moral decline sociology: critiquing the legacy of durkheim

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Moral decline sociology: Critiquing the legacy of Durkheim

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DOI: 10.1177/1440783313514644jos.sagepub.com

Moral decline sociology: Critiquing the legacy of Durkheim

Nicholas HookwayUniversity of Tasmania, Australia

AbstractThis article critically evaluates key assumptions within classical and contemporary ‘decline’ moral sociology. It argues that two dominant models of moral loss sociology – the ‘cultural pessimist’ and ‘communitarians’ – are indebted to a set of Durkheimian assumptions that underwrite his original diagnosis of the moral crisis of modernity. Three specific assumptions are identified and critiqued: view of human nature and self; ‘society’ as the necessary source of morality; and the functions of morality. The article suggests that these assumptions work to ignore how self, emotions and cultural ideals of self-improvement may work as alternate moral structures in late modernity.

Keywordsauthenticity, decline sociology, Durkheim, emotions, ethics, morality

From anxieties concerning the spread of relationship ‘short-termism’ and contemporary obsessions with celebrity, cosmetic enhancement and self-image, to the vision of a world overrun by drugs, crime and civic disorder, the contemporary western world today is often imagined as morally worse than the ‘world’ we used to inhabit. Contemporary subjects are supposedly morally cut adrift as the old moral anchors and certainties become merely choices and we are left to bicker and fumble over what might constitute ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Concerns over moral absence feature prominently in current popular debate but are also central to a tradition of moral decline or loss sociology. This article-argues that the ‘decline’ genre of sociology has its antecedents in Durkheim’s diagnosis

Corresponding author:Nicholas Hookway, School of Sociology and Social Work, University of Tasmania, Locked Bag 1340, Launceston, Tasmania 7250, Australia. Email: [email protected]

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of the moral infirmity of modernity and maps onto more recent diagnoses of moral breakdown.

Durkheim’s theory is briefly contextualised and examined before two more recent influential strands of moral ‘decline’ sociology are critiqued: Rieff (1987 [1966]), Lasch (1979), Bell (1976) and Carroll (2004) in the ‘cultural pessimist’ camp; and Etzioni (1994), Bellah et al. (1996) and MacIntyre (1985) in the ‘communitarian’ camp. It is argued that Durkheim’s moral assumptions concerning the asocial dimensions of human nature and the necessity for morality to be rooted in higher authoritative structures that have been undermined by declining community and rising individualism, are key assumptions shared by the ‘cultural pessimists’ and the ‘communitarian’ assessments of the moral present. These assumptions are critiqued as offering an overly disparaging reading of the self, body and emotions, and an unnecessary insistence on morality achieved outside the self through the sanctifying agents of ‘society’, ‘religion’ or ‘com-munity’. The article suggests that the pessimism of decline accounts ignores how self, emotions, and cultural values of self-improvement and authenticity can prove to be use-ful moral structures in contemporary social conditions.

Durkheim and moral decline sociology

While the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology were all interested in assessing the impacts of modernity on moral and ethical life, it was Durkheim who developed the most systematic sociological conceptualisation of a ‘science of morality’ (Seidman, 1994: 21; Smart, 2001: 509). Durkheim views morality as a ‘social fact’ realised and enforced only through the transcendence of society and its attendant ideas, beliefs and sentiments (Hearn, 1997: 79; Junge, 2001: 106). For Durkheim, individuals fulfil the social roles and concomitant moral obligations placed upon them as members of collectives: ‘when I fulfil my obliga-tions as a brother, husband or citizen … I perform duties which are defined externally to myself and my acts, in law and custom’ (Durkheim, 1982 [1895]: 50). Individuals are only ‘moral’ beings in the sense that they are ‘social’ beings. Morality residing in the ‘absolutely autonomous individual’ can only result in an egoistically driven moral dysto-pia (Durkheim (1973 [1890]: 37–40 cited in Hearn, 1997: 79).

