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DURKHEIM BEYOND LIBERALISM: LIBERAL ACCOMMODATIONS OF GROUP RIGHTS

Marion Maddox

Durkheim Beyond Liberalism

This paper grows out of a larger project on liberal defences of group rights. Specifically, I looked at defences of affirmative action programmes for women (particularly as they exist in Australia, the US and a number of Scandinavian countries) and of so­called ‘cultural rights’ for members of first nations in colonised territories (as advocated most famously by Will Kymlicka).

The starting point for my project was the observation that each body of literature that defending affirmative action and that defending cultural rights mounted convincing critiques of liberal individualism and, beyond that, each also mounted an internally quite persuasive case for a particular kind of group rights. However, one does not have to look very hard to notice that the respective arguments for group rights advocated in each body of literature, while largely successful in their own terms, are mutually quite destructive. It is very difficult to defend affirmative action using the kinds of arguments mounted by defenders of differential rights of cultural minorities, and very difficult to defend cultural rights using the kinds of arguments mounted by defenders of affirmative action. As cultural rights theorists are quick to point out, affirmative action is essentially assimilationist; as feminists charge, cultural rights arguments often compromise on protecting individual rights below the level of the cultural community.

Does that matter? Must a theory defending one kind of group rights in one context necessarily be transferable to a different kind of group rights in a different context? I concluded that the two sets of arguments are founded on mutually contradictory assumptions about the relationship between individuals, communities and the state. However, they share a mutual

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inclination to see membership of a ‘group’ as an exceptional state, special instances standing out from an assumed ‘liberal background’ in which the normal mode of citizens’ incorporation into the state is understood in fundamentally individualist terms. Durkheim’s view of the state as irreducibly composed of ‘intermediate associations’, between the level of individual and society, helps us move beyond the impasses of current debates within liberal theory. This angle on Durkheim’s contribution to political theory is not summed up in any one book, but emerges from reading some of his shorter and less well­known works (particularly the lecture series Professional Ethics and Civic Morals and Moral Education, the Dreyfusard polemic ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’ and some short book reviews) in conversation with the classic Suicide, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, The Rules of Sociological Method and The Division of Labour in Society.

Liberal Individualism?

It is conventional in political philosophy to view liberalism as a theory which gives primacy (for good or ill, depending on the interpreter’s stance) to notions of the individual. As one example, Alan Ryan’s summary statement on liberalism in the Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy discusses and discards various possible definitions before concluding that “liberalism is best understood as a theory of the good life for individuals linked to a theory of the social, economic and political arrangements within which they may lead that life”. 1 Similar insistence on an individual focus in liberalism can be found in Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2 Honderich’s Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 3 and the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. 4 The consensus is echoed in numerous textbooks, ‘Introductions to ...’ and encyclopaedia entries. A

1 Alan Ryan “Liberalism” in Robert E Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds) A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Blackwell, Oxford, 1995) 291, 303.

2 Liberalism is dealt with in James Sterba “Political Philosophy” in Robert Audi (ed) The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995).

3 Will Kymlicka “Liberalism” in Ted Honderich (ed) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995).

4 Alan Bullock and Steve Reilly “Liberal/liberalism” in Alan Bullock and others (eds) The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (2 ed, Fontana Paperbacks, London, 1988).

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considerable amount of ink has deplored this individualist core, both from liberalism’s communitarian and socialist critics, and from many of those who class themselves as ‘post­liberal’. 5

Among the latter are attempts to construct a liberal defence of group rights, in particular the proposals of Will Kymlicka. He has mounted a detailed case for liberal recognition of group rights, arguing that liberals can consistently offer such recognition where communitarians, for example, have explicitly eschewed it. Other liberals have taken issue with Kymlicka’s claim that liberalism can incorporate rights for any kind of entity other than individuals.

In the affirmative action literature, there is less soul­searching about what makes one a ‘real’ (or ‘post­’) liberal. Philosophical debates about affirmative action have tended to focus on whether it is fair compensation to members of a group for wrongs sustained in the past by the entire group or, on the contrary, ‘reverse discrimination’, replacing one injustice (towards members of previously­marginalised ethnic groups) with another (towards members of ethnic groups which have not suffered systematic racism or other kinds of collective disadvantage, but who are disadvantaged by preferential treatment offered to those perceived to have suffered past wrongs). Crucial to the understanding of ‘groups’ is a particular view, shared by the vast majority of philosophical treatments of affirmative action that I surveyed, about the nature and significance of disadvantage. Defenders of affirmative action, like its philosophical critics, tend to (implicitly) equate group membership with disadvantage. Targets of racism and sexism are created as groups by their marginalisation and material disadvantage. Once that creation has taken place, they can also benefit collectively (for example, under an affirmative action programme). White men, by contrast, have no collective identity in the initial state of affairs in which groups such as women and blacks are disadvantaged (because no one is targeting them for any disadvantage). Consequently, according to affirmative action critics, white men cannot be regarded as undeserving beneficiaries of anything. Instead, they are created as a group by any system which targets them as the bearers of sacrifice for affirmative action. Blacks and women, with group identities ready­made by marginalisation, can be either disadvantaged or advantaged in their group identity; and to either advantage or disadvantage someone because of their

5 For example, the contributors to Pateman and Gross’ Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986), which devotes a third of its contents to “The Challenge to Liberalism”.

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group identity is wrong. But white men, lacking any group identity until affirmative action creates one for them, can only be understood in terms of collective disadvantage, not collective benefit; so, for proponents of this kind of argument, no group­based critique of the position they enjoy before the introduction of affirmative action policies will hold water.

Where affirmative action recognises cultural groups in order to assimilate them into a perceived mainstream, policies of multi­culturalism affirm the value of cultural difference. Advocates of multi­culturalism are more likely to see membership in a cultural group as in itself conferring specific rights. Seeing cultural diversity as a good in itself, and assimilation as at least in many cases an evil (because it reduces diversity), multi­culturalism argues that cultural groups have a right to protection. In addition, advocates of multi­culturalism may argue that cultural rights need to be protected for the sake of individuals, as well as for the sake of the culture concerned as a whole. One influential statement of this position is that of Will Kymlicka, who holds that individuals become who they are, and develop their capacities to make choices, develop and pursue their own goals, and so on, only in the context of their culture. Thus, cultural survival becomes a matter of justice for the individuals who would be affected by the loss of their culture.

In contradistinction to the affirmative action arguments considered above, multi­cultural advocates of group rights are likely to accept that cultural membership is related to certain rights (such as the right to have one’s culture maintained as far as possible). They are also likely to argue that the specific histories of some cultural groups may confer special rights upon members of those groups (such as the right to financial or other support for aspects of their culture which are in danger of being swamped by a majority culture or, more forcefully, of being destroyed by active attempts by members or institutions of the majority culture to suppress aspects of their culture).

Yet, I suggest, Kymlicka’s contribution, although extremely promising in many respects, nevertheless comes unstuck precisely because of its liberal foundations. For all his strategic and philosophical commitment to protecting group rights, Kymlicka, like the defenders of affirmative action discussed above, sees group membership as an extraordinary or exceptional aspect of human existence, an ‘add­on’ to citizens’ fundamentally individual relationship to the state. I suggest that his attempt to construct a home for group rights within liberal theory founders on its acceptance of the ‘liberal background’. While prepared to make room for groups, Kymlicka shares the

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tendency to see group membership as an exceptional rather than an inevitable aspect of citizenship, the unexceptional form of citizenship being the ‘universal’ mode in which each citizen relates to the state as an individual, and in which each citizen’s relationship to the state is formally identical to every other citizen’s relationship to the state.

