Emile Durkheim On Morality And Society

Selections from Durkheim's writings focus on the nature of his conception of society and its moral context.

Selections from Durkheim's writings focus on the nature of his conception of society and its moral context.

Émile Durkheim is one of the founding fathers of sociology and Professional Ethics and Civic Morals is one of his most neglected yet insightful works. Durkheim's view that the instability of industrial society was connected to the decline of religion and his characterization of the state as the ultimate moral force in society reveal his lifelong engagement with the relationship between the individual and society. In Professional Ethics and Civic Morals Durkheim poses a major question: given the negative social consequences of unfettered markets, which caused what he termed ‘anomie’, how is the state to reconcile morality with the market? Durkheim argues that the answer is to be found in the evolution of a civil religion, in the form of professional codes and civic values, which would counteract the effects of individualism, just as guilds had regulated medieval economic life. Arguing that the state has a vital role to play in moral life and that morals are at bottom social facts – a controversial position which drew considerable criticism – Durkheim also argues that the state had a duty to protect the rights of the individual, via a form of cosmopolitan patriotism. Durkheim also articulates a highly original and critical interpretation of the rules around property and inheritance – a perspective which resonates with debates about inequality and the redistribution of wealth today. Included in this Routledge Classics edition is a new introduction by Bryan S.Turner, placing Durkheim in contemporary context and outlining the key tenets of Professional Ethics and Civic Morals.

International scholarship over the last twenty years has produced a new understanding of Emile Durkheim as a thinker. It has contributed to reassembling what, for Durkheim, was always a whole: a sociological selection on morals and moral activism. This volume presents an overview of Durkheim's thought and is representative of the best of contemporary Durkheim scholarship.

This volume focuses on three closely-connected aspects of Émile Durkheim's work: his sociology of justice, his sociology of morality and his political sociology. These areas of his thought are the most relevant and practical today in considering fundamental problems of contemporary societies and they provide many of the richest and most important insights of his social theory. Yet they are also relatively neglected and this volume collects together the most incisive recent periodical commentary on them. Within the justice-morality-politics triangle, Durkheim examines moral pluralism and the possibility of identifying a unifying value system for complex societies; the nature and conditions of democracy; the relations of the citizen, the state and corporate groups; criteria of justice and of effective economic regulation; and modern individualism with its associated ideas of human dignity and human rights. This tightly-integrated volume presents Durkheim's thought in an unusual and revealing light, showing him as a key social and political thinker for the twenty-first century.

The great French sociologist and philosopher Emile Durkheim is best known for his classic book Suicide (1897), a landmark in social psychology. Among his other major works is this study in the sociology of education, which features 18 lectures by an influential theorist who discusses his ideas on the school as the appropriate setting for moral education. The first element in developing a moral being, he maintains, is instilling a sense of discipline, followed by a willingness to behave in terms of the group's collective interest, and a sense of autonomy. Durkheim also examines discipline and the psychology of the child, discipline of the school and the use of punishment, altruism in the child, the influence of the school environment, and the teaching of science, aesthetics, and history. Perceptive and provocative, this volume abounds in valuable insights for teachers and others involved in education.

Emile Durkheim, whose writings still exert a great influence over sociological thought, has often been called the father of the sociology of education. He lectured extensively on the subject, and was convinced of its necessary place in social theory. Buthis work cannot be fully understood unless it is realized that he had an overriding concern form morals. He saw the relationship between morals and education as almost that of theory to practice, yet he never wrote a systematic work on the subject of morals, although for some time he planned such a book and managed just before he died in 1917 to write the opening introduction. This collection of Durkheim's work on morals and education brings together many items translated into English for the first time.A wide selection of articles, reviews and discussions has been included in this book, covering such subjects as, defining morals, the science of morality, moral facts, relativism, the relation of science to morality; and in education, problems of definition, childhood, sex education, Rousseau's 'Emile', teaching secular morality and the effectiveness of moral doctrines. The book also included an introduction to each of the two sections, as well as bibliographies which deal with Durkheim's own works on morals and education, together with those covering references to his writing on these subjects written by others.