Moral and social order depends, in Durkheim’s sociology, on the unquenchable ‘sen-sual appetites’ that engulf individuals being regulated and contained by external social constraints (Mayes, 1980: 82). Humans are homo duplex: constituted by a perpetual struggle between the opposing ‘qualities of body and soul’ (Smart, 2001: 513) – between ‘sensations and sensory appetities, on the one hand, and the intellectual and moral life, on the other’ (Durkheim, 1960: 326, 328 cited in Smart, 2001: 513). The purpose of society is to maintain stability and cohesion through successful regulation and integra-tion of the pre-social self into the prevailing norms and values of a society. Society, writes Durkheim, is the ‘voice which speaks to us in such an imperative tone, which enjoins us to change our own nature, [and] can only derive from a being which is distinct from ourselves, and which also dominates us’ (Durkheim, 1971 [1900]: 133 cited in Bauman, 2005: 371). Religion plays a key role here as an external source of moral ideas and a regulatory device that ensures cohesive and stable societies (Wallwork, 1985: 206).



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The implication of Durkheim’s assumption that morality has its origins in the society–religion nexus is that a breakdown in society correspondingly means a breakdown in morality (Junge, 2001: 106). It was this line of thinking that underpinned Durkheim’s central anxiety concerning the crisis of morality within the emerging conditions of moder-nity. Durkheim declared that ‘morality … is in the throes of an appalling crisis’ and that the ‘maladjustment’ experienced in modernity was the result of an ‘alarming poverty of morality’ (Durkheim, 1997 [1893]: 339; Durkheim cited in Bellah, 1973: xxx). Durkheim was concerned that forces of individualism and secularism were loosening the authorita-tive restrictions and limits that were central to shoring up morality and meaning in tradi-tional life. Modern industrial forms meant there was no longer a clearly defined ‘boundary between the permissible and the prohibited, between what is just and what is unjust’ (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]: xxxii cited in Smart, 2001: 512). Durkheim worried that the weakening grip of tradition and community would result in the wholesale release of ego-istic desire and bodily impulse, leaving a normative vacuum in which a nightmarish vision ‘of nature as a war against all’ could thrive (Junge, 2001: 107).

Durkheim’s work laid important sociological grounds for the study of morality. His approach to morality as socially derived and a necessary binding force for togetherness became the dominant sociological paradigm (Junge, 2001: 107). Moving from Durkheim’s 19th-century account of the moral crisis of early modernity, the following section outlines two recent assessments of moral demise in the late-modern West – those of the ‘cultural pessimists’ and the ‘communitarians’. These are presented as dominant theoretical orientations diagnosing the moral vacuity of modernity since the second half of the 20th century. Like Durkheim’s analysis of morality, these two strands constitute a genre of sociology marked by a tone of moral loss, collapse and fragmentation. The article goes on to critique three key assumptions in the Durkheimian model of morality and shows how these map onto the ‘cultural pessimists’ and the ‘communitarian’ accounts of moral decline. It is argued that the classical and contemporary approaches to moral loss are united by a set of assumptions concerning human nature, and the origins and pur-poses of morality.

Contemporary assessments of moral decline: ‘cultural pessimists’ and ‘communitarians’

Durkheim’s pessimism concerning the crisis of morality in modernity can be traced in two dominant accounts of modern ‘decline’ social theory (Hookway, 2013). In the first group are the ‘cultural pessimists’ who claim that Westerners have become hedonistic and narcissistic as traditional cultural authorities weaken and therapeutic values of self-fulfilment and self-improvement come to dominate (Bell, 1976; Lasch, 1979; Rieff, 1987 [1966]). In the second group are the ‘communitarians’, who suggest that wide-spread individualism and weakening community are eroding shared moral life. While there are similarities between these two strands of decline – both are concerned by weak-ening tradition, the decline of religion and the negative impacts of a deregulated con-sumer economy – the key difference is that cultural pessimists envisage moral loss as the consequence of cultural transformation whereas for communitarians it is seen as a




product of weakening community and social bonds. Both camps of decline also belong to different social contexts: the cultural pessimists were writing largely as a response to cultural transformation in the 1960s whereas communitarianism emerged as a reaction to the hyper-consumption, materialism and economic deregulation of the 1980s.

