Paul Carls

With the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity in Western societies, debates over hate speech and free speech have become an increasingly prominent part of the political landscape. The Canadian, German, and American constitutions represent three different approaches to these issues. How do these different approaches derive their legitimacy? In answering this question, the chapter discusses the details of each country’s approach to hate speech laws, including its bill of rights and relevant Supreme Court decisions, and identifies the implicit moral dimensions. This chapter makes the argument that the legitimation of concepts such as human dignity, hate speech, and free speech is of a fundamentally moral nature. The analysis draws on the work of Émile Durkheim, who writes extensively about moral forms of legitimation. According to his analysis, the individual in the modern West has become a sacred object, and bills of rights are sacred, moral documents that enshrine the protection of the individual person.

In the 1960s Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase “masters of suspicion” to describe Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud for their ability to reveal the hidden or repressed meanings or truths located in texts or social and psychological phenomena. Philosophers, theologians, and literary theorists have subsequently applied the term “master of suspicion,” as well as the associated term “hermeneutics of suspicion,” in manifold ways. The concept has become one of philosophy’s recognizable turns of phrase, an “iconic term” that excites imagination and interest in much the same way as Nietzsche’s ‘death of God.’ Ricoeur identifies four aspects that the masters of suspicion have in common: an engagement with religion; their contestation of the primacy of consciousness in the domain of knowledge, which implies a radical critique of the Cartesian cogito and the exposure of false consciousness; the development of a new method of demystification, or a new way to explain consciousness; the destruction of old myths, which implies simultaneously a rebuilding process towards developing a new, more true understanding of reality, a process that involves a liberation from illusion and the expansion of consciousness. Durkheim’s sociological project contains all of these elements: by showing how individuals are socially constructed, including even their ability for logical thought, his work exposes the falsity of the Cartesian cogito and the idea of the independent and autonomous ego; he develops a new sociological method which seeks to unmask the hidden social processes that determine individual thought and behavior; his sociology destroys old ways of thinking, but simultaneously actively rebuilds a new understanding of reality, and seeks to expand consciousness by highlighting how consciousness is shaped by social processes; his work on religion is an exercise in a hermeneutics of suspicion just as radical as that of the other masters of suspicion. This contribution will explain the ways in which Durkheim is truly a master of suspicion in Ricoeur’s sense, but also seeks to understand why Ricoeur did not mention Durkheim. The contribution will thus explore how Durkheim is relevant for hermeneutics, while also exploring facets of his methodology in new ways.

Multiculturalism and the Nation in Germany: A Study in Moral Conflict examines the new debates surrounding matters of multiculturalism, immigration, and national identity in Germany in the wake of the 2015 Refugee Crisis. Arguing that contemporary disputes are centered around four moral ideals, or ideal visions of the German community, it draws upon the thought of Émile Durkheim to identify the role of the sacred in political conflict. The book argues that at the heart of each moral ideal is a sacred object that legitimates specific policies and behaviors, and that attempts to realize moral ideals lead to conflicts involving free speech, German Memory Culture, inner-party rivalries, and political violence that go to the very essence of what it means to be German. The book includes a ground-breaking theoretical reworking of Durkheim’s sociology, which it applies to the study of power and politics, as well as to debates in political philosophy. This volume will appeal to scholars across disciplines with interests in political sociology, comparative politics, social and political theory, and questions of citizenship, national identity, and belonging.

Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx are generally considered the founding fathers of sociology and have had great influence in related fields such as anthropology, political science, and philosophy. Durkheim’s work has been influential in certain areas of the social sciences and humanities, yet beyond this recognition his reception is more checkered. In many fields Durkheim remains a marginal figure, if not one that is actively derided. This contribution explores this legacy and what it reveals about the social sciences and humanities. It first discusses the most prominent tropes, or recurring themes, related to Durkheim’s work that have negatively influenced its reception. It then focuses on examples of particularly harsh treatment of Durkheim by prominent philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists, including John Searle, Charles Tilly, Theodor Adorno, Zygmunt Bauman, and Jacques Derrida. Each author’s assessment does two things. First, it plays into the various aforementioned tropes. Second, it uses Durkheim as a negative foil to promote a preferred research paradigm. These responses reveal less about Durkheim than they do about the social sciences and humanities themselves, including which research paradigms are dominant and what their biases are. The essay thus seeks to explore the interpretative and conceptual obstacles that have hindered Durkheim reception. The essay will defend Durkheim’s legacy, demonstrate the ways he remains relevant, and argue for a reevaluation by scholars in relevant fields.

This fascinating book explores the life and work of Émile Durkheim, presenting new and exciting interpretations of his foundational sociological ideas. By tracing the evolution of his thought and its impact on key areas of inquiry, the book demonstrates Durkheim’s continuing significance in contemporary social science. Leading scholars recontextualize Durkheim’s ideas, placing him in dialogue with other core figures in the social sciences from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Each chapter covers a different topic, and together they address issues in sociology, politics, philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, criminology, nationalism, religious studies, ethics, suicide, gender, anthropology, and post-colonialism. This book showcases the enduring relevance of Durkheim’s work, establishing its innovative potential and continued inspiration for modern analysis. This interdisciplinary investigation of Émile Durkheim will benefit scholars and students across the social sciences, particularly those in the fields of sociology, criminology, philosophy, politics, religious studies, and anthropology.

