How are individuals integrated into society? This very broad question is that of the social bond: how can we explain this characteristic of all societies? In his various works, French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) answers this question from different angles (social change, suicide, religion). But from his thesis, published under the title De la division du travail social in 1893. He brought a resolutely sociological approach to a phenomenon that, until then, had been the object of study by economists and philosophers.
The division of labor from Plato to Adam Smith
Plato observes that: “One does more and better and more easily, when each one does only one thing, that to which he is proper” (Universalis). In the 17th century, John Locke also showed that work and property are at the heart of the social contract.
But it was Adam Smith who provided the most famous definition of the term. The division of labor is based on a specialized division of the production process. People divide up tasks in order to survive, and exchange the fruits of their labor. This is one of the reasons for the wealth of nations. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) shows that the division of labor is a marker of the evolution of societies, which should eventually lead to the disappearance of the state. Moreover, the division of labor leaves room for the most advanced societies to the detriment of others.
When he published his thesis in 1893, Emile Durkheim was 35 years old: a philosophy graduate, he had studied the various works of the then nascent sociology (notably those of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Ferdinand Tönnies), but he had also read the classical philosophers (Montesquieu and Rousseau in particular). Influenced by the rigor of Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, published in 1865, Durkheim sought to establish a moral sociology consistent with the political project of the Third Republic. In particular, he defended the ideal of the republican school, one of the main thrusts of the period, and came to the defense of Dreyfus in 1898.
When he published The Division of Labour in Society, he was still an unknown on the philosophical/sociological scene: other important names such as Gabriel Tarde and René Worms were more famous. But Durkheim had a clear project: to analyze morality at an equidistance between philosophical and biological concepts. The Division of Labour in Society is therefore a work that lays a new foundation for sociology, developing an a priori very simple thesis: the function of the division of labor is to produce social solidarity.
For Durkheim, the division of labor is not only a source of economic progress, it also has a fundamental social character.
For Durkheim, the division of labor is not just a source of economic progress, as Adam Smith and the classical economists (David Ricardo and Jean-Baptiste Say in particular) might have thought, nor is it a reduction of the social bond to economic exchange, as Spencer might have thought. For Durkheim, the division of labor can be observed in all industrialized societies, whether at the economic, family, legal or political level. The division of labor, far from being reduced to a simple economic component, clearly has a moral character and helps to meet the need for cohesion and solidarity.
In other words, the division of labor enables the integration of individuals into society: it is therefore a factor of social cohesion. Durkheim assumes that law is an indicator of the evolution of societies. As he showed in his Rules of Sociological Method, published the following year, law is an external, objectified phenomenon that exerts a form of coercion on individuals. It therefore meets the definition of a social fact.
What are restitutive and repressive sanctions?
Law, Durkheim explains, represents forms of social solidarity. It is characterized in particular by the introduction of sanctions that can be measured. The first is the repressive sanctions: based on criminal law, it aims to punish someone who has committed a crime or misdemeanor. The second is restitutive sanctions, based on civil, commercial or administrative law, which aim to put things right. For Durkheim, the repressive (criminal) sanctions is one that expresses society’s entire reaction to an act that runs counter to collective feelings, while the restitutive sanction settles conflicts with the competent organs of society. For example, if someone commits a crime in a given society, this will result in a lynching (repressive sanction), but in the same situation, in another type of society, the crime will be judged by the competent courts (restitutive sanction). The evolution of these two forms of law shows that, for Durkheim, there are two types of social bond and therefore two forms of society, each characterized by a given form of solidarity: societies with “mechanical solidarity” and “societies with organic solidarity”.
Mechanical solidarity and collective conscience in The Division of Labour in Society
Societies characterized by mechanical solidarity are known as primitive or inferior societies in the vocabulary of the time. They are characterized by the primacy of collective conscience, which Durkheim describes as “the set of beliefs and feelings shared by the average member of the same society”. Individuals share the same values and beliefs, individual conscience is reduced to a minimum, and repressive sanction is imposed on individuals, who can punish anyone who offends against the values of society.
