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Chapter Two 108 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory109as the external object of human manipulation or to trade it off for the solereality of the intentional subject. How then Radcliffe-Brown? Surely thesame considerations would prevent Durkheim from indulging in the thinlydisguised utilitarianism of a sociological functionalism. Not even his enthusiasmfor "solidarity" ever permitted him to suppose in principle thatthe function of a custom, or its role in the satisfaction of the besoinssociaux. could provide an account of its specific nature. 38 Nevertheless,the lineaments of Radcliffe-Brown's functionalism show forth in Durkheim'sontology. Negating the political economy, Durkheim was forced toreproduce at the level of society, viewed as a kind of supersubject, thesame economism he refused as constituting at the level of the individual.One can follow this union of opposites very well in an early paper (1887)on German moral science, where Durkheim champions the social perspectivesof the economic historians G. Schmoller and A. Wagner against theliberals of the "Manchester school." For the latter, Durkheim writes,political economy consists of the satisfaction of the needs of the individualand especially of his material needs. In this conception, theindividual thus exists as the unique end of economic relations; by himand for him everything is done. As for society, it is a figment ofthought, a metaphysical entity that the scholar can and must ignore.What goes by that name is only the collection of all individual activities;it is a whole no greater than the sum of its parts.... One seesthat basically the liberal economists are unknowing disciples of Rousseau,whom they mistakenly repudiate. True, they recognize that thestate of isolation is not ideal, but like Rousseau they see nothing in thesocial tie but a superficial rapprochement, determined by the conjunctionof individual interests. [Durkheim 1887, p. 37. But see his lateressay (1965) on Rousseau for a changed opinion.]But then, the argument against the individual being is exactly the existenceof a social being-and against the ordering power of individual need, it isthe social need. The denial that a given practice, for example, economic,stems from individual desire takes the form of an insistence on its socialutility:For [Wagner and Schmoller], on the contrary, society is a true being,without doubt nothing outside the individuals who compose it, but38. "To show in what respect a fact is useful is not to explain why it is true nor why it is whatit is. For the uses it serves presuppose the specific properties which characterize it, but donot create it. The need we have ofthings cannot determine that they be such and such and,by consequence, it is not this need that can take them out of nothing and give themexistence" (Durkheim 195(») [18951, p. 90; d. pp. 94-95,109-11; and 1965. pp.42-44).which nevertheless has its own nature and personality. These expressionsofthe current tongue-collective consciousness, collective mind,the body of the nation""':'do not have a mere verbal value but expressfacts that are eminently concrete. It is wrong to say that the whole isequal to the sum of its parts. By the simple fact that the parts havedefinite relations with each other, are arranged in a certain way, somethingnew results from the assemblage: a composite being, surely, butone with special properties and which may even under special circumstancesbecome conscious of itself. ... As ... the social being hasneeds of its own and among them the need of material things, it institutesand organizes in order to satisfy these needs an economic activitywhich is not that of this or that individual or that of the majority of thecitizens, but of the nation in its entirety. [Ibid., pp. 37-38]Society thus has its own ends, which are not those of the individual, andit is by the first, not the second, that social activity may be understood. "Inorder for a fact to be sociological, it must interest not only all the individualstaken separately, but the society itself. The army, industry, the familyhave social functions inasmuch as they have as their objective the one todefend, the other to nourish society, the third to assure its renewal andcontinuity. " (Durkheim 1886, p. 66) In the event, the utilitarian teleologycould not be avoided. The whole means-ends paradigm was built into theconception of the social fact, inasmuch as this fact was determined byopposition to individual need. Only now, the life ofsociety, was the relevantfinality. But, in addition, precisely as it had been defined as exteriorand by contradistinction to individual welfare, this idea of social survivalhad a number of permanent effects on the idea of the social object. Onewas the view that society was continuously menaced from within by a warofeach against all and was constructed to avoid that danger: a concept thatprofoundly inspired many of the works of the Annt?e Sociologique group,as it also stood behind Radcliffe-Brown's concern for "coaptation" andthe jural order generally (cf. Sahlins 1972, chap. 4). It may be that thisnotion of subterranean strife and the functional problems it presents tosociety remain the most important legacy bestowed on social science bycapitalist ideology. More obviously, the emphasis on the life of society asopposed to individual purpose provided logical rationale for the appropriationof the entire organic metaphor as the basic idea of social constitution.The tradition of society as an organism was of course maintained byRadcliffe-Brown, and with it the division of social anthropology or sociologyinto the life-science branches of morphology, physiology, and evolution.It required only the proposition that the "social function" of aninstitution, or its contribution to social continuity, is also its "raison