This, I suggest, raises the same problems for his theory as it does for affirmative action defenders. First, it makes it difficult to theorise group advantage (as opposed to disadvantage), leaving defences of group rights open to the familiar right wing charge that the oppressed are being granted ‘special privileges’, rather than redress for their history of exclusion from the special privileges of others. Second, maintaining the idea of group membership as something exceptional, an ‘add­on’ to what it means to be human rather than an essential component of human existence, keeps attention focused on particular kinds of groups at the expense of others. This helps to explain why the kinds of group rights arguments which are advanced for affirmative action seem inapplicable to the rights of indigenous cultures, while arguments proposed to benefit such cultures often seem inapplicable to other oppressed or marginalised groups, such as women, gays or religious minorities.

Kymlicka’s Federalist Solution

Kymlicka’s answer to how liberal theory can adequately incorporate protection for the rights of cultural minorities is to point to federalist models in which individuals who belong to ‘cultural minorities’ within a state: 6

… are incorporated into the state not ‘universally’ (ie so that each individual citizen stands in the same direct relationship to the state), but ‘consociationally’ (ie through membership in one or other of the cultural communities).

He gives as examples the “special constitutional status” of Native American communities in the US and “legislation which establishes special political and social rights for aboriginal [sic] peoples in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia”. 7 Such systems’ attraction, he argues, is that: 8

6 Will Kymlicka Liberalism, Community and Culture (Clarendon, Oxford, 1989) 137.

7 Kymlicka, above, 136­137. 8 Kymlicka, above, 137.

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… [u]nder consociational modes of incorporation, the nature of people’s rights, and the opportunities for exercising them, tend to vary with the particular cultural community into which they are incorporated. And the justification for these measures focuses on their role in allowing minority cultures to develop their distinct cultural life, an ability insufficiently protected by ‘universal’ modes of incorporation.

This seems, in some respects, an extremely attractive and promising way of understanding the position of minority cultures, especially those of conquered peoples in colonised territory. For example, Kymlicka describes a proposal by indigenous leaders in Canada’s north to establish differential voting rights for indigenous and non­indigenous people in Inuit areas with a high population of non­indigenous transient workers. The move is designed to protect the autonomy of indigenous Canadian communities from non­ indigenous, but transient, majorities, who would otherwise outvote the permanent residents on such matters as local planning and allocation of resources, forcing probably irreversible departures from their preferred way of life. 9 From the point of view of Kymlicka’s strategic justification in the context of Canadian political realities, the consociational model has the advantage of providing the non­indigenous population, including those who make decisions affecting indigenous communities, 10 with a theoretical justification for arrangements which indigenous peoples see as being to their benefit.

However, the consociational model has limitations when we come to considering the kinds of ‘special’ rights which might be held to be appropriate to groups other than cultural or ethnic ones. Kymlicka gives little detail about the practical arrangements appropriate to consociational modes of citizenship. However, if the federalist image is taken literally, as he apparently intends, then, just as one can live in only one piece of territory at a time, so too those individuals who associate with the state ‘consociationally’ would do so through only one avenue: a person is a member of (at most) one of the federating communities. This avoids many practical difficulties, such as how individuals could enjoy a number of different kinds of voting rights at once. However, the element of the federalist model which implies that people associate with the state through a maximum of one consociational group

9 Kymlicka, above, 146­147. 10 See Kymlicka, above, 151­152.

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raises difficulties in practice for individuals who, as a result of intermarriage in earlier generations, have associations with more than one federating community. 11

That element of the model also creates problems in extending the federalist solution to include other kinds of association. The language of ‘nation’ and ‘federation’, with its territorial and constitutional connotations, means that this picture does not transfer even as metaphor to cover such matters as affirmative action for women, who may be members of numerous different cultural and ethnic groups but also have common experiences and disadvantages which arguably entitle them to consideration qua women, rather than as either genderless ‘universal’ citizens or as separate parts of a womanhood segmented by ethnic and cultural boundaries. 12 Kymlicka might reply that this does not matter why, after all, should all kinds of collective disadvantage be addressed under one theory? My answer is that the similarity of right­wing objections in each case that ‘special measures’ imply unfair ‘special privileges’ to marginalised groups, for example suggests that the various claims for group recognition point to the same or closely related points of strain in the liberal conception of citizenship, and that such criticisms will be most effectively answered by a model which can address those strains comprehensively.

Beyond the question about how many communities an individual may associate with, a further problem for Kymlicka’s model lies in the fact that the federalist picture leaves intact the idea that those citizens who are not members of minority cultures are “incorporated into the state ‘universally’”, such that “each individual citizen stands in the same direct relationship to the state”. In effect, this mirrors the view in the affirmative action literature, that to be a member of a group (or at least of a group whose importance is sufficient to affect the form one’s citizenship takes) is an exceptional circumstance. The neutral position for a citizen in a liberal state is ‘universal

11 This dilemma is discussed in Kymlicka, above, 148­150. 12 This is not to elide such important inequalities between women as those of race,

class and sexuality; but, while taking such matters into account as pressing and serious concerns for women’s movements to address both internally and in the public arena, there may still be issues such as rape, sexual harassment, and access to education, jobs and other social goods which confront women as women and which give them a sense of occupying, however provisionally, common ground vis­a­vis the state.

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citizenship’. Exceptional circumstances, such as being the descendent of slaves or a member of a conquered people, qualifies one to step out from this neutral condition, which I am calling the ‘liberal background’, and identify as a member of a ‘consociational group’. 13 In the Inuit example above, the indigenous community relates to the state consociationally, enabling it to claim exceptional conditions such as a ten­year residency requirement for outsiders wishing to vote in their territory. The non­indigenous transient workers, on the other hand, are perceived not as members of a different consociational group, but as ‘universal’ citizens who have strayed into a group­controlled area.

Making group membership exceptional in this way leaves Kymlicka’s argument vulnerable to the same objections as those raised above in relation to affirmative action debates. First, group membership comes to seem synonymous with deprivation. To borrow a phrase from Carol Bacchi, to be identified as a member of a consociational group casts those so identified as ‘the problem’, their ‘special’ treatment implying inadequacy on their part. 14

Proposals for differential rights such as those in Kymlicka’s Inuit example are frequently greeted from the right by cries of ‘one law for everybody’, or fears that such arrangements would lead to a ‘new apartheid’. Liberalism, Community and Culture convincingly addresses the claim of apartheid in its final chapter; but the consociational model does little to address the basically individualist conception of citizenship which underlies such fears.

A second, related criticism is that identifying group membership with disadvantage makes it difficult to see the phenomenon of group advantage. Those who need ‘special constitutional status’ because of their history of deprivation are identified in terms of their group membership; but those who do well under existing circumstances cannot be held collectively responsible, because they are not members of any group which profits at others’ expense.

