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Matt Dawson, "The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies" (Routledge, 2023)
00:46:10
An interview with Matt Dawson
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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to New Books in Sociology, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Rita Panna, and today I'm going to be in conversation with Matt Dawson. Matt is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He's the author of the Political Durkheim Sociology, Social Socialism Legacies, published by Rutledge in 2023. So, social theory for Alternative Societies, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. And late modernity, Individualization and Socialism, an Associational Critique of Neoliberalism, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. He has research interest in social theory and the history of sociology. Today we'll be discussing his newly published book, the Political Durkheim, Sociology, Socialism, Legacies, published by Rutledge in 2023. Matt, I welcome you to this podcast. Thank you for joining me today.
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Oh, thanks very much for inviting me. Delighted to be here.
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Right, so let me begin by asking you your main motivation behind writing this book. Why, you know a book on Durkheim?
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Yes, good question. I think, like many people of my generation, so I started studying sociology around the turn of the century. Durkheim was not really a figure when I first encountered him, that I was particularly interest. He was presented to me as someone who perhaps, if not the conservative functionist, the Previous generations thought of him as someone who wasn't particularly critical, certainly wasn't radical, and was a bit staid and boring. So when I started my PhD about 13 years ago now, I didn't have any idea that I'd be interested in Durkheim at all. And then for a whole variety of different circumstances, his name appearing in some of the texts I was reading a sort of a in passing type of reference to someone who was related to the forms of socialism that I was interested in, or passing thoughts of. This sounds a bit like the division of labor. I decided I should really return to Durkheim and started reading some of the books like socialism and St. Simone and professional Ethics and Civic Morals. And I was really astounded by what I found there. I found a really radical critical Durkheim and I became a bit obsessed for it. For a while I kept just reading Durkheim and I kept reading all these different writers who had written on Durkheim. And what I found was that there were a number of people who were talking about this different type of Durkheim, a more radical, critical Durkheim, People like Giddins, Muller, Gane, Stedman, Jones and so on. But there was never really a full development of what it meant to think about Durkheim as a socialist or influenced by socialism and what that might mean. Because after all, there's lots of different ways of being a socialist or lots of different ways of being influenced by socialism. So really I think, you know, it started then, you know, and 13 years later, this book is sort of the end of it. And I find often, you know, when you end up writing books or think of ideas for books, it's partly because you sort of wish you could have read the book, you know, that in the past you thought, I wish I could. I wish there was a book on X. And you don't find one. So you think, well, maybe I should write one. And that's sort of what I came to here. And this, this book is a collection of essays, some of which are already published, some of which are new, which really tries to bring out what this sort of Durkheim I discovered when I was starting to read them, this political Durkheim, invest in socialism, but talking about his relevance and the value that I thought I was discovering when I read him, and sort of trying to bring that work all together and show the value of this Durkheim. So the motivation was really, you know, 13 years ago when I suddenly discovered this Durkheim I wasn't aware of and trying to trying to give people a guide to this Durkheim that I was excited to read.
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Interesting. I think it does resonate with me as a sociologist, too. So let me also ask you, because you've written this book on Durkheim, what is the need for yet another book? Because what is this importance that we should reread and reinterpret classics?