Chapter Two 110 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory111d' etre" (Radcliffe-Brown 1950, p. 62) to complete in one movement areversal of Durkheim's dictum to the contrary-and the transfer ofutilitarianism from the individual to the supersubject that Durkheim's owninitial line of argument had made inescapable.Durkheim's concept of symboling, including the well-known "sociologicalepistemology," ultimately fell victim to the same kind of dualism-asit likewise became in the hands of anthropological followers another formof instrumental logic. Lukes and others have argued, against the objectionsof Levi-Strauss to the derivation of collective representation from socialmorphology, that Durkheim had become increasingly aware of the autonomyand universality of meaning. Perhaps this is another case of thedifference between being aware of a fact and knowing its right theoreticalplace. The texts that might be persuasively cited on both sides of the issueamount to only one of the set of paradoxes in the master's understanding ofthe relation of thought to the world. Another is the problem (much likeMalinowski's) of the difference between the sociologist's way of knowingand the way knowledge is constituted in childhood and society-processesso distinct in Durkheim's conception as to leave him unable to encompasshis own positivist program. For that program held that social facts, preciselybecause they were "things," could only be penetrated from outsideas guided by perception and without preconception. Yet Durkheim neverbelieved that either our own knowledge as members of society or, a fortiori,the social facts had the same type of genesis. The dilemma so posedmight be exemplified by two brief passages from the Rules. On one hand,Durkheim writes that" all education is a continuous effort to impose on thechild ways of seeing, feeling, and acting which he could not have arrived atspontaneously" (l950a [1895], p. 6). Yet some pages later he says:"Moralists think it necessary to determine with precision the essence of theideas of law and ethics, and not the nature ofethics and law. They have notyet arrived at the very simple truth that, as our ideas (representations) ofphysical things are derived from these things themselves and express themmore or less exactly, so [as scholars] our ideas of ethics must be derivedfrom the observable manifestation of the rules that are functioning underour eyes" (ibid., p. 23). Durkheim held simultaneously to a mediated andan unmediated relation of subject and object. If the latter conformed to thescientific project, the first was the fate of man in society. The contradiction,however, was actually more complex and not without a certain resolution.For in the mediated case, society alternately confronted man as asupersubject whose own concepts of the world dominated and replaced hisindividual sensibilities and then as an object, the direct experience ofwhich accounted empirically for that process of conceptual imposition. Asthe locus of this antagonistic dualism between society and sensibility, manwas "double" in Durkheim's view, and the duality of his being correspondedto an opposition between (individual) perception and (social) conceptionas well as between egoistic gratification and collective morality. 39I note these dialectic convolutions because they help explain both thevirtues and the limitations of Durkheim's problematic as culture theory.These virtues are only partially documented by the influence of Durkheim'sconcept of the social fact on Saussure's formulation of the distinctionbetween langue and parole (Doroszewski 1933). In Primitive Classification(with Mauss) and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,Durkheim had himself developed a notion of the sign, particularly as concernsthe "categories" of class, number, space, time, cause, and the like,that was in several essentials very close to Saussure's. A paradox again fromthe point of view of the arbitrary character of the sign, since for Durkheim. the categories represented the de facto social morphology-on which morewill be said later. Yet as concepts emanating from the social totality, theyspecifically transcend individual experience. Rather than articulating suchexperience, they amount to a metalanguage by which it is organized. 40And since the categories are not the particulars of experience but rathergeneral ideas of the particulars (such as make an experience a particular),they specifically do not reflect perception but appropriate it within a relativecultural system. 41 Finally, Durkheim recognizes the arbitrary charac-39. In a late paper (1914). sequel to the Elementary Forms, Durkheim wrote: "Our intelligence,like our activity. presents two very different forms: on the one hand, are sensationsand sensory tendencies; on the other, conceptual thought and moral activity. Each ofthese two parts of ourselves represents a separate pole of our being. and these two polesare not only distinct from one another but are opposed to one another. Our sensoryappetites are necessarily egoistic: they have our individuality and it alone as their object.When we satisfy our hunger, our thirst and so on, without bringing any other tendencyinto play, it is ourselves, and ourselves alone. that we satisfy. IConceptual thought] andmoral activity are, on the contrary. distinguished by the fact that the rules of conduct towhich they confonn can be universalized. Therefore, by definition. they pursue impersonalends. Morality begins with disinterest. with attachment to somethin~ other thanourselves" (1960 [19t41, p. 327; cf. 1951. and Lukes 1972, pp. 23-24).40. "In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whosemeaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent. the limits of our personal experience.Very frequently a tenn expresses things which we have never perceived or experienceswe have never had or of which we have never been the witnesses" (Durkheim 1947[19121, p. 434).41. "Thinking by concepts is not merely seeing reality on its most general side. but it isprojecting a light upon the sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it and transfonns it.Conceiving something is both learning its essential elements better and also locating it in
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