13 “Liberal background”, as I am using it here, should not be confused with Rawls’ “background culture”. By “background culture”, Rawls means much what others refer to as civil society; he uses “background” to distinguish this sphere of life from formal politics, with which he is concerned. My expression “liberal background” does not refer to a distinction between different levels of politics, but refers instead to the “background” of assumed individualism against which group membership stands out in contrast.

14 Carol Lee Bacchi The Politics of Affirmative Action: Women, Equality and Category Politics (SAGE, London, 1996) 22.

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They are merely ‘universal citizens’, disappearing into the ‘liberal background’. Against the ‘liberal background’, any move to impose a long­ term residency requirement on non­indigenous voters in the Inuit example would be likely to be understood primarily in terms of a curtailment of the visitors’ universal rights, and might well be perceived by them as unjust. A more promising avenue might be an image of citizenship which saw all citizens partly in group terms. That would make it easier to see non­ indigenous peoples’ collective advantage (relative to indigenous peoples) as well as collective indigenous disadvantage. Under such a governing image, differential arrangements like those proposed by Kymlicka would stand a better chance of being interpreted as an attempt by the permanent residents to ensure the same kind of stability for their own culture as members of the majority culture take for granted. Rather than an unjust curtailment of the visitors’ rights, the picture would show redress for the loss of indigenous autonomy which has historically helped to guarantee the majority culture’s stability.

A third, closely related, problem follows from construing an individualist ‘background’ from which groups stand out as the exception. Even though group membership is defined in terms of disadvantage, yet the simultaneous invisibility of the advantage enjoyed by those who are not identified with such groups means that any special measures taken by the state to redress the identified groups’ disadvantage is likely to be seen by those who are not members as unfair ‘special privileges’. This is the mechanism which allows right­wing opponents of Aboriginal land rights, for example, to decry each indigenous victory as a defeat for the ‘mainstream’, or which allows white men to declare that affirmative action somehow disadvantages them in the workplace, even as they retain a statistically disproportionate number of highly­paid and high­status positions. In the Inuit example, not only might the non­indigenous transients see their own rights as curtailed, but the indigenous community, by having the power to enforce that curtailment, would appear to be receiving unfairly favourable treatment from the state. The visitors might find that this feeling of exclusion from ‘special privileges’ gives them a collective identity (the new victims) where none existed before. But the collective identity would be purely reactive: it would incorporate no sense of existing advantage. The stage could be set for an outbreak of racist politics.

By contrast, an image of citizenship in which all are understood partly in terms of their group associations would enable the political changes which

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the Inuit seek to be undertaken in the spirit of negotiation between collectivities, one of which enjoys demonstrable advantages (for example, sufficient security to be able to take one’s culture for granted) which the other lacks. How, we might ask, can political theory accommodate both sets of aspirations? Is it possible to have an approach which, at the same time, allows people to be treated as equal individuals, albeit with different needs, and also to allow cultural communities (such as within colonised territories) to retain their distinctive differences from the surrounding liberal society even when that may mean that they come into conflict with the wider society’s liberal values? In the next section, I shall suggest that the approaches proposed in the affirmative action literature, and those emerging from debates about indigenous rights, both fall short of a position where they might be able to engage successfully with one another. They fall short because they offer a too narrow interpretation of the relationship between individuals, groups and society. I shall then propose instead a model of citizenship generally as being derived partly through group associations; and I shall suggest that this model is able both to protect groups against undesirable exclusion or assimilation and to provide strong safeguards for the rights of individuals within and against both their various group associations and the state.

What Kind of Communities?

The difficulty for both the affirmative action and cultural rights literature I have examined so far has been to develop a theory which is sufficiently flexible to take account of more than one kind of community. Individuals live in, and are shaped and constituted as persons by, all kinds of communities. Communities consist of, and are shaped by, many individuals. Societies consist of, and are shaped by, many communities, coexisting, competing, conflicting or even overlapping, and by the individuals who exist in or outside of any given community. Communities can be communities of affection and shared material life, like families; they can be communities of interest, like political lobby groups; they can be communities of identity, like religious or ethnic groups. No one belongs only to one; and some (perhaps all) communities function in more than one way. The phrase ‘the gay community’ suggests a notional entity which may at times function on all of these layers, from a political lobby (or coalition of lobbies) through a determinant of family and affective relationships. ‘The Aboriginal community’ is another term of identity which often functions on these

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multifarious levels, while also containing numerous local and descent­based communities within it.

As theorists of civil society point out, 15 a well­functioning society needs various kinds of association within which people develop the skills for effective citizenship. But such various levels of association are necessary not only to democratic society, but to any society; the statement that society needs various kinds of association between individuals and the whole is true not only normatively, but descriptively.

A persistent challenge for liberal theories of difference has been that such groupings can overlap, and are not fixed. It may be comparatively easy to develop a theory, for example, which, on paper, takes account of the demands of blacks and the demands of women. However, as Bacchi and others point out, such attempts are likely to rest on the idea that society’s ‘normal’ state is one of non­discrimination, that ‘discrimination’ is thus an aberration, that all that is needed to fix it is for the state to apply its resources remedially in the appropriate areas, and that, once equality is restored, difference will disappear or become irrelevant 16 . We can point to two detrimental consequences (among others): first, marginalised groups are positioned in unproductive competition with one another for scarce resources; and second, people who belong to more than one marginalised group, such as black women, are likely to be overlooked altogether as ‘blacks’ and ‘women’ are cast as competing categories.

Still further complicating the picture is the fact that, at times, people move, or find that they have been moved, beyond the affective or organisational ties of a community to which they once belonged, and to which they may still feel a kind of (changed) belonging. When a partner files for divorce, when a child runs away from home, when a believer leaves a church, they step or are forced beyond the boundaries of a community which once in part formed their individual identity, and which may still continue to do so in a variety of positive or negative ways. Not all shifts have an air of crisis: some occur gradually and some, like the shift from adult status to the (in Western society) more marginalised state of old age, are both gradual and, barring premature decease, inevitable.

15 For example, Robert D Putnam Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993).

16 Bacchi, above, 18.

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At times, people appeal to the institutions of the wider society to intervene to protect them from the communities to which they have once belonged (and may still belong). 17 When a wife takes out a restraining order against her husband, when a parishioner charges a church official with sexual abuse, or when a child claims the protection of the state against violent or neglectful parents, the individual stakes her status as a member of the wider society against the ties of some particular community.

But even these instances do not exhaust the range of ways in which a person fits into the webs of state, society and community. As communities of resistance demonstrate repeatedly, people often rely on ties affective, organisational or more loosely associative to protect them against the efforts of the wider society to impose itself upon them. One example is the recent mobilisation of the Australian ‘gay community’ against the anti­gay laws of one state, Tasmania; the solidarity of Aboriginal communities against deaths in custody is another. The ties in such cases can be formal (as in the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Watch Committees formed during the 1980s) or informal (as for example were often maintained by draft dodgers during Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War). When individuals engage in collective protest action or solo acts of resistance which are supported by webs of association, they assert their membership in particular communities against their ties to the wider society.