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Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there's probably two questions there. So start with your second bit in terms of, you know, rereading and reinterpreting the classics, I think it's really important we do this constantly. And part of that is a question of, you know, what do we consider a classic? So, obviously, what in sociology we've considered classics has always changed throughout our discipline's history. And a lot of the people we now would include within the notion of the classics, partly in response to decolonial and feminist perspectives, people like W.E.B. du Bois and Harriet Martineau. Part of the way in which these people become classics is through returning to the texts and reading them and reinterpreting them and showing their value. You know, it's not just purely a sort of historical question of justice, although it is that. It's also about saying, now these people are really valuable. They're really important. And the same way for people that we now decide, we don't necessarily want to call it classic. So someone like Parsons, for example, is a writer, you know, largely left out of that now. But this is all based around sort of rereading and reinterpreting at the same time. It's also about rereading and reinterpreting people we already consider classics and thinking about, well, what is it about their work that's particularly relevant now? You know, is there something that we want to draw out which perhaps hasn't been discussed in the past? So I can think, for example, of how people like Anderson and Mustow have discussed recently started rereading Marx and sort of trying to talk about how he was concerned with colonialism and global capitalism as a response to the decolonial critique that we have now. So I think it's always really important to reread and reinterpret the classics in order to make sure they don't become staid, you know, and we don't end up with sort of a boring canon that reflects what we've had. We just leave it unquestioned. We have to actually reread and reinterpret and engage with these ideas. And ultimately, as sociologists, we all learn through reading, don't we? You know, we. We're in a discipline that's largely based around the written word, and this is how we get our messages across and how we engage with the discipline. But you also mentioned is there a need for another book on Durkheim? Well, I guess maybe I'm the wrong person to ask, since obviously I do. I do think there is a need, but I think the need has to be about trying to, as I already mentioned, sort of trying to say, well, let's go back to a writer like Durkheim on whom there's so much that's already been written, and see if we can think about it differently. Is there something that we can learn that was previously overlooked about Durkheim's work? Something that hasn't been discussed sufficiently, or a way in which we can link him to the current day? And so we try to make him speak to some of the things we're facing. That's certainly what I try to do here in terms of trying to say, you know, there's this different kind, you know, very much part of a socialist tradition that we can understand, and also trying to apply him to attempts in the current day, you know, and sort of political issues, such as some ones I discussed there, such as Covid, such as economic recession and probation, and talking about what Durkheim would have to say about these issues in the current day. So I. I think there's a need for another book on Durkheim. If we have this, you know, new position to take. If. If people feel like they want to read my book on Durkheim, I guess that that's for them to decide. But, yeah, I certainly think there's need for another book on Durkheim.
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C
Interesting. So how would you locate your book within the existing, you know, theoretical literature on Durkheim?
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Yeah, I think there's probably two distinctions I'd make. So the first one is that the sort of dominant position on Durkheim today, I would say, is found in what's called the strong program of cultural sociology that many people might be familiar with, which is largely American, owes a lot to the work of Jeffrey Alexander. And this is a program which, as the name gives away, attempts to look at a very Dirkheimian cultural sociology. And in the introduction to the book, I try to distance myself from that perspective. And this, you know, there's always a tendency in sociology, isn't there, to sort of, when you distance yourself from something, to make it sound like I disagree with everything. And that's not the case at all, I think. A lot of the work that's produced by that school is really valuable. But they tend to have two things which I disagree with. The first one is that they make a distinction between two Durkheims. And there's von Durkheim, which is an early Durkheim, generally up to sort of rules of sociological method. This is a writer who's quite structuralist, perhaps even materialist, not really interested in meaning, these different types of concerns, and sort of underdeveloped, you know, not particularly sophisticated. And then There's a Durkheim 2 which is primarily based around the elementary forms of religious life. And this is a writer who's a lot more concerned with culture, with meaning, with understanding these different types of questions. And I don't agree that there's this fundamental split between two Durkheims. It's a position that splits the Durkheim in the field more generally, and there's different perspectives taken on it. I think there is a large level of continuity in Durkheim's writing, but my particular concern with the cultural program of sociology is that there's a sort of splitting of what makes up Durkheim's political sociology and their notions of two Durkheim. So in the. By having this first Durkheim, they say, well, he was interested in socialism as a state. But the second Durkheim, who we want to talk about, is interested in democracy. And I think for a good political, social, you have to combine all those elements. And also I think there's too much of a tendency to sort of dismiss the first Durkheim and say, well, we don't need to worry about any of this stuff. Just read elementary forms. You'll get the key Durkheim. And I don't agree with that. So I differentiate myself from the cultural program. But there is Also, in the 21st century, an increasing amount of people who are talking about this radical critical Durkheim, I think, picking up on what I mentioned earlier, have been somewhat freed from that sort of very conservative functionist tradition. So someone have already mentioned Susan Stedman Jones and her Durkheim Re considers a good example of this. But recent books, there was an anthem companion to Durkheim and a book entitled Durkheim Critique by Fitz and Marcucci, which are both really fascinating takes on a critical Durkheim. Where I'm different from these writers is that I have had a stronger attempt to place Durkheim within a socialist tradition and think more specifically about his normative theory. And also, you know, attempting to. Rather than place Durkheim Purely within critical theory. My goal is partly attempt to apply him to contemporary political issues and in doing that, to raise the status of a book entitled Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, which is a book that is a collection of lectures that Durkheim gave. Dates are unclear, but sometime between 1890 and 1900, which I think is the key place you have to go for Durkheim's sociology, where he talks about questions as a state, his normative theory, inheritance, inequality, capitalism, and so on. And I think we really need to, you know, raise this book to the level of one of Durkheim's key texts. For me, it's his most valuable. But I realize that's partly depends on the type of question you're asking. And I don't want to claim that somehow it's his best book, but it's certainly the one I find most valuable in talking about the political Durkheim.