Phillip Rieff (1987 [1966]), Christopher Lasch (1979), Daniel Bell (1976) and John Carroll (2004) are key figures in the ‘cultural pessimist’ camp. These theorists, despite their particularities, all testify to a reorganisation of western culture, which has hollowed out cultural and moral life with negative effects upon self and personhood. This is evi-dent in Rieff’s (1987 [1966]) and Lasch’s (1979) psychoanalytically based discussions of cultures of ‘therapy’ and ‘narcissism’, Bell’s (1976) concerns regarding a consumer-based ‘fun morality’ and Carroll’s (2004) diagnosis of a paralysing ‘existential malaise’. The refrain is that the breakdown of traditional forms of moral and religious authority and the rise of ‘narcissistic’ and ‘therapeutic’ cultures, means contemporary social life has little to offer beyond empty and meaningless self-gratification and self-actualisation. Common to these accounts is a distinctly Judaic approach to culture, which sees the proper role of culture as a set of prohibitive controls or ‘thou shalt nots’ rooted in the ten commandments. While caution must be exercised in reading theory from biography, it is worth noting that Durkheim, Rieff and Bell all had strong links with Jewish intellectual culture and faith.

Rieff argues that the creation of moral order requires a Durkheimian repressive inhibi-tion, where culture maintains a set of restrictive motives that liberates through control rather than release. The key issue with therapeutic culture for Rieff is that it is ‘remissive’ rather than ‘repressive’ (1987 [1966]: 121). Like Durkheim, Rieff adopts a model of self and society where moral crisis is premised on weakening cultural authority and inade-quate repression of the id in a culture of sensuality, expressive individualism and self-fulfilment.

Lasch (1979) and Bell (1976) similarly account for the decline of morality in terms of the displacement of religious modes of authority by therapeutic modes of self-fulfilment. According to Lasch (1979: 11), the widespread erosion of models of authority such as ‘fathers, teachers and preachers’ has created a ‘narcissistic culture’ pathologically focused on self-improvement, self-care and personal well-being. Here modern subjects attempt to screen the psychic angst caused by the cultural imbalance between a restrain-ing ‘ego ideal’ and a disinhibited ‘superego’ by turning to forms of ‘psychic self-improvement’, involving ‘getting in touch with their feelings’, ‘eating healthy food’, ‘immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East’ and ‘jogging’ (Lasch, 1979: 4).

For Bell (1976: 17), the central concern is that with ‘the refusal to accept limits’ indi-viduals will be left to ‘the shambles of appetite and self-interest’. Bell makes explicit the Durkheimian conception of human beings as homo duplex that underpins his analysis. He states, ‘human culture is a creation of men, the construction of a world to maintain continuity, to maintain the “un-animal” life’ (1976: 170). In Bell’s words, ‘the problem in modern society is that release itself has gone so far as to be without bounds’ with the result that ‘nothing is forbidden, [and] all is to be explored’ (Bell, 1976: 50). Like Rieff – and harking back to Durkheim – Lasch and Bell are making the case that the absence of traditional forms of authority creates a psychological disequilibrium between controls and releases, between inhibition and gratification, between restraint and impulse.



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In contrast to Rieff, Bell and Lasch, John Carroll’s analysis of the collapse of the modern West is less about the demise of morality than it is about the collapse of meaning. While Rieff’s, Bell’s and Lasch’s analyses posit the deterioration of morality according to the dynamics of ‘therapeutic’, ‘narcissistic’ or ‘consumer’ societies, Carroll’s key the-sis is the existential inadequacy of modern humanism. At the core of Carroll’s diagnosis is the thesis that humanism shrivels when it comes to questions of suffering, meaning and death. Without answers to foundational metaphysical questions such as ‘Where do we come from?’, ‘How do I live my life?’ and ‘What happens at death?’, modern Westerners are cast adrift in a sea of despair and nihilism (Carroll, 2004, 2007: 8).