Émile Durkheim’s late work focuses on représentations collectives, social facts that embody sui generis social forces and that direct behaviour in meaningful ways. The focus on représentations collectives raises questions, but also opens doors for Durkheimian sociology. Many would contend that Durkheim’s focus on représentations collectives introduces a hermeneutical and ideational element that is at odds with his positivist approach. His study of représentations collectives also point to a potentially broad application of his method to the study of culture as a causally autonomous factor in social life. This article will discuss the social fact in Durkheim’s late work in light of these issues. It will argue that représentations collectives are social facts, ‘things’ in Durkheim’s terminology, that are rooted in ritual. They have an objective existence and are causally efficacious, which makes them the object of positive sociology; there is thus no tension between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Durkheim on this point. It will also argue that due to the causally autonomous and inherently meaningful nature of représentations collectives, Durkheim’s approach adds to the Strong Program’s research agenda, albeit with more of a focus on ritual and emotional energy. In so doing the article seeks to build a bridge between the Strong Program and the interaction ritual approach developed by Randall Collins.

Both Durkheim and Derrida think through the ‘structurality of structure’, or the arbitrary and empty nature of a central, onto-theological/ metaphysical authority. In response, Derrida articulates a deconstructive ethics and politics that remains continuously open to the infinite alterity of the other and that subverts metaphysical thought. Durkheim, however, concludes that structure is an inherent feature of social life. He argues that all moral systems necessarily contain metaphysical dimensions that deconstruction actively works against, notably through the notion of the sacred. This article discusses Derrida’s deconstructive ethics and politics, assesses its claims from a Durkheimian perspective, and argues that deconstruction contains a notion of the sacred in the form of infinite alterity. Deconstruction thus contains a moral authority and is marked by an unacknowledged onto-theology. Derrida’s democracy to come thus creates a stable and structured group identity and constitutes a form of what Durkheim identifies as the cult of the individual.

The Enlightenment-humanist tradition places the rational, autonomous individual at the heart of its inquiries into human nature. Much of phenomenology, following Edmund Husserl, carries forward this tradition, placing the rational individual at the heart of its investigations. Existential phenomenology, as developed, for example, by Jean-Paul Sartre, applies this approach and seeks to answer questions related to the meaninglessness of life and human freedom. This tradition was criticized in the latter half of the twentieth century by posthumanist authors emphasizing the importance of the social, power, or the unconscious as decisive factors explaining human behavior. One author relevant to this discussion is Émile Durkheim, who embodies elements of both traditions. He embraces Cartesian rationalism as a means to understand the social world, and yet, a consequence of his sociology is a deconstruction of the individual to show how the social pre-figures and shapes individual consciousness. This text draws out the similarities between Durkheim’s work and the existential-phenomenological tradition. It details the existential problematic that arises from Durkheim’s sociology, which demonstrates the social construction of reality and thus its inherent meaninglessness. It also builds on Durkheim’s observation that the gods are dead and that a unique, socio-historically developed form of individual subjectivity is the hallmark of modernity and indeed the sociological pre-condition for the emergence of existentialism itself. From there it uses the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sartre to develop a notion of Durkheimian existential ethics, what I call amor societatis, that reconciles the social with the problems of freedom, subjectivity, and absurdity. Akin to Nietzsche’s amor fati, the Durkheimian amor societatis recognizes the absurdity of the social world and its obligations, but fully embraces them as a necessary component of life, indeed as that which makes us fully human.

This chapter examines the research team of sociologists that, beginning in 1896, collaborated with Émile Durkheim to create the journal L’Année sociologique. It explores the central place that Durkheim held in the group, as well as the vital roles that different collaborators such as Célestin Bouglé and Marcel Mauss played in making L’Année sociologique an initial success. The chapter then follows the development of this Durkheimian school and its historical legacy after Durkheim’s death in 1917. This development includes the Durkheimian school’s maintenance of a prominent position in the 1920s and 1930s, its relative post–World War II obscurity, and its rebirth beginning in the 1970s and 1980s through renewed academic interest in the work of members of the team. Beyond L’Année sociologique, special attention is given to specific members of Durkheim’s team, including collaborators such as Henri Hubert, François Simiand, Maurice Halbwachs, and Robert Hertz.

After the demise of Christianity, Western society did not become secular, according to Emile Durkheim, but located foundations in a new religion he calls the “cult of the individual.” This religion holds the rational individual person as sacred, and corresponds to a multi-faceted, complex, and diverse society united around individual democratic rights and modern science. Different traditional religions can co-exist in the cult of the individual, but only if they accept a subordinate status in relation to it. Durkheim maintains, however, that all religions construct authoritative regimes of truth and moral obligations, setting the stage for conflict. How then should modern democracies respond to challenges to their authority from traditional religions? This article argues that a Durkheimian response would be to assert the values of the cult of the individual, as this is the only way to maintain the integrity and viability of Western democratic society.