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Right. So how do you understand the political Durkheim? What is his political sociology?
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Yes, good question. I think in thinking about this, I think there's probably two key things that define the political Durkheim and two things that mark out his political sociology. One is that Durkheim is a fundamentally normative political sociologist. His concepts are always defined by what should happen as much as, and perhaps even sometimes more than what does happen. And I'm not making a completely original point here. So Anthony Giddings, who I mentioned earlier, made this point in the 70s, and Ruth Levitas has made it more recently with reference to utopian elements of sociology. But I think, if anything, we can. This element of Durkheim's political sociology is underplayed by others. So take some of the key concepts that Durkheim uses in his political sociology and be key to any political sociology. So, for example, Durkheim talks about the state, and he says, well, the state is, in his terms, the social brain, and the social brain, which in his terms also doesn't execute anything. So all of a sudden we have a definition of the state where it's not actually governing. The state is not actually investing in governance, it's not passing laws, it's not enforcing laws, etc. All it is doing, in Durkheim's language, is providing collective representations. So it's providing certain ideas of what the group as a whole is. And these include what Durkheim calls civic morals. So moral guidelines that stand for the country as a whole. Now, it's actually very difficult to apply that definition of the state and find it anywhere, you know, to find a state which is operating as this sort of social brain invested in collective representations. We can think of examples where the state might do this. So in Covid, for example, the state was often invested with this power. It was sort of providing collective representations, collective messages on how we should be acting. But it's difficult to think of a state that's just doing this. You know, states rule, states are executors, they use force, etc. Etc. But Durkheim sees this as not the business of the state at all. So who does that? Well, then Durkheim says, well, what we have is something called a political society. And a political society is made up of what you also call secondary groups. Now these secondary groups actually do the governing. They're the bodies which actually govern us. So what would be the secondary groups as we see them now? Well, you know, it could be perhaps local councils, although they seem to be a bit too tied to the state. They could be sort of voluntary organizations, sort of professional organizations and so on that might do this. But it's very difficult to actually identify this type of state political society set up in any country, really. And the key reasons for this is that Durkheim is using these concepts normatively. He's saying this is what society should look like. To the extent that society doesn't look like this, we have a problem. And for him, the problem is based around what politics should be. And for him, politics is valuable when it speaks to us, when we have some form of connection to it. And this connection should come from political society. We should be part of groups that connect to our day to day activity in which we have interest, in which we have concern, and which allow us to express ourselves politically and decide the state of society we want. But we don't have that. And then Durkheim goes on to talk about democracy. He says, well, democracy is being reduced too much to vote in regularly for members of parliament with whom you don't really have any connection. Democracy, for him is about communication and about communication between political society and the state. And so Durkheim's argument is, well, is it really surprising we have something like political apathy when what the state, political society and democracy should be don't fit what they are? So I think the first element that marks out a political Durkheim is this real emphasis on the redefining of key concepts with strong normative agendas. This is what it should look like from the start. His political sociology is normative. And I'd say the second thing that marks out political Durkheim and the second key element of his political sociology relates to questions of morality, and particularly morality and economics. So one of the key critiques Durkheim offers about politics all the time is the centrality of the economic. He talks about what he calls the amoral character of economic life. For him, making money can have no moral end. Its only justification is itself. But the problem for Durkheim is that we've come to take these justifications as natural. So we can think of this when we turn on the news. We'll hear all these economic descriptors. We'll hear discussions of economic growth or inflation, and we just sort of innately take these things as good or bad. Growth good, inflation bad. And for Durkheim, these things aren't innately good. They have to be defined in economic terms. But politics has increasingly, for Durkheim, just become about economics. It's become about achieving economic growth. Instead, for him, there's a need to reassert the question of morality. For him, politics is always about what's the right moral state of society, what should society look like, what's the type of morality we want? And politics has become about something else. And he argues this is true of right wing and left wing. They've become too subservient to the economy. Instead, we need to reassert this question of morality and make it a form of public debate and concern of what morality should be. So I think, you know, in terms of what marks out the political Durkheim, I think it's this normative element in terms of how he redefines his concepts and imbued some of a strong normative element. And then secondly, the way in which he reasserts the importance of the moral as the thing that economic as the thing that politics should be focused on rather than economic concerns.