In contrast to the cultural focus of authors like Rieff, Lasch, Bell and Carroll, com-munitarians centre their diagnosis of moral loss on how modern individualised and con-sumer relations have weakened the necessary moral weight of community. In the face of sky-rocketing divorce rates, the fragmentation of the nuclear family, shrinking house-holds, lone households and drying up of life-long commitments, communitarians diag-nose morality as in a terminal state. Communitarians argue that as the market encroaches further into non-economic areas of life, individual self-interest, competition and con-sumer acquisition come to predominate over trust, mutuality and reciprocity (Boucher and Sharpe, 2008: 172). Commodity and consumer culture is argued to have an ethically destructive power as market values of competition, individualism and superficiality work to erode trust, mutuality and depth in the fabric of modern culture (Hudson and Kane, 2000; Sandel, 2009).

Communitarian thought is critical of any move to the self and individual as a potential source of morality, emphasising the importance of communally based moral frameworks. For social theorists like Etzioni (1994), Bellah et al. (1996) and MacIntyre (1985), a modern culture that emphasises individual fulfilment and personal authenticity will inev-itably mean diminished care, respect and responsibility for others.

Communitarianism can be seen to be at odds with a recent tradition of social theory (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991), which endorses ‘de-traditionalisation’ and reflexive indi-vidualism. While communitarians agree that individualism is a master narrative for explaining changing social identities and relationships, they diverge from the positive assessment given by the ‘reflexive modernists’. Although theorists of reflexive moder-nity are optimistic about the implications of new modalities of identity and sociality whereby individuals become, to use Ehrenberg’s (1991, cited in McDonald, 1999: 121) expression, ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, communitarian theory is critical of how role structures associated with collective and community life – a Durkheimian ‘culture of socialisation’ – have been weakened in modern societies.

Etzioni, for example, asserts that community is ‘the most important sustaining source of moral voice’ (1994: 31). Community, suggests Etzioni, is the backbone of a moral and social order where individual actions are orientated towards moral ends constituted by common values. Etzioni is concerned that in the West common values built on a shared history and identity are being undermined by acquisitive and self-interested individuals intent on ‘making it’ (1994: 123). Bellah et al. (1996: 76) make a similar argument, sug-gesting that individualism has become our ‘first language’ and that the ‘self and its feel-ings become our only moral guide’. Bellah et al. (1996: xxx) worry that ‘individualism may have grown cancerous’ as we become isolated and lack a wider web of meaning in




which to orient our decisions and actions. MacIntyre (1985) is similarly critical of the fracturing of moral community and tradition, and the rise of a disembedded self, which lacks virtuous social roles articulated by common goals and objectives to create narra-tives of moral action. MacIntyre’s (1985: 220) philosophical ‘sociology’ converges with Durkheim’s (1982 [1895]: 50) own account of the social origins of morality, claiming that it is the fulfilment of the moral obligations attached to roles such as father, sister, teacher and citizen that ‘constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point’ (MacIntyre, 1985: 220).

In the Australian context, commentators such as Hamilton (2007) and Mackay (2004) have built on communitarian arguments to mount their concerns about a crisis of moral-ity. Clive Hamilton (2007: 3), for example, suggests that endemic materialism wears away at everyday virtues of honour, courage or self-sacrifice. He proposes that the crick-eter walking or the mountaineer abandoning his hopes of the summit ‘to help another’ become moral anomalies in current social conditions; aberrations that only reinforce the ordinarily nasty and brutish reality of modern consumer life.