When we take into account the location of individuals and their various communities within a competitive market economy, the picture only grows more complex. As Benjamin Barber points out, cultural, sexual and ethnic identities may be intersected by market and civic identities which pull individuals in a number of different directions: 18

Americans are job holders as well as consumers, and even in the narrow terms of economic efficiency, their capacity to consume over the long haul depends on secure employment in the long term and they know it. They are citizens no less than producers and need to consider the public space

17 Ayelet Schachar addresses this issue in relation to policies of multicultural accommodation with particular reference to family law in Ayelet Schachar “Group Identity and Women’s Rights in Family Law: The Perils of Multicultural Accommodation” (1998) 6 Journal of Political Philosophy 285.

18 Benjamin R Barber Jihad vs McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Shaping the World (Ballantine, New York, 1996) 30­31.

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consequences of their private sector acts. Market identity is only one fractious piece of a person’s whole identity, which also contains ethnic and civic dimensions that may rival or even be inimical to market identity. The consumer who welcomes lower prices may, as an employee of a textile firm, be hostile to the export of jobs that brought prices down. The producer who profits from the circumventing of environmental regulations may regret as a citizen the damage businesses like his cause to the environment and, as a citizen, support clean air legislation injurious to his business.

Perhaps some people are more inclined by their personality or circumstances to act in some of these ways rather than others. In addition, it is not hard to suppose that some societies elicit more of one kind of behaviour than another from their members, for example, a repressive state might create greater need for collective action against it, while making individuals less inclined to call on it in their own support. However, it is not necessary to go into specifics to observe that the kinds of relation between individual, community and society which I have described are not mutually exclusive choices for any individual. It is highly likely that, in different circumstances, individuals will behave in ways characteristic of each pattern. At one time the state may strike me as repressive, intruding unduly into my life and creating hardships which it has no right to create. I may respond by calling on an existing community of like­ minded people who are concerned for my wellbeing to join me in resisting, or by joining such a community if I am not already part of one, or by trying to form one if none exists. At another time, in any of a variety of ways, that community, or any other to which I belong for any reason, may come to pose a threat to my welfare. If simply leaving it does not work, I may have to call on the very institutions of the state which I and my associates once opposed.

Individual and Society

Emile Durkheim is conventionally regarded as a functionalist and an advocate of social order, better at explaining stasis than social change. In first year sociological theory courses, he is likely to be contrasted with Marx, who is held up as an example of a theorist whose evolutionary framework equips him to be a better explainer of change than of stasis. Nevertheless, a number of recent accounts have contested the orthodox, functionalist reading of Durkheim to uncover more radical strands in his thought. In this section I consider three of Durkheim’s less frequently discussed works, although they

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will be read against the background of the better known Suicide 19 and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 20 I shall suggest that Durkheim offers a promising way beyond liberal dilemmas, showing how a philosophical framework which values liberalism’s commitment to individual rights can yet incorporate a robust view of the importance of intermediate communities between the individual and the state. His view of the state, as existing only through the inter­relationships of numerous different kinds of communities, takes us beyond the limitations of a universal citizenship model where each citizen is understood as standing in an identical relationship to the state as every other citizen. But, at the same time, an approach building on Durkheim’s view of the state retains an irreducible commitment to preserving the rights of individuals.

‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’ (published in 1898 but not available in English until 1969) is a short, polemical reply to Ferdinand Brunetière’s attack on the position taken by liberal intellectuals in the Dreyfus affair. Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, although published posthumously, derives from a series of lectures first given during Durkheim’s most prolific period at the end of the 1890s and subsequently re­offered a number of times until 1912. 21 Moral Education also derives from a lecture series, developed and offered when the lectures on Professional Ethics and Civic Morals had received their 1890 and 1900 presentations and had yet to be given their 1904 delivery at the Sorbonne. TheMoral Education lectures were presented at the Sorbonne in 1902 and 1903, and published in 1925. 22 Although beating Professional Ethics and Civic Morals into print by some years, they represent a similar period of Durkheim’s thought. This makes the contrasting philosophical positions of the two works all the more fertile. Being so similar in provenance, both in their chronology and in arising from the classroom, the differences should presumably be read as paired inflexions in Durkheim’s thought rather than as a change of mind on his part. As students who took both courses must have done, readers are likely to gain a more fruitful

19 Emile Durkheim Suicide (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1951). 20 Emile Durkheim The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (George Allen and

Unwin, London, 1976). 21 Emile Durkheim Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (Routledge and Kegan

Paul, London, 1957) (Professional Ethics). 22 Emile Durkheim Moral Education: A Study in the Theory an Application of the

Sociology of Education (The Free Press, New York, 1973).

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reading by asking how the apparently contrasting arguments might fit together than by interpreting them as mutually exclusive.

The lectures represent an attempt to systematise the relations between individuals and society, both to understand how individuals actually operate in collectivities, and also, and more significantly for my discussion, to combine this empirical analysis with a normative argument about where moral ideas come from and how relations between individuals and groups should best be accommodated. The crucial element of Durkheim’s thought for my project is his interest in the relationship of individuals to collectivities below the level of the state. Where the lectures explore and elaborate different dimensions of the place and function of ideas in society, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’ develops Durkheim’s account of how individualism is to be understood in the light of such collectivist commitments.

Durkheim’s writing conveys both a practical and an intellectual commitment to individualism. Politically, he sees a ‘non­egoistic individualism’ as the necessary guarantee of human rights upon which the state must not trespass. Theoretically, he sees in ‘non­egoistic individualism’ both a system of ideas and a social institution which can fill religion’s place as the cohesive principle in industrialised society. Yet his thought differs importantly from the individualism opposed by liberalism’s feminist, socialist and communitarian critics and indeed from the conventional position from which Kymlicka tries to wrench his group­respecting version of liberal theory.

Durkheim distinguishes two kinds of individualism: an egoistic, narcissistic and destructive form, and positive, ‘non­egoistic individualism’ which emphasises connection between individuals. While the former produces ever­ escalating desires which find their end only in the suicide’s grave, the latter forms the basis of a ‘cult of man’ which has the capacity both to contain otherwise endlessly escalating desires by setting a higher good to which individuals must subordinate themselves and at the same time to ensure that individuals, so subordinated, are not deprived of their legitimate rights.

The importance of individual rights means that desire is never entirely absent from the healthy form of individualism. For one thing, it performs the useful function of stimulating concern for one’s own well­being against possible incursions by repressive institutions. But this kind of desire, harnessed to the ‘cult of man’, also forms the ground of a compassionate sense of bonding

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with other individuals. 23 For Durkheim, individualism forms the focus for a world­view which transcends individuals: 24

Since human personality is the only thing that appeals unanimously to all hearts, since its enhancement is the only aim that can be collectively pursued, it inevitably acquires exceptional value in the eyes of all. It thus rises far above all human aims, assuming a religious nature. This cult of man is something, accordingly, very different from the egoistic individualism ... which leads to suicide. Far from detaching individuals from society and from every aim beyond themselves, it unites them in one thought, makes them servants of one work.