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Okay, so could you also talk a little bit about the sociological alternative that Keim had proposed?
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Yeah, it's perhaps unsurprising, given what I've just said, about how normative Durkheim was. He had very clear ideas for what society should look like. And in the book, in chapter one, I talk about what his alternative would be. And I think there's three elements, really, that mark out this. The first one are what he calls the corporations. So the corporations are those bodies of political society, the secondary groups that I mentioned earlier. And they are professional organizations. They are bodies made up of particular professions. So you could imagine there would be a corporation for lecturers, There'd be a corporation for plumbers, There'd be a corporation members of the clergy, corporation for insurance, Salespeople and so on and so forth. So what that corporation does is first of all achieves the classic socialist goal of socializing the means of production. So rather than use one example, car manufacturing, so the corporation of car manufacturers run the industry. There's no bourgeoisie, there's no private capital who are running that. It's run by the corporation. These corporations are then democratic bodies. We have votes in them. We vote on the activity. So to use our example of car manufacturing, you know, what type of car should we produce, in what should we be aiming to do it, how should we do it, what hours should we work, and so on and so forth. They vote on wages, so how does the money get distributed within there? And they also in turn, for Durkheim, vote on what he calls the professional ethics of each occupation. So one of the things Durkheim is critical of is how, with the increase, to use this term, complexity, or what we might now call diversity of society in terms of activities, we're all doing different things, have separate beliefs and so on and so forth. We all lack a sort of sense of the moral purpose of our activity in terms of what is the moral purpose of working in car manufacturing, for example. So the corporation can provide that, can set a clear idea of what the industry is for and set clear moral guidelines of what is the right thing to do. You know, what are moral guidelines of lecturers? And how might they be different to someone who works in insurance, for example. And in turn, for Durkheim, these corporations sort of become the basis of the political body. So parliament becomes not a collection of people who are voted based around locality, but a collection of people who represent occupations in that body. The second element of Durkheim's alternative is about banning inheritance. And he sees inheritance as just completely contradictory. You know, we exist in society for Durkheim's that proclaim individualism, you know, work hard, get ahead, succeed, you know, you will get rewarded, etc. When inheritance doesn't fit any of that, for Durkheim, you know, it's a complete lack of birth. You get rewards for completely disconnected to anything you have done as an individual. So for him, just ban it. You know, we shouldn't allow inheritance at all. It just shouldn't exist. So where does that go? You know, once someone dies, where does their wealth go? Well, here that kind of makes a almost a Marxist point. And he says, well, you know, wealth is produced socially. We imagine that somehow wealth is an individual product. Now it's a product of collective social endeavor. So therefore, when you Die. Your wealth should go to your corporation. You've produced it via working in your particular occupation for your life. They should then get the wealth back. Then there's a democratic discussion. What's done with that? Is it distributed amongst the members? Is perhaps, you know, if the corporation inherits a house from someone, is there someone in the corporation perhaps is starting a new family and needs a house? Well, maybe they have the house. You know, there can be a democratic discussion about it. And the third change relates to education. So Durkheim is quite critical of contemporary education. We don't know what we're actually educating for. And I think this reflects arguments we have today about education. Is education a sort of humanist endeavor in which we're trying to give people knowledge, to be informed citizens of society, or is it something that fills gaps on the labour market, so we're trying to give people particular skills that will sell? And Durkheim is critical of both of these and argues that, perhaps unsurprisingly, given what I said earlier, that education should be about morality. It should be about reasserting the moral. And in developing a sense of what he calls the spirit of association, if we are going to be part of corporations, if we're going to be part of these collective bodies to our lives, we should be shown their value, and we should be shown to think in an associated manner. So he talks about tracking a class through and developing a sort of record of achievement, of removing any form of individualized punishment, of having what he calls a prize for virtue to reward morality. But fundamentally, what Durkheim argues education should be about is not about passing on a set of moral rules, you know, in a very rote manner, in the ways in which, particularly in Britain, children used to be taught their times table by just simply saying 1 times 8 is 8, 2 times 8 is 16, etc. Etc. Durkheim says that's not how we should learn morality. Morality is about exciting, to use his term, a particular moral perspective in people, encouraging people to think morally, but to think critically in terms of morality with the knowledge that the next generation would like to change our sense of morality and push it forward. And that's what we should always be trying to do.