Mackay (2004), also writing in the Australian context, makes a related argument. He believes that Australians are now ‘less charitable’, ‘more prejudiced’ and ‘less compas-sionate’ and links this to the decline of community. With the Durkheimian textbook firmly in hand, Mackay writes:

The consequences could hardly be more serious: our moral sense is a social sense. Only by learning how to live in a community do we acquire our sense of right and wrong, and more subtle values such as tolerance, compassion and respect for others. (Mackay, 2009)

Communitarian theory is indebted to a Durkheimian claim that individuals only make sense in relation to ‘community’ or ‘society’; the self only has meaning and moral integrity in relation to the gestalt of existing moral debts, expectations and responsibilities inherited from outside itself. The search for common moral understandings resurrected through communal life is offered as the antidote to contemporary moral decline. The hope for morality lies in the re-establishment of common standards of the good that are resistant to ‘incessant renegotiation’ (Bellah et al., 1996: 140). For communitarians, the proper place of morality is not self-interested or emotionally irrational individuals but ‘agreed-upon standards of right and wrong’ or ‘basic settled values’ formed and transmitted by commu-nity and social roles (Bellah et al., 1996: 140; Etzioni, 1994: 25; MacIntyre, 1985). Thus, communitarians argue that remoralisation can only occur if morality is re-established across the social foundations of education, family, community, religion and politics.

Problematising decline assumptions

This section outlines and critiques three core assumptions built into Durkheim’s theoreti-cal system and shows how they underpin the recent ‘cultural pessimistic’ and ‘communi-tarian’ strands of ‘decline’ sociology. The assumptions are presented as: (1) view of human nature and self; (2) origins of morality; and (3) functions of morality. These assumptions are presented as bestowing a distrust of the individual, emotions and the body, a romanticised picture of the society–morality nexus and a conformity conception



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of morality that emphasises moral functions over substantive moral content. Challenging these assumptions built into diagnoses of moral decline works to problematise their excessive negativity, and provides the basis for building a defence of the individual as a potential moral structure and an alternative standpoint for theorising moral engagement in contemporary life. This opens possibilities for building a positive, or at least more optimistic, interpretation of contemporary moral culture utilising the social theory of Bauman (1993, 1995), Wright (2008), Taylor (1992) and feminist thinkers like Ahmed (2000) and Irigaray (1991).

View of human nature and the self

The Durkheimian fear that not far beneath the surface of the socialised self lurks a wolf-like individual ready to puncture a functioning social order runs through the ‘cultural pessimist’ and ‘communitarian’ takes on moral decline in the contemporary West. That is, these contemporary strands of decline sociology are indebted to a 19th-century Durkheimian view of human nature, in which human nature is taken to refer to the innate or essential characteristics of human beings (O’Donnell, 2003: 754). Durkheim’s assumptions about human nature are best described as Hobbesian, holding an approach to human nature that assumes an animalistic, anti-social and immoral basis for human life (Junge, 2001: 106; Mayes, 1980: 94).

Durkheim sees human beings in constant struggle between their bodily impulses and passions and their higher intellectual and moral needs rooted in the broader collective good (Smart, 2001: 513). Humans are homo duplex, appetitive in nature and thus requir-ing limitation and restraint. The function of society is to restrain the body and the instincts for the purposes of creating moral order (Coser, 1977:227). The implication of Durkheim’s homo duplex ontology is that individual emotions, feelings and the sensual body are regarded as inimical to morality. Our ‘natural inclinations’ are anti-social and thus immoral. In the absence of the sanctifying structures of society and community, the unregulated body, the self and its passions are always ‘profane’ and never ‘sacred’.

The ‘cultural pessimist’ and ‘communitarian’ assessments share this disparaging view of the individual, body and emotions. Rieff, Bell and Lasch, for instance, in the first camp of moral decline, assume that the primary purpose of culture is to work as a pro-hibitive mechanism that treats ‘the sensual part of the self as an enemy’ (Rieff, 1987 [1966]: 49). It is this freedom from limits of the emotional and bodily self in modern culture that is seen as the core of moral decline in contemporary conditions. A similar position is advocated in the communitarian camp. For instance, Bellah et al. (1996: 76) fears a turn to the ‘self and its feelings’ and Etzioni (2001: 360) worries about the unleash-ing of ‘sexual urges’ and ‘aggressive feelings’. These theorists all go along with a Durkheimian denigration of the individual where self and the emotions are problematic and need to be channelled towards higher communal goals and objectives.

