which these were based, thereby enabling the elaboration of laws.

Steiner primarily connects Mauss with “the second research programme” – the work of elucidating the connection between religion and economy. He turns to a sociology of value in order to forge this chain, arguing, for instance, that the value of money partly constitutes a crystallization of societal belief or faith.

One of the most interesting aspects of Durkheimian economic sociology, as with Durkheim's work overall, is the focus on representations, and more generally, the point of convergence between external social/societal structures and internal representations of this reality. Emphasizing the influence of ways of understanding and defining reality on action, this sociology raises associations to more contemporary constructionism. The impact of associations is further elaborated in Durkheim's emphasis on economic knowledge and its proliferation through the workings of the schooling system, which is the main topic of Chapter 7.

The very last chapter compares Durkheim's second research programme to Max Weber's theory on the relation between religious doctrine and capitalism. The focal point is the question of how the capitalist spirit was sustained after Puritanism had passed over into utilitarianism, a question that does not find an answer in Weber's writing. Steiner argues here that Durkheim's modeling of the schooling system as the domain responsible for the construction, proliferation and organization of an economic understanding that ultimately sustains a utilitarian doctrine, forms a theoretical link that extends Weber's theory beyond the seventeenth century, and possibly into the present. Although an interesting argument, one might claim that the designation of a single societal institution as responsible for the proliferation of economic discourse is excessively blinkered, and that thinkers such as Michel Foucault have advanced this approach substantially. Even though I sense that Steiner's praise of Durkheim's thesis might be a little strained when this point is stretched out to explain contemporary society, this passage is definitely one of the most interesting parts of the book.

The chapters dealing with Simiand and Halbwachs, and partly the treatment of Mauss, suffer from the general difficulty of finding a level of narration and description that makes it possible to follow the argument of the original research while at the same time “meta‐surveying” it. At times it feels slightly too detailed, satisfying an interest that in itself could motivate turning to the originals, but overall Steiner strikes a good balance between summation and detail. In conclusion, the book deserves acclamation for its thorough treatment of this previously overlooked and somewhat embarrassing gap in the canon of classical economic sociology. It is of interest to anyone who wants to develop an understanding of why Durkheim's inclusion is warranted amongst the classical economic sociologists.