However, the process must also be seen from the other side. This kind of individualism not only produces a collective consciousness but is also, originally, produced by it: “individualism itself is a social product, like all moralities and all religions. The individual receives from society even the moral beliefs which deify him”. 25 This, according to Steven Lukes, allows Durkheim to “cut the conceptual knot that has frequently been held to tie methodological individualism to liberalism”. 26 Maintaining that knot has, according to Durkheim, been the persistent mistake of liberals from Kant and Rousseau forward: “they wished to deduce their individualist ethics not from society, but from the notion of the isolated individual”. 27 As a result, although they transcended the limitations both of utilitarian willingness to sacrifice individuals for the common good and of the economists’ elevation of egoistic desire, yet they produced their own contradictions. If Kant “has sometimes been reproached for having carried the autonomy of reason to excess”, Durkheim retorts that “it could equally be said, with some truth, that he based his ethics on an act of unreasoning faith and submission”. As for Rousseau, if “one begins by seeing the individual as a sort of absolute who

23 See, for example, Emile Durkheim Suicide (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1951) 337.

24 Durkheim Suicide, above, 336. 25 Emile Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1969) 32 Political Studies

20, footnote 28. 26 Steven Lukes “Durkheim’s 'Individualism and the Intellectuals'” (1969) 32

Political Studies 19. 27 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above, footnote 28.

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can and must be sufficient unto himself, it is obviously difficult then to explain how civil society could be established”. 28

For Durkheim, both they and his own contemporaries who criticise individualism have fallen victim to a semantic error: “A verbal similarity has made it possible to believe that individualism necessarily resulted from individual, and thus egoistic sentiments”. The error is compounded by identifying individualism with a disastrous political theory, “the narrow utilitarianism and utilitarian egoism of Spencer and the economists”, which upholds a social order structured around “that narrow commercialism which reduces society to nothing more than a vast apparatus of production and exchange”. 29 By contrast, true liberals (as Kymlicka would later contend) “are no less sensitive to the rights of the collectivity than they are to those of the individual”. 30 But Durkheim’s position differs from Kymlicka’s in seeing in liberal tradition (even at its least atomistic) a fundamental “logical contradiction”, 31 which derives from confusing the philosophical goal of individualism with a methodology based on ‘the notion of the isolated individual’.

Despite this contradiction in received liberal tradition, Durkheim maintains that “it is possible, without contradiction, to be an individualist while asserting that the individual is a product of society, rather than its cause”. 32

Properly understood, “[i]t is society which assigns us this ideal [individualism] as the sole common end which is today capable of providing a focus for men’s wills”. This ideal amounts to “a religion of the individual”, which is “a social institution like all known religions”. 33 Because this is a religion in which individuals come from society, and return to it (so to speak), its “motive force is not egoism, but sympathy for all that is human, a wider pity for all sufferings, for all human miseries, a more ardent desire to combat and alleviate them, a greater thirst for justice”. 34 Here desire and altruism meet: sensitivity to one’s own rights sensitises one to the rights of

28 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above, 22­23. 29 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above, 20. 30 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above, 22. 31 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above, footnote 28. 32 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above. 33 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above. 34 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above, 24.

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others, so that egoism and altruism, forces whose morbid forms are dissected in Suicide, can be maintained in a healthy balance.

Community, Society and State

The dynamic relation between rights­bearing individuals and the society which produces both the individuals and their rights is approached from another angle in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Here, Durkheim cautions that the rights themselves, being social products, cannot be taken for granted but need to be repeatedly re­construed and defended. Where it suited the polemical purposes of the Dreyfusard ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’ to talk about individual rights as non­negotiable absolutes (“no reason of State ... can excuse an outrage against the person when the rights of the person are placed above the State” 35 ), in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals the positivist social observer takes over from the herald of a new religion, to remind the reader that, ultimately, rights are a name for how much society values you:

If all that affects the individual affects the society, the society will react against all that might diminish him. This would not only forbid the slightest offences against him, but even more, the society would hold itself bound to work towards increasing his stature and towards his development. If, on the other hand, the individual is held in only moderate regard, the society will be indifferent even to serious outrages on him and will tolerate them. 36

Durkheim argues for professional moral codes, which arise out of the shared life of professional groups, on the model of Roman and medieval guilds. Different levels of community require different levels of ‘moral particularism’, a specificity of moral requirements which: 37

… has no place in individual morals, makes an appearance in the domestic morals of the family, goes on to reach its climax in professional ethics, to decline with civic morals and to pass away once more with the morals that govern the relations of men as human beings.

35 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above, 22. 36 Emile Durkheim Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (Routledge and Kegan

Paul, London, 1957) 67 (Professional Ethics). 37 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 4­5.

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The professional body, as a level of community part­way between state and family, 38 is the appropriate forum for the development of moral traditions which are sufficiently general to take account of a variety of needs and circumstances, yet not so general that the special considerations due to some are lost amid philosophical or bureaucratic abstraction.

A number of Durkheim’s recommendations in Professional Ethicsmight well read hollowly to modern eyes. His vision of “the professional association taking over from the jurisdictional area [parish, commune] as a political unit” 39 would raise the eyebrows of, at least, the unemployed, full­time parents and retirees. Even to those in regular employment, it speaks nostalgically of a world where a man expected to develop a craft, trade or profession (perhaps that of his father) and maintain it throughout his life. In the fin de siècle following Durkheim’s, 40 economic and political leaders unite in urging citizens to anticipate several career changes during a lifetime and to accept that an increasing amount of work will be part­time and casual. If such a society were to place on professional organisations and trade guilds the weight which Durkheim invites them to bear, the concept of citizenship would be severely restricted. Nevertheless, although Professional Ethics’s specific concentration on work associations crumbles under the weight of history, 41 yet Durkheim’s general point about intermediate levels of community, with its broader application to “family, ... Church, regional areas and so on”, 42 is very promising for the kinds of dilemmas which I noted in part one.

The goal of intermediate levels of association in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals is to provide differential, needs­specific kinds of law and custom which arise out of the shared life of a community. But, unlike the singleness of the communitarian vision, these differential norms are not

38 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 25­26. 39 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 39. 40 The conceit of reading Durkheim as a voice from one fin de siècle speaking to the

next is fruitfully developed in Stepjan Meštrovic Durkheim and Postmodern Culture (Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1992).

41 Even in Durkheim’s day this would have raised serious problems about, for example, the citizenship of women, children, the infirm and the elderly ­ but see his denunciation later of the failings of representative democracy on exactly these grounds: Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 77­78.

42 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 65.

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developed or applied in isolation from a wider society. 43 Rather, the intermediate bodies are attached to the state by virtue of their members being also citizens: “Occupational legislation could hardly be other than an application in particular of the law in general, just as professional ethics can only be a special form of common morality”. 44 That, says Durkheim, is the nature of political society: it is made up of groups and subgroups which nevertheless do not lose their conception of themselves as “subject to the same one authority which is not itself subject to any other superior authority duly constituted”. 45

Communities, State and Power

These intermediate communities are essential to the state; it relies on them to the extent that “it exists where they exist. No secondary groups, no political authority”. 46 While both the state and intermediate associations can potentially develop into agents of repression rather than liberation, an ameliorating factor is the difference in the kinds of repression to which each is prone. The modern state: 47

… is so removed from individual interests that it cannot take into account the special or local and other conditions in which [individual interests] exist. Therefore when it does attempt to regulate them, it succeeds only at the cost of doing violence to them and distorting them.

