The Rules of Sociological

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 

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16 
Introduction 
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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-

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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