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Okay, so do you think that Durkheim's works can be placed within the socialist tradition?
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Yeah, I think that Durkheim has a very clear place within the socialist tradition. And I think, as I argue in the book, the best fit is in a tradition of what's broadly called libertarian socialism, and particularly the work of G. D. H. Cole who was an English socialist theorist of the first half 20th century, most famous for a conception of what he called guild socialism. And you know, to talk about some of the key ways that Durkheim fits this tradition. This is a tradition which has a focus on guilds in Coles work or corporations more generally. So like Durkheim, there's a focus on using occupationally specific bodies which are democratically run to socialize the means of production, to organize them and to then to become the key elements of the political body. So much like Durkheim co argued, you know, to the extent there is a parliament, this should represent the corporations. They should be based around occupation. We spend our life as part of our occupation. It's, you know, it's our key political focus. This is where we should have our interests and so on and so forth. So there's a focus there on a shared means of achieving socialism. There's also a shared critique of democracy. So for Cole, like for Durkheim and for other writers in this tradition, there's a strong criticism on liberal democracy and its focus on voting and locality and a sort of focus on this somehow linking us to a state. Instead, for all of this tradition, there's a focus, as the term libertarian gives away, on a form of continual engagement and continual communication and particularly a form of engagement that is functionally specific, to use Coles term, that is about a particular occupation. In this case about linking people to the concerns. Thirdly, they have a concern with inequality, like many socialists. But what's significant about Durkheim, Cole and other rights in libertarian socialist tradition is that they don't just see inequality as important in itself. You know, at one point the conversation you can't reduce socialism to simply socialism of the stomach. You know, it's not just simply inequality is important, but it's not simply about having equal equal means. It's a broader concern with justice and the good life. It's a broader concern with how can we make the means of the good life available to many different people and how can we ensure that work is fulfilling. For example, how can we ensure that people have equal means of living a good life? And then the sort of fourth thing which I think unites libertarian socialism and is often not something readily associated with Dirk Humble, which I think is central to both his sociology and his socialism is individualism. So as the name libertarian socialism gives away, these writers are all concerned with how can we develop a form of socialist society that allows for individuals to be free to make choices, to fulfill their own individualism and Cole had that focus as part of his work, but Durkheim has it as well. You know, all this focus he offers on particular forms of socialist organization is always linked to the type of individualism he talks about in his wonderful essay, Individualism and Intellectuals, written the height of the Dreyfus affair, where he argues, you know, that political organization is a means of furthering individualism. It's a way of allowing people to have individual freedom, to make choices, to find their way within the social structure. And I think, you know, both of Durkheim is united with libertarian socialist tradition with this focus on collective organization via the corporations or the guilds, whatever term you want to use, to fulfill these individualized goals, to allow for political individualism to have its proper stand in society. So I think he fits quite well within that tradition, in my view.
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C
Right. You mentioned the contemporary at the beginning of the podcast. So I wanted to ask you about the contemporary relevance of his work and how if we could use his theoretical ideas to understand the COVID 19 pandemic.