But Durkheim rejects natural rights and the advocacy of minimal government which often follows from a natural rights position: 48

We should now set forth how the State, without pursuing a mystic aim of any kind, goes on expanding its functions. If indeed we work on the premise that the rights of the individual are not ipso facto his at birth; that they are not inscribed in the nature of things with such certainty as warrants the State in

43 But for an interpretation of Durkheim that attempts to overcome the conventional liberal/communitarian dichotomy, see Mark Cladis A Communitarian Defence of Liberalism: Emile Durkheim and Contemporary Social Theory (Stanford University Press, California, 1992).

44 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 39. 45 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 45. 46 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above. 47 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 63. 48 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 65.

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endorsing them and promulgating them; that, on the contrary, the rights have to be won from the opposing forces that deny them; that the State alone is qualified to play this part then it cannot keep to the functions of supreme arbiter and of administrator of an entirely prohibitive justice, as the utilitarian or Kantian individualism would have it.

Rather, the state’s task is the creation and maintenance of individual rights, which explains the apparent paradox that “on the one hand ... the State goes on developing more and more: on the other, ... the rights of the individual, held to be actively opposed to those of the State, have a parallel development”. 49

But for the state to fulfil this function properly, it needs not only to be open to challenge from the collectivities which constitute it, but needs also to be able to prevent them from abusing their more immediate access to individuals. Intermediate groups are close enough to individuals to be able to take account of special needs and circumstances, but also “surround individuals closely enough to shape them in their own image” and to “adapt their actions exactly” 50 we might add, for good or ill. Consequently:

… the State must deploy energies equal to those for which it has to provide a counter­balance. It must even permeate all those secondary groups of family, trade and professional association, Church, regional areas and so on ... which tend, as we have seen, to absorb the personality of their members. It must do this, in order to prevent this absorption and free these individuals, and so as to remind these partial societies that they are not alone and that there is a right that stands above their own rights ... Wherever these particular collective forces exist, there the power of the State must be, to neutralise them: for if they were left alone and to their own devices, they would draw the individual within their exclusive domination. 51

If this account in isolation reads like a recipe for totalitarianism (despite the qualification of “equal energies”), it loses much of its sting when read in conversation with the earlier part of Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, where the role of the intermediate levels is elaborated. Since a democratic society is one which is “conscious of itself”, and such consciousness comes

49 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 57. 50 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above. 51 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 65.

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through collective as well as individual “deliberation and reflection and a critical spirit”, 52 the intermediate communities, when functioning properly, play an essential role in making the society democratic. Both the state and intermediate associations, then, are “conditions essential to the emancipation of the individual”, because “it is out of this conflict of social forces that individual liberties are born”. 53 The state produces individual liberties and is itself produced out of continuous contestation between intermediate communities and society wide formal institutions, as each level prevents the other from overstepping the appropriate limits of its intrusion into the lives of individuals.

Consequently, Durkheim’s individualism differs from the liberal mainstream (if not of our day then certainly of his) in rejecting not only “the notion of the isolated individual” as its methodological starting point, but also classical liberalism’s commitment to a minimalist theory of the state. The state, for Durkheim, is not a threat to innate, ‘natural’ rights but, rather, the creator and guarantor of individual rights which grow greater as its structure becomes more complex and as its power waxes. 54 Its propensity to turn despotic is countered not by trying to contain its expansion, but by maintaining a vibrant culture of intermediate associations, subject to its intervention against their own abuse but also ready to stand against the state if its power gets out of hand.

Durkheim’s account here points to a very different political cosmogony from the various ‘state of nature’ accounts which underpin liberal (or proto­liberal) visions from Hobbes to Rousseau. Durkheim’s state is neither a collection of individuals mutually contracting to end a war of all against all, nor a Lockean interpreter of the natural law, nor even a mechanism for systematising the general will. 55 Moreover, Durkheim rejects the crude cultural evolutionist’s state of nature as much as those of the philosophers: modern political society is not to be understood as the descendant of consanguineous groups under patriarchal autocracy, but rather, as a further development (because of the

52 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 89. 53 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above. 54 Durkheim Professional Ethics, above, 55­60. 55 Durkheim’s differences with Rousseau are discussed in Emile Durkheim

“Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1969) 32 Political Studies 20, footnote 28; 52­53.

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increasingly complex division of labour) of the primal political organisations which involved families, clans and clan associations. 56 Although he notes in passing that there may at some point in history have existed non­segmental and therefore non­political kinds of societies, Durkheim contends that none are known today; one is left with the impression that politics, the field of negotiation between different groups with sometimes different interests (what Benjamin Barber, parodying Rawls, calls the messy world of “reflective disequilibrium” 57 ) is an irreducible part of what makes a human society.

Morality and Society

The thesis of Moral Education, with its determined anti­absolutism, further elaborates the principle that moral norms and moral behaviour arise out of the shared life of a particular geographical, historical and social setting. 58 At the same time, it opens up further questions of how different moral systems relate to one another. It does so by stressing the strength with which any moral system is tied to the society which gives it birth.

Morality is born out of communal life, which gives rise not to a single system but to numerous, situation specific rules. So organically does a moral system emerge out of society that there can be no archimedean point of judgment. Every society is bound to practice the ethics appropriate to itself so that, for example, “[t]he notion that the Romans could have practised a different morality is, really, an historical absurdity”. 59 Not only that, but moral innovators are unlikely to be recognisable to their compatriots, who can identify only with the moral system rooted in their own society. Such was the fate, for example, of Socrates and of Jesus Christ: in the eyes of “most of their fellow citizens” they appeared “immoral and were not accorded any authority”. 60 This is a specific application, to moral concepts, of a general

56 Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals”, above 46­47. 57 Benjamin Barber The Conquest of Politics (Princeton University Press, Princeton,

1988). 58 For example, Emile Durkheim Moral Education: A Study in the Theory an

Application of the Sociology of Education (The Free Press, New York, 1973) 87­ 100; 266; 275­280 (Moral Education).

59 DurkheimMoral Education, above, 87. 60 DurkheimMoral Education, above, 90­91.

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point which Durkheim develops in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life concerning concepts ranging from the scientific to the religious: 61

It is not enough that they be true to be believed. If they are not in harmony with the other beliefs and opinions, or, in a word, with the mass of the other collective representations, they will be denied; minds will be closed to them; consequently it will be as though they did not exist.

The Positive Science makes a similar argument in its discussion of genius, where the makers of history are unequivocally also its products, who gather up and concentrate impulses already present in the conscience collective.

Read in isolation from the rest of his oeuvre, these passages, of which Moral Education is a particularly strong example, appear vulnerable to one of the conventional criticisms of Durkheim: his alleged unwillingness to account for (let alone promote) social change. Indeed Frank Pearce’s re­reading of ‘the radical Durkheim’ identifies Moral Education as among his most conservative work. 62 If moral ideas can only arise from within the existing structures of society, the wonder is not that Socrates and Jesus failed to rouse mass sympathy, but that they were ever heard of at all. Moral Education on its own offers few resources for understanding how such innovation might occur.