A central issue with Durkheim and the ‘cultural pessimists’ and ‘communitarians’ is that they rule out the capacity of emotions to be morally generative (Ahmed, 2000; Holmes, 2010; Irigaray, 1991). The self appears to be reduced to a realm of destructive impulses and instincts, which occludes the socially and morally productive aspects of self, bodies and emotion. In accepting Durkheim’s claim that emotions generated in




collective or ritualised forms are useful for binding individuals to the higher social body, these theorists simultaneously dismiss the possibility of individual embodied emotion – moral feeling – as a source of moral action. The assumption that the self is inherently flawed renders these theorists blind to the possibility that it may also be a source of moral guidance. This is not to propose some Rousseauian model of the inherent goodness of human nature but to offer a more balanced reading that acknowledges the self and emo-tions as morally capable rather than simply violent and destructive.

Bauman’s (1993, 1995) postmodern ethics, in combination with feminist thinkers such as Ahmed (2000) and Irigaray (1991), are significant here, restoring emotions and body as morally capable. Bauman (1993: 67–9), for example, emphasises the moral sig-nificance of ‘acting out of affections’ rather than following ‘heteronomous rules’ in post-modern conditions; while Ahmed (2000) and Irigaray (1991) underline the value of emotion, feelings and bodies in ethical encounters and how this is implicated in particu-larised relations with gendered, sexed, racialised and even non-human Others. Similarly, Skeggs (2005) looks at how emotions and bodies are involved in the creation of value and respect with regards to class and gender formations. Underlining the moral potency of emotion and embodiment is not to argue for an asocial moral self but rather to empha-sise the significance of emotions and bodily feeling as part of the reflexive negotiation of moral subjectivity within real and imagined interaction with others (Holmes, 2010: 145). Emotions and bodies are fundamentally social and moral, involving us in relations that connect and disconnect us from self and others.

Further, cultural pessimist and communitarian diagnoses of the moral present deny how therapeutic and self-fulfilment cultures defined by the search for personal authentic-ity or self-discovery could be positive for morality (Taylor, 1992; Wright, 2008). Wright (2008) makes a powerful argument that we can theorise a positive moral content for therapeutic culture. While not denying the depoliticising and narcissistic potentialities of therapy culture, Wright (2006: 309) suggests that the value of the therapeutic lies in its capacity to open up a society to concern with abuse, dignity and suffering rather than stifling these within a culture of repression, stoicism and self-reliance. She cites develop-ments such as the formation of the Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s national inquiry into children in immigra-tion detention, and revelations of abuse in the Catholic Church as examples of how the therapeutic can provide ‘a language and legitimacy to claims of oppression, abuse and violence’ otherwise hidden or silenced (Wright, 2006: 309–10, 2008: 333). Wright’s work suggests how a therapeutic orientation to the self can produce a substantive social consequence in terms of ethics, care and justice.

Further, why read practices of self-improvement solely as amoral? The ‘wisdom of the East’ or ‘eating health food’ – indices of narcissism for Lasch – of course can be seen in a more positive moral light. Take yoga as an example, which has grown recently in popularity in Australia as a physical and spiritual practice (Penman, 2010). An important component of yoga is certainly self-awareness, personal growth and self-care, but it is also fundamentally about locating the self within wider ‘horizons of meaning’ (Taylor, 1992). The etymology of the word ‘yoga’ is ‘yug’, a Sanskrit word which means ‘joining together’ (Graham, 2005). We need to problematise simplistic readings of yoga – and the growing popularity in the West of other Eastern practices such as Buddhism and



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meditation (Phillips and Aarons, 2007) – that view it as symptomatic of a self-indulgent Western narcissism. More nuanced arguments are required, which pay attention to the ethical possibilities of these practices; how they may foster self-fulfilment and personal development within positive ethical relations of responsibility and care between self, body, nature, humans and environment. As Yoga Journal claims of yogic practice: ‘you become more aware of how the small choices you make every day affect you, your com-munity, and the world around you’ (Ferreira, n.d.).