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Yeah, I mean, in the book I talk about COVID and I won't talk about all the different ways here, but I don't know about you, rich partner, but when I was going through Covid, thinking about as a sociologist, one of the things I was really struck by was the ways in which it sort of almost reduced society to its basis. You know, like all of the. All of the elements of society that we took for granted as day to day life or elements of sociality are meeting each other's etc were suddenly removed and our societies were sort of reduced to what is the key things we need, what are the essential services, what are the essential forms of sociality. We might sort of strip them back in a way. And I think one thing that's really interesting from a Dirk Harmony basis here is the question of the division of labor. So all of a sudden we went from our very complex division of labor to a concerned with who are key workers, who has to go to work. And not just who has to go to work, who has to go outside to go to work, who actually has to travel to work. So on one hand we get a collection of key workers who have to go out, who have to work, and then we get a collection of workers who in Durkheim's language are able to disengage from the division of labour. So that could be one step of disengagement, that is, they could work at home. And therefore, although as someone who worked home during COVID not seeking to pretend that was some easy process, but at least your risk of catching COVID was lower. Or they might have been, as happened in the UK and many other countries, they might have been furloughed. In a sense, they were removed from their job for a period. Now, two things are particularly significant here. One is, I think what we saw quite clearly was the level of interconnection in the divisional labour that Durkheim discusses. So by having some people go to work, all of a sudden we realized that lots of other people also had to go to work. So obviously nurses had to go to work. Well, that means then a whole variety of people need to work in bus drivers, train drivers, we need petrol stations open, we need mechanics open, we need the shops that nurses depend on when they're driving there. We need road maintenance, we need all these different types of groups. You know, we need supermarkets open. Okay, we need delivery drivers, we need security people. We need a whole variety of different groups to continue working. It was a, it was a wonderful example for any of us who, who teach. Durkheim and Introduction to Sociology want to talk about the division of labor. You know, Covid was a wonderful example of that. But there was a political element here, you know, that often these jobs that became key jobs, some of them were broadly middle class jobs, doctors, etc, etc, but often they were very working class jobs, you know, working in supermarkets and so on and so forth. And what then happened is all of a sudden they became questions of justice. Durkheim talks about how division of labor is, in his word, a mission of justice. It's about making all of us have positions in divisional labour which are valued, which have moral worth, which get appropriate reward for our position of individual labor. But what happened during COVID is all of a sudden we drew attention to the fact that this reward wasn't there. In the UK and many other countries there was a weekly sort of we could clap for heroes over here where, you know, once a week people go outside and clap for nurses and all the key workers who are out working. But then after Covid comes, there's no pay rise. And all of a sudden, you know, what had been accepted for a long time under inflation, pay rises, which have been the norm in many western countries for the last 10 years, became a political question and they became to be contested. And we're currently dealing with large scale strikes as a result of this. So I think Covid really sort of brought that question of justice, which for Durkheim is central to division of labour, out into the forefront. And what we're Dealing with today is really sort of legacy of that in the continual forms of political strife and industrial action that comes with them.
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C
Yes. And we cannot not talk about economic recession also when we are talking about corporations. So could you also talk a little bit about how we can understand it using a Durkheimian lens?
- [32:04]
A
Yeah, indeed. Two are fundamentally linked, aren't they? And I think really to understand what Durkheim has said about recession, we have to understand what happens before it. So times of when the economy is doing well in the times of boom, rather than the booms of busts. And one of the things Durkheim argues is, you know, we all have insatiable appetites, right? And we know this. You know, we can have one chocolate bar and then decide to have another chocolate bar, even though we're not really hungry. And we're quite happy to that we all have these insatiable appetites. It makes some sense to us. So we all need moral limits, Right? We need someone to tell us no this far, but no further. To use the phrase that Durkheim uses. Yeah, we need someone to actually, you know, two or three chocolate bars is probably enough. Right. And this is writ large in terms of economic growth. When the economy is doing well, we're all encouraged to spend, you know, because that's what keeps the economy going. There's exciting new consumer products, etc. Etc. We're encouraged to seek out new jobs and seek out all the opportunities offered there. And in turn, governments, which as I mentioned earlier, retired to these measures of economic growth and big time of the economy, don't really have much interest in coming in to regulate this. They see this as their purpose to encourage further growth, to keep the economy growing. And what we see then is at times like in 2008, leading up to the last really significant recession we had before COVID that there's not really any attempt to regulate the economy. And also at the same time, with the diversity of the economy, new very specialized techniques, particularly financial techniques, are expanding that no one but the people who do them would have any chance of regulating. But of course, there's no corporation to regulate them. So again, they're just driven by the amoral character of economic life. They're just driven by make more, make more, make more. The making more money becomes an end in itself rather than, as we saw Durkheim argued earlier, some sort of moral end being the key focus. So therefore, what we get at some point, inevitably for Durkheim, is recession, because all of a sudden the production outstrips the Consumption, because in this case, the production of financial products outstripped the consumption. And this is what Durkheim calls economic anomie. Economic anomy is about the lack of regulation in the economy, the encouraging of individual desires, which for him will always lead to forms of recession, because these desires will have to have some limit at some point. They reach up against a level where they can't still be satiated and they're beyond the level of consumption available. And what we get as a result of this economic anomy for the climate is a very individualized notion of recession. All of a sudden, you know, we see the people who, when we're dealing with recession, who should be punished for it are often the poorest people, because we've developed this notion of wealth generation for Durkheim, where it's an individual effort. And if I've worked hard and I've earned money, that means people who haven't got money haven't worked hard and haven't succeeded. So therefore, we get things like austerity that tends to come after periods of recession and little cutting back of particular resources, with, again, a focus on furthering the economy, furthering economic growth while punishing particular groups in society. So there's an earthly Durkheimian way of understanding economic recession, which, picking up what I mentioned earlier, reasserts this need for. For morality, and this need in particular for moral regulation of the economy, thinking about what is the end to which we want to direct our economic activity, not taking economic activity itself as an end.