The foregoing accords with Durkheim’s general thrust of conceiving society as absolute. Yet, in an apparent contradiction, Moral Education devotes considerable attention to the need for (implying the possibility of) deliberate, intentional and considered social action to change the structures of society. This is, at one level, a matter of practical strategy for the morally motivated. Where charity is a good thing because it strengthens one’s sense of connectedness to others, yet as a means of bringing about lasting improvement it is of merely token significance: 63

In fact, the lone individual, reduced to his own resources, is unable to alter the social situation. One can act effectively on society only by grouping individual efforts in such a way as to counter social forces. The ills that specific acts of charity seek to cure or mitigate derive basically from social

61 Emile Durkheim The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1976) 438.

62 Frank Pearce The Radical Durkheim (Unwin Hyman, London, 1989) 139. 63 DurkheimMoral Education, above, 84.

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causes. Taken apart from particular cases, the nature of the distress in a particular society is a function of economic life and of the way in which it operates that is to say, a function of its particular organisation.

Beyond strategy, social action “takes on a higher moral character” than charity “precisely because it serves more impersonal, more general ends”. 64

The commitment to social action follows from the argument that moral systems are grounded in society (in as much as that to bring about any moral innovation, a change in society would be the first, necessary move). But it offers no hints about where the impulse and intellectual resources to trigger such a change can come from, if the individuals who might propose it also have their vision contained by their society’s moral horizon. Durkheim’s account, in which values arise out of social life and can only be changed through a change in the structures of social organisation, allows room for the possibility that such changes may be deliberate, and morally motivated. But such deliberate change would require somebody or some group to be able to compare existing circumstances, and the morality which arises from and legitimises them, with some other past or imagined future circumstances and morality, and judge the latter more desirable than the former.

Durkheim does not see his view leading to a moral conservatism. Indeed, he responds directly to the charge of leaving the status quo intact 65

One can see, now, how little substance there is in such an objection. We have viewed morality as essentially idealistic. What, indeed, is an ideal if not a body of ideas that soar above the individual while vigorously stimulating certain behaviour? Now society, which we have made the object of moral conduct, infinitely surpasses the level of self­centred interests. What we must above all cherish in society that to which above all we must devote ourselves is not society in its physical aspects, but its spirit. And what is this thing that people call society’s soul, or spirit, but a complex of ideas, of which the isolated individual would never have been able to conceive, which go beyond his mentality and which come into being and sustain themselves only through the interaction of a plurality of associated individuals?

Change in moral systems comes about, then, through change in social organisation, which may itself be morally motivated. But that motivation

64 DurkheimMoral Education, above. 65 DurkheimMoral Education, above, 123.

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must have come from somewhere in the supra­personal ‘complex of ideas’. The explicit argument in Moral Education takes us no further towards resolving this conundrum; but at least three answers can be found by reading Moral Education against other parts of Durkheim’s work.

Where Moral Education sees Socrates as a great moral innovator, The Rules of Sociological Method 66 describes him more bluntly as a criminal. Criminality is a normal part of ‘normal society’. But it indicates, in Pearce’s evocative phrase, “a certain slackness in the conscience collective”, 67 which allows creativity to blossom, whether “the originality of the criminal” or “the originality of the idealist” 68 a distinction which may not be clear at the time, as the ‘crime of Socrates’ suggests. In this case, the ‘slackness’ in the conscience collective explains how innovation manages to enter the closed social­moral system, but it does not yet tell us where such innovative impulses originate.

Some element Durkheim might allow to come from the anarchic world of the mad, so that Suicide sees in neurasthenia not only a source of pathological despair but also of creative innovation. 69 But Durkheim is as adamant as any subsequent anti­psychiatry theorist that mental disease is itself the product largely of social factors, such as anomie. Consequently, the innovation to which it might give rise has to be understood as having a social genesis. While madness can help explain the route which new ideas or impulses may take when they rise to prominence in the conscience collective, the quest for their origins is not greatly advanced.

A more promising avenue follows Durkheim’s emphasis on the positive value of mutual sympathy. A sense of connectedness to others, which charity fosters and which is the goal of the ‘cult of man’, can draw one to identify with others whose experience is different from one’s own. In Moral Education, such sympathy is cultivated on a small stage, extending as far as love for animals, for one’s birthplace and for “those in whom we find most

66 Frank Pearce The Radical Durkheim (Unwin Hyman, London, 1989) 65. 67 Pearce, above, 22­23. 68 Pearce, above, 65. 69 Emile Durkheim Suicide (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1951) 77.

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clearly our society’s particular conception of humanity”. 70 But elsewhere, Durkheim’s account of mutual sympathy, compassion and the capacity for ‘co­suffering’ extends far wider, reflecting the internationalist ideals which characterised his fin de siècle. 71 Sufficient cultivation of one’s capacity for sympathy and empathy can open the way to expand or transcend one’s own conscience collective to embrace others.

But, unlike some other proponents of the internationalist ideal, Durkheim did not see this capacity as the unique achievement of modern society. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, published in the same year as the final Sorbonne presentation of the lectures on Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, I have already cited as another source of the general idea that concepts (religious, scientific or moral) can only gain a hearing in a society already attuned to receive them. But in this later work, Durkheim extrapolates from the fact of difference in Aboriginal Australia to generalise: 72

There is no people and no State which is not a part of another society, more or less unlimited, which embraces all the peoples and all the States with which the first comes in contact, either directly or indirectly; there is no national life which is not dominated by a collective life of an international nature.

The difference between the ways in which this phenomenon manifests in small­scale societies and in industrial society lies in the complexity engendered by an ever­increasing division of labour and, presumably, in the greater access to one another which societies have as a result of mechanised transport and the means of mass communication. Consequently: 73

70 Emile Durkheim Moral Education: A Study in the Theory an Application of the Sociology of Education (The Free Press, New York, 1973) (Moral Education) 82­ 83.

71 For a discussion of the phenomenon of burgeoning internationalism at the turn of the twentieth century, see Marion Maddox “Baring All: Self­disclosure as Moral Exhortation” in Paul Corcoran and Vicki Spencer (eds) Disclosures (Ashgate, London, 2000) 69­99.

72 Emile Durkheim The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1976) 426­427; 445 (for a related argument).

73 Durkheim The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, above, 426­427.

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In proportion as we advance in history, these international groups acquire a greater importance and extent. Thus we show how, in certain cases, this universalistic tendency has been able to develop itself to the point of affecting not only the higher ideas of the religious system, but even the principles upon which it rests.

The full significance of this paragraph becomes clear only when we remember the position which religion holds in Durkheim’s vision of society. Although he sometimes seems to talk religion down as (merely) “a set of beliefs and practices that have a special authority”, 74 this collection of beliefs and practices is nothing less than “the womb from which come all the leading germs of human civilisation ... both those that make possible the continuation of the moral life (law, morals, beaux­arts) and those serving the material life (the natural, technical and practical sciences)”. 75 In other words, the ‘universalistic tendency’ could neither be more radical in its effects nor draw from a wider range of sympathetic impulses. As lower­level collectivities are embedded in the state, so states themselves are embedded in higher­order collectivities which extend, ultimately, to the whole of humanity. Consequently, the inability to recognise and appropriate moral (or religious or other) insights from another conscience collective should be understood as able to be transcended when the bonds of sympathy which tie us to one another become sufficiently generalised. This reading explains how the encounter with another moral system can inspire, broaden or reproach one’s understanding of one’s own.

