particular interpretations of these phenomena. And indeed, his
last great work is an extended interpretation of the meaning of
primitive religious mythology and ritual practice. On the other
hand, he never brought his actual interpretative practices to the
level of self-conscious reflection: his official methodological posi
tion never allowed him explicitly to address the problems of
interpretation and thus to incorporate henneneutic inquiry into
the rules of sociological method. And this fact, of course, in turn
had limiting and distorting effects upon his sociological practice,
rendering him insufficiently critical of his own proposed inter
pretations (as Evans-Pritchard remarked, 'It was Durkheim and
not the savage who made society into a god' 63) and insensitive to
the existence and sociological relevance of divergences among
actors' intepretations.
The same contradiction between methodology and sociological
16
Introduction
.�
former offeri�g a restrictively n�rrow
�
onstr��l ?f t
�
e
,
be
seen in Durkheim's view of socIology s speclficlty,
m
his
application of the Boutroux-C?mte principle that
I'
science
has its own principles of explanation, thereby exclud
\
ing'pSychology'. And here too, Durkheim's official methodologic
al
position reacted back upon his own practice, rendering it less
comprehensive and convincing than it might otherwise have been.
Durkheim supposed that a sharp demarcatien line could be
drawn between the social and individual levels of reality. As I have
argued elsewhere, this overarching dichotomy conflates at least
eight separate distinctions.64 Durkheim not only conflates these,
but reifies them into the abstractions of 'society' and 'the indi
vidual'. This multiple dichotomy served, in a sense, as the
keystone of Durkheim's entire system of thought, underlying the
distinctions he drew between moral rules and sensual appetites,
concepts and sensations, and the sacred and the profane. It also
underlay his sharp dichotomy between sociology and psychology
and his doctrine that sociological explanation is independent of
psychological expianation.
.
This strange and rigid view lay behind Durkheim's battles for
sociology against the strong methodological individualism of con
temporary historians, economists and even sociologists, some of
which are represented in this volume. In these battles he won some
notable victories, especially against explanations appealing to
inclinations or dispositions which themselves demand sociological
explanation - as when the organisation of the family is-explained
by parental or familial sentiments, the incest taboo by instinctive
aversion, economic life by the desire for wealth, or religions by
religious sentiments. But the view makes little sense as a positive
methodological principle. Every, macro-theory presupposes,
whether implicitly or explicitly, a micro-theory to back; up its
explanations: in Durkheim's terms, social causes can only produce
these, rather than those, social effects, if individuals act and react
and interact in these ways rather than those.
Like Marxism, Durkheimian sociology is notable for its lack of.
such an explicit micro-theory. Unlike Max Weber, Durkheim
never explored the forms of rational action under specified social
situations; unlike Freud, he never worked out a model of the
psyche. The conceptioQs of rationality and of the psyche implicit in
and required by his macro-theories can, of course, be recon-
Introduction 17
structed, and, when they are"they turn out to be distinctly crude,
not worked out, and vulnerable to criticism, just because they
were not subjected to it by their author.
Thus he could seek to explain differential suicide rates by social
causes and suppose that he did not need to examine either the
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