- [35:26]
C
Right. So we've talked a lot about him, but what about Durkheim's representation in sociological textbooks?
- [35:36]
A
Yeah, this is the focus of one of the chapters in the book. And again, it's. It was just something that struck me as really interesting. And the chapter I wrote there was inspired by Canadian study conducted by Mallory and Cormac, who looked at Canadian textbooks. And I think we probably as sociologists don't pay enough attention to textbooks. You know, they're something I'm. I'm sure you've read a number in your time, particularly when you were starting out. Certainly I did. And I'm sure listeners have come across them as well. And they were sort of our introduction to the discipline. And what Mallory and Cormac found in their Canadian case was two Durkheims in these books. And they said, on one hand, these books represent Durkheim as this sort of key found in figure. The key inspiration behind sociology. The person who showed even suicide can be discussed in a sociological manner. Right. This person who Showed you could talk about anything of sociological manner is key, except exciting figure, right? To introduce people to the value of sociology. Then if you turn the page, then there's another Durkheim represented. And this Durkheim is a very simplistic functionist, positivist thinker who was a bit naive, very conservative, and is just someone to reject. And this is what we saw in the Canadian case, and it's what I found in the British case as well, that there was, on one hand this invocation of this really Durkheim is this really significant figure who has this unique sociological insight, shows how things can be discussed sociologically, but also at the same time, this, like, naive writer who we shouldn't really be concerned with. And what then tends to happen in sociology textbooks is the second Durkheim is the one who becomes dominant, and he's only ever mentioned as someone to dismiss, you know, so later, writers who are contrasted in an approving way with this Durkheim, you know, they're not simplistic functionists, you know, they're a bit more critical than the conservative Durkheim. So on, so forward. So we see this in the Canadian cases that Mallory and Cormac looked at, and the British case I looked at. And while I suspect it would be different across different nations, I suspect there would be very similar things at work. And I think a lot of this has to do with the ways in which we've returned to one of the things we were talking about earlier in the pod, the ways in which these are sort of classic canon has been set up where, you know, by creating a canon of Marks, Weber and Durkheim, we also create this story. And the sociology of textbooks I read for this book, which is a fascinating field, and I talk about some of it in there, talks about the ways in which textbooks have to provide sort of stories for students to understand sociology. And having a story whereby we have the radical Marx who's investing in communism, and then a liberal Faber who's concerned with class and debating with the gloth of the Marx. But, you know, not quite that radical means that you have to create a conservative diacon. You have to have those perspectives to sort of feed students into them. And, you know, the textbooks I read were very impressive. I was impressed by what my colleagues had done, but I also left them a bit sad that people who read them would not see any virtue in reading Durkheim. And going back to what I said at the start, it was true of me. So I suspect it's certainly true of many students who come into sociology now that I don't necessarily see Durkheim as someone who's worth reading, and hopefully I can have a very small role in trying to fight back against her.
- [38:56]
C
Yeah, it does resonate. So, last question. Matt, could you talk a little bit about Durkheim's legacy?