Durkheim uses the example of Roman society to show how repressive sanction is a characteristic of societies with mechanical solidarity:
In Rome, while civil matters were the responsibility of the praetor, criminal matters were judged by the people, first by the comices curies and then, from the Law of the XII Tables onwards, by the comices centuries; until the end of the Republic, and even though he had in fact delegated his powers to permanent commissions, he remained in principle the supreme judge for these kinds of trials (On the Division of Social Labor, chapter 2).
The example of the Law of the XII Tables shows that citizens could practically take justice into their own hands (for more on the Law of the XII Tables, see this article on Roman history here).
Organic solidarity and individual consciousness
Organic solidarity characterizes so-called industrial societies. Individuals complement each other through the division of labor, since there are exchange relationships, particularly economic ones. This type of society is characterized by a stronger individual consciousness than collective consciousness. What unites individuals is not their resemblance but their differentiation, and the roles of each serve the functioning of society. Furthermore, restitutive law has prevailed over repressive law. The hallmark of a society with organic solidarity is social differentiation. However, although Durkheim sees individualism as the cement of modern society – even if this is not yet clear in De la division du travail social – individuals are not disconnected units. They adhere to a set of norms and values within the social groups to which they belong. These rules do not carry the same weight as in societies with mechanical solidarity, since individuals have more room for manoeuvre with them. What’s more, anyone can belong to several different social groups (family, religion, work…).
The transition from mechanical to organic solidarity societies
Both types of society are abstractions designed to account for the change from one society to another under the influence of the division of labor. For Durkheim, this is due to the reduced importance of collective consciousness, the decline in heredity and, above all, urbanization and the concentration of the population in small areas. To develop cities, for example, the division of labor is the only solution for Durkheim, since individuals are no longer rivals but in solidarity with one another.
Anomie and abnormal forms of division of labor in society
The division of labor should normally produce social solidarity in a society with organic solidarity, but there are also situations in which regulatory norms no longer exist. This is a situation of anomie (absence of norms), a central concept in Durkheimian sociology.
The division of labor can be anomic when it is caused by industrial or commercial crises. In this case, says Durkheim: “At certain points of the organism, certain social functions are not adjusted to one another. Now, as work becomes more divided, these phenomena seem to become more frequent, at least in certain cases”. Anomie can also arise from the antagonism of labor and capital, resulting from a lack of ties between employers and employees.
Anomie can also arise from excessive regulation of work, which fragments tasks to the extreme and causes employees to lose meaning in their work. The critique of work represents an original approach in Durkheim’s work, insofar as productive activity ultimately takes a back seat in his book. In addition, Durkheim’s critique is similar to Marx’s on the alienation of work. It would also form the basis of the first field surveys in the sociology of work, notably by sociologists Georges Friedmann and Pierre Naville, almost fifty years after the publication of Durkheim’s book.
The other abnormal form of division of labor stems from the unfairness of the rules: this is what Durkheim calls the forced division of labor. The roles assigned to each person in the division of labor do not correspond to our individual merits: “The distribution of social functions on which it is based does not correspond, or rather no longer corresponds, to the distribution of natural talents”. In contemporary parlance, this is known as inequality of opportunity. The other inequality is based on the mismatch between the cost of a product and the labor required to produce it, which creates an imbalance.
The last abnormal form of division of labor identified by Durkheim, although marginal in his work, is based on the situation in which work is divided in such a way that each person is not sufficiently occupied with his or her task.
De la division du travail social can be read as an introduction to Durkheim’s later works.
This work goes beyond the ideas of Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer regarding the place of the division of labor in society. However, the text remains steeped in evolutionism (typical of the 19th century) and gives a caricatured reading of social change. On the one hand, the characterization of societies with mechanical solidarity has been called into question by ethnological and anthropological studies, and on the other, the weight of penal sanctions is perhaps greater in our societies than Durkheim might have thought. An early work, De la division du travail social prefigures later works on the general theme of the study of social bonds, social integration and social cohesion. It is also a work which, by presenting society as a body with its organs and functions, lays the first theoretical foundations for what was to become functionalism.
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