Groups, Citizenship and Liberal Dilemmas

Durkheim’s approach allows us to hold together a number of themes which are frequently said to be in conflict. Debates about the primacy of the individual or the social are resolvable for Durkheim by pointing out that individualism is itself a social product, as are individuals themselves, and that this does not reduce their significance but, on the contrary, provides a reason for defending and augmenting their rights. This further helps clarify the relation between situation and agency, seeing agents as both products and shapers of situation. Following Durkheim’s account of this relation leads us away from those developments of liberal thought which tend to abstract

74 Emile Durkheim “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1969) 32 Political Studies 20, footnote 28; 25.

75 Durkheim The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, above, 223.

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agents from situation and to elide situation from moral arguments a tendency whose attendant risks become apparent in liberal discussions of affirmative action and indigenous rights.

Durkheim’s picture of individual rights as constructed and maintained through a creative tension between the state and intermediate levels of association (which also allow the state to exist) helps to answer the objection raised by opponents of collective rights that moves to give special, collective recognition to some but not others on the basis of such criteria as sex or cultural minority status amount to unfair ‘special privileges’. It is true that Durkheim studies in detail only one kind of intermediate association, namely, professional bodies. However, he repeatedly states that these are just one example of intermediate associations; another which he mentions by way of example is the family. By avoiding the federalist model’s territorial connotations and singular focus, Durkheim’s image allows for more fluidity in the kinds of associations which people might draw upon in defining their position in relation to the state.

Further, Durkheim throws into relief shortcomings of a model, such as Kymlicka’s, which, while accepting a category of ‘group rights’, assumes that at least some citizens associate with the state ‘universally’. For Durkheim, no one is a ‘universal citizen’: every citizen relates to the state through multiple, intermediate layers of community, without which the state could not exist. This allows us to be more explicit about the nature of citizenship rights. For example, seeing all citizenship in group terms would enable us to point out that the rights of white Australians did not develop as universal citizenship rights, from which some of the country’s inhabitants were unfortunately excluded by a kind of historical oversight. The rights which are taken for granted by white Australians were historically understood as relying on the active exclusion of Aborigines and non­white immigrants. 76 Australian history shows the notion of universally accessible ‘universal citizenship’ to be at least questionable. Further, as feminist theories of citizenship have pointed out, when the imaginary ‘universal citizen’ is stripped of his unisex outfit, he is unmistakably male. 77 Again, this

76 See, for example, Brian Galligan and John Chesterman (eds) Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian citizenship (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK), 1997.

77 For example, Carole Pateman The Disorder of Women (Polity Press, Cambridge (UK), 1989).

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is not by accident or oversight but because the rights of men as public citizens were made possible by the relegation of women to the private ‘feminine netherworld’. 78

Viewed in this context, Kymlicka’s vision of an underlying ‘universal citizenship’, within which some members of cultural minorities require special kinds of consociational citizenship, glosses over the exclusive nature of that universalist ideal. In Durkheim’s picture, everyone’s association with the state is through various lower­level communities, people are created as individuals out of the intersections of their various communities and out of those communities’ various relationships with the state, individual rights are creations of the state in response to the needs of individuals, mediated through those intermediate levels, and individuals in turn push their communities to challenge and restrain the state from becoming unduly intrusive. This model allows us to identify the ways in which the rights of some groups have been defined through the exclusion of others. Since there is nothing natural or innate about such rights, the wrongs of exclusion can be rectified by incorporating new rights as they are articulated by the excluded communities. The flexibility of Durkheim’s model also allows us to see how people’s membership in various groups makes for variations in the kinds of rights and exclusions they experience. For example, it allows more room to account for the position of white women, who experience inclusion by virtue of their ethnicity but also exclusion by virtue of their sex.

Public, Private and Individuals

Durkheim’s schema does more than allow room for present day theorists to make cases to end historical exclusions. In spite of his own theory’s concentration on professional groups, he reminds us that professional groups do not exhaust the range of significant lower­level associations, nominating the family as another instance. The family is certainly relevantly different from communities such as professional associations which exist in what liberal convention has held to be the public sphere, but Durkheim does not want us to see it as an alien type. On the contrary, Durkheim’s vision of

78 For different dimensions of this argument see Val Plumwood “Feminism, Privacy and Radical Democracy” (1995) 3 Anarchist Studies 97; Carole Pateman The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, Cambridge (UK), 1988); Genevieve Lloyd The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (Methuen, London, 1984). The expression “feminine netherworld” is from Lloyd’s treatment of Hegel, see Lloyd, above, 80­82; 88­100.

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‘political society’ holds all kinds of lower­level communities to be indispensable to the state. 79 In this way, his vision of society actively dissolves the opposition between the ‘feminine netherworld’ and the public arena in which male citizens achieve transcendence. Family becomes just another one of the layers between the individual and the state, through which individuals are formed as citizens and without which neither they nor the state could exist.

Kymlicka intends his federalist, consociational vision to provide the reinterpretation which will allow liberal theory to answer its challengers, a selection of whom provide the kicking­off point for Liberalism, Community and Culture. I have suggested that its territorial and constitutional connotations stop it short of achieving this. Nevertheless, I do not want to dismiss it. It would be difficult to dispute Kymlicka’s fundamental point that liberal societies owe special consideration to indigenous communities in colonised territories, and that such communities have a moral claim to have their differences respected and accommodated even within a state whose over­arching principles are individualist. 80 But Kymlicka presents his ‘special rights’ model as an answer, not just to those of liberalism’s critics who take it to task for limitations in dealing with indigenous rights, but also to those, like Alison Jaggar, who see liberalism as being founded on a deficiently atomistic anthropology in general, preventing it from taking adequate account of the claims of (among others) women. It is these critics whom Kymlicka’s federalist vision leaves unanswered.

Durkheim’s multi­layered picture of the relations between individuals, communities and the state can accommodate cultural minorities as one of the kinds of intermediate association through which the state is constituted.

79 It is, of course, easy to think of examples of destructive lower­level communities, which are not indispensable to the state. The state could arguably get on very well without vigilante squads, racist underground militias and satanic cults. However, these can all be seen as dysfunctional instances of general types of community (political movements, ethnic groups, religious communities), which fall within Durkheim’s picture.

80 For a related argument of the moral claims of indigenous peoples against settler populations, including later generations of migrants, see Ross Poole “The Limits of Multiculturalism and the Claims of Aboriginal Australia” in George Couvalis, Helen Macdonald and Cheryl Simpson (eds) Cultural Heritage: Values and Rights (Flinders University Centre for Applied Philosophy, Bedford Park (South Australia), 1998) 12.

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Allowing that there are others does not invalidate Kymlicka’s contention that the federalist vision offers a promising suggestion for a way in which such invaded minority cultures can maintain autonomy and self­definition while relating to the settler state. Neither does extending the vision to incorporate other kinds of association contradict the moral argument such as that made by Ross Poole that such communities have a right to claim certain kinds of priority in their relationship to the settler state. 81 However, it does provide a way for acknowledging the many other kinds of association to which people (indigenous or not) may also look in defining their identity and structuring their dealings with the state; and it provides an avenue for criticising the assumption that those who benefit under present arrangements fit a ‘universal’ model of citizenship in an individualist ‘liberal background’ against which their collective benefit disappears.

81 Poole, above, 22­23.