- [39:03]
A
Yeah, I think it's a really rich time to be talking about Durkheim's legacy and a really important time to do it. And I think the decolonial critique has been really significant here. You know, what the decolonial critique has forced us to do is reckon with the history of our discipline and to going back to what we were talking about, the start, you know, rereading, reappraising these classical writers. And there's been some really important work that's been done here and some important work done about Durkheim. So Kira Saga, for example, has written a wonderful piece in a book entitled Sociology and Empire, which said to by George Steinmetz, talking about what he calls the Constitution paradox at the heart of Durkheim's Year of Empire, where on one hand is very critical of it morally, but comes to accept some political reality of it. And I think there's important work to do there. But also I have a concern about some of it, and I talk about this in the postscript to the book and the concern to which it can be guilty of what Julian Goh calls racial essentialism, whereby there's a tendency to sort of see groups to have particular views as a result of their historic racial positioning. So someone like Durkheim, writing in the west, is seen as white, as he's part of the metropole, and therefore has particular views which we should now dismiss. And it's a lot more complex than that. And in the postscript, I talk about how someone like Durkheim, who was Jewish, was marked out as Jewish during his life. That he could only have, following Jacobson, what I called probationary whiteness. You know, he would be white at some points, but most of the time he was denied that he was seen as not white. He experienced significant forms of antisemitism, multiple fears of losing his job. At the height of the Dreyfus affair. His family were scared to leave his house. So I think we need to think very carefully about where we place someone like Durkheim and how we use the decolonial critique to think about the different positioning that these theorists had in terms of racialized economies and racialized political structures at particular points in time, and in particular, the internalized process of racialization within Europe, not just from without Europe. I think there's other ways in which, you know, Durkheim's legacy is. Is rich for discussion and. And turn to. And I talk about some of the book in terms of. I have a chapter there which talks about what Anthony Giddings had to say about Durkheim. And one of the things I think I. I think is really significant there is how Giddens draws attention to the ways in which Durkheim published hundreds of book reviews. And in times of academia now, I think there's a tendency to sort of not see book reviews as particularly significant, you know, to see them as something that sort of superfluous to requirements. But I think. I think they're really important. I know Richmond, you have your own website doing sociology website, where you have some of these book reviews. And I think they're really important things to have. They're a form of scholarly communication. I think in many ways, we should. We should look to Durkheim as an example of how to do that. You know, that book reviews are part of how we communicate with each other as scholars. Giddens brings that out very well. But I think, you know, if you said to me, as you did, what Durkheim's legacy, I think I was thinking about this, and I think there's probably two things that I would want to bring out and say that I think mark out Durkheim's legacy. One is that I think he shows us, again, an inevitably normative notion of sociology, particularly of political sociology. And I mentioned earlier the work of Ruth Levitas, who's a huge inspiration for me, who writes about utopianism and a sort of inherently utopian element of sociology. And I think, you know, we can debate about whether sociology should have that. But I think Levitas is right in the sense of saying, well, sociology has had that. You know, whether it's implicit or whether it's explicit, notions of what society should look like often rest behind forms of critical sociology. And I think Durkheim is a type of writer who really brings that to the fore in the way, as I was talking about earlier, by being explicit in terms of definition of concepts, in terms of how he does his form of political critique, in terms of foregrounding this normative element of sociology. And I think this is one of the key legacies we have from him, is to revisit that. And secondly, again, returns something we mentioned earlier. I can't help but think, you know, that the key legacy Durkheim has is, in a way, the books that have his name on them and the articles that have his name on them. He is this incredibly rich writer who has great value to read and to enjoy. You know, he gives you insights for the current day, which I hope I've shown a little bit of in the book. But really at the heart of it, that is someone who can tell us something about the current day. And I think the legacy of any classical theorists, whether it's someone like Durkheim, Du Bois, Martineau, whoever we're talking, Simmel, so on and so forth, whoever we're talking about, it should be about, you know, to what extent do they give us those insights there. And if they have that, that's as good a legacy to have as anything.
- [43:58]
C
Well, thank you once again, Matt, for joining me for the conversation on your new book. I wish it all the best and hope that more and more sociology students and even non sociology ones can pick it up and give it a read. Thank you once again for joining me.
- [44:14]
A
Oh, thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it.