This position resonates with Taylor’s ‘ethics of authenticity’ (1992: 66). Taylor sug-gests that values of self-discovery and self-fulfilment – placed within ‘horizons of sig-nificance’ (i.e. intimate relationships, nature, community, environment religion) – are worthwhile contemporary moral ideals. Taylor does not deny the narcissistic potential of values of self-discovery and self-fulfilment, but at the same time opens up creative moral space around what these values can do in a secular age. What decline theories overlook, then, is how cultures of therapy and self-fulfilment can be constructed within a more positive frame of ethical regard for others. If social theory moves outside restrictive Durkheimian assumptions concerning human nature, this gives sufficient room to orient towards a more affirming view of self-based ethics and values of self-improvement, rather than the disparaging one constructed by the ‘cultural pessimists’ and the ‘communitarians’.

Origins of morality

Morality is unequivocally top-down in Durkheim. The corollary of his homo duplex ontology is that morality must be rooted in higher authoritative structures – either reli-gion or alternative rational substitutes – that preside over and regulate the inherently egoistic and appetitive individual. Morality must come from something higher than the self; the self cannot be a source of morality. This assumption is also explicit in the two perspectives of moral decline, focused as they are on the negative moral consequences of weakening tradition, religious authority and community.

This criticism is particularly relevant to the communitarian agenda of Bellah (1996), Etzioni (1994) and MacIntyre (1985). These theorists demonstrate an unambiguous alle-giance to the Durkheimian idea that community is the only proper source of morality. It is only through communities that individual moral commitments and sentiments can be harnessed, endorsed and affirmed (Smart, 1999: 168). This not only excludes the indi-vidual as a potential source of morality but also ignores how ‘society’ or ‘community’ can operate, as Bauman (1989: 174) defines it, as ‘a “morality-silencing” force’. Durkheim and the communitarians preclude the possibility that society and community, those revered sites of moral production, could themselves be sources of immorality.

A parallel argument can be made concerning the emphasis on religion as a generator of moral precepts. Durkheim’s insistence that the purpose of religion is to create ordered and cohesive societies through the moral regulation of individuals disregards its potential for the promotion of immorality. As Coser (1977: 223) points out, Durkheim seems blind to an obvious ‘social fact’: that religion is historically connected to systematised acts of hatred, violence, genocide, colonialism, terrorism and war. This critique applies to the cultural pessimists and the communitarians who share an overly optimistic reading of




organised religion as a positive moral force. Durkheim and others seem to deny that morality from above (religious or otherwise) may not always provide an assured path to ‘right’ moral action.

Bauman powerfully demonstrates how ‘society cum religion’ can operate as a moral silencing force in his discussion of the human atrocities that occurred in Nazi Germany. The Holocaust functions for Bauman (1989: 176) as a monstrous anomaly in the Durkheimian model of socially injected morality, showing how following the moral code of a society can be synonymous with carrying out the most morally depraved of human actions. Bauman offers a particularly scathing critique of ‘community’, arguing that it is the ‘individual’s burden and bane’ (1995: 271), ‘expropriating’ individual moral respon-sibility for commands from above and actively excluding alternative moral voices.

The worry for Bauman is that the communitarian promise of togetherness, cosiness and mutual understanding is bought at the cost of freedom, autonomy and a promised release from the ‘torments of moral responsibility’ (1995: 278). Community is consti-tuted in Bauman (1996: 89) as a two-edged sword, lived between the promise of security but at the heavy price of unfreedom: ‘community without freedom is a project as horrify-ing as freedom without community’. The nub of Bauman’s critique is that analyses focused on the achievement of morality in ‘community’ – epitomised in Durkheim/com-munitarian thinking – endorse conformity and rule following, sapping individual moral freedom and promoting intolerance of moral difference. Bauman’s question to the com-munitarians – and to Durkheim – is: what happens to those outside the social role, the community, the tribe or the nation? If morality is always defined relative to community goals, what happens to individuals or groups who do not share the communal position (Hall, 1991: 102)?

Functions of morality

There is a tendency in Durkheimian moral theory to reduce morality to its objective social functions. The establishment of social cohesion and order through societal regula-tion of our pre-social impulses is the end point of morality. Durkheim argues: ‘It seems to us incontestable that in reality the practical function of morality is to make society possible, to help people live together without too much harm or conflict, to safeguard, in a word, the great collective interests’ (Durkheim, 1993 [1887]: 65). The problem with this ‘functionalist’ assumption is that if moral behaviour is reduced to its fulfilment of objective social ends, how can the substantive content of a moral code be evaluated? If ‘we cannot’, as Durkheim (2009 [1924]: 30) suggests, ‘aspire to a morality other than that which is related to the state of our society’, what does this mean for evaluating a society which is corrupt, immoral or fascist? If a society is ‘healthy’ in its overall func-tioning but happens, for instance, to be a ‘slave’ society’, how in Durkheim’s system can we morally denounce it? Do we have the tools in Durkheim’s theory to critique it? Should we even denounce it?

Bauman’s (1989) critique of Durkheim’s social theory suggests that he exhibits a ‘sociological reductionism’, thereby steering us into the murky waters of moral relativ-ism. If morality is ‘synonymous with social conformity and obedience to the norms observed by the majority’, this means that moral behaviour is simply action that conforms



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to what ‘everyone else is doing’ (Bauman, 1989: 172). Bauman asks: if morality is reduced to conformity to the dominant norms of the society what grounds do we have to evaluate different societies? Further, what grounds do we have to make sense of moral action that goes against the prevailing norms of the society? For example, how do we, using Durkheim’s theory, make sense of the moral heroism of Nazi military officers who saved Jews from the gas chambers or the heroic acts of individuals like Hugh Thompson who acted alone to save Vietnamese civilians during the American murder spree known as the My Lai massacre (Tester, 1997)?

While the strength of this critique is weaker for contemporary theorists, there are echoes of a functionalist analysis in both camps of decline sociology. The most obvious is Etzioni’s emphasis on morality as the product of a ‘web of affect-laden social relations’ and identifiable ‘shared values’ (Etzioni, 2001: 359). This opens itself up to a similar critique to that of Durkheim: is the British National Party or Australia’s One Nation Party, for example, to be respected and promoted simply by virtue of being a community of strong social bonds and common values?

A similar functionalism is evident in Rieff and MacIntyre. Rieff (1987 [1966]: 49), for example, writes that ‘the generative principle of culture, expressed itself in positive dep-rivations – in a character ideal that functioned to commit the individual to the group’. Does this mean any culture is morally acceptable as long as it fulfils Rieff’s requirement of repression of impulses? At what point does repression become exploitation and to what degree is this tolerated if it fulfils the goal of collective-cultural morals? Further, MacIntyre’s communitarianism assumes that social roles are functional and necessarily embody particular goals tailored to the production of social virtue (Hall, 1991: 99). While MacIntyre’s insistence on virtues created as communal ends somewhat shields him from a critique concerning the promotion of ‘ends’ over moral content, we still might ask whose virtues are promoted, how are these virtues evaluated and what social roles are tolerated for the purposes of virtue construction? The key problem, as with Durkheim, is who defines the communal good towards which societies function and how to evaluate the moral contents of a society in such a teleological system.

Conclusion

The central argument of this article is that Durkheim’s moral sociology is underpinned by a set of problematic assumptions concerning the necessity of ‘society’ to control the amoral inclinations of human beings and that these assumptions, in similar but different configurations, underwrite the cultural pessimist and communitarian approaches to morality. Three specific assumptions were identified as problematic in Durkheim’s moral sociology: first, the homo duplex model of human nature; second, his emphasis on the necessity of society as a morally productive force; and, third, his insistence on the func-tions of morality.

In discussing the first assumption, the claim was made that the cultural pessimists and the communitarians share Durkheim’s disparaging view of human nature, the self and emotions. The arguments of Rieff, Etzioni and Bell consign the individual to a destruc-tive aggression, desire and egoism emanating from the id. It was suggested that these shared assumptions ontologically preclude the morally creative potential of the self,




denying the moral capacity of emotions and bodies and offering a one-dimensional view of cultures of therapy and self-