The analysis of Durkheim’s writings have to be contextualized in his historical time and his analyses of primitive societies where men seemed to be more free and equal to the others. According to this author the conditions by which the society was established in western cultures were based on the assumption that humans have received some natural heredity for being social agents. This author points out that an individual receives at birth tastes and aptitudes that predispose him to certain functions, and these predispositions have certainty and influence upon the tasks are distributed.[1] Thus there is a strong relationship between the human nature and the division of labor. The greater the role of heredity in the distribution of tasks the more invariable that distribution is within each society. However, the heredity is only part of the secondary factors of Durkheim’s description of human nature, being the human natural condition of cooperation the most important one. According to this author, solidarity is an essential aspect of the human nature. Thus, the society is not a collection of individuals which a machine keeps united and compressed against each other by the use of force. For Durkheim solidarity comes from the inside of the society, and humans are attached to one another “as naturally as the atoms of a mineral and the cells of an organism” (Durkheim 1895). The affinity that the individuals feel, and which holds them together, is based upon sympathy like an essential human condition. In addition, this solidarity is expressed by social structures such as the state or the religion. That argument has been questioned by some contemporary authors, mainly by those which base their arguments in the functions of social conflicts. For Lewis Coser (1956), the kind of relationships among the individuals is strongly related with the conflicts. Contrary to the equilibrium searched by Durkheim, this author points out that conflicts are part of the dynamic social life , and that close relationships provide frequent occasions for conflicts. If, however, conflicts occur despite suppression, they tend to disrupt the relationship because they are likely to assume peculiar and accumulation of suppressed hostilities.[2]
Among other more contemporary theorists, Coser (1954) was one of those who has recognized and used some of the methodological bases pointed out by Durkheim, but has made differences about the social predisposition of solidarity, which have been easily understandable considering the different historical contexts of those authors. As Coser (1984) points out in his introduction to one of Durkheim’s book, he attempted systematically to distinguish the type of solidarity prevalent in relatively simple societies from those to be found in the modern world.[3]
Today, the complexity and the specification of the division of labor imply the social analysis from different approaches. Many of the theories which are based on qualitative and ethnographical methodologies are used as part of the methodological fashion among the academia. However, the current complexity developed by our “organic” economic system seems to have many units of study as part of a huge system. The whole picture of that big social system or web seems to be closer to Durkheim’s ideas about rules of methodologies. But the small unit of analysis (Durkheim’s villages or tribes) can serve us to analyze some facts such as conflicts and those described above, where the psychological aspects avoided by Durkheim, seem to easily arise and be observed or investigated.
[1] Durkheim, E. 1997, The Division of Labor in Society, p.246, The Free Press, US.
[2] Coser, Lewis, 1956, The Functions of Social Conflict, The Free Press, Ney York, US.
[3] Coser, Lewis, 1984, in Introduction of The Division of Labor in Society, p. xiv, The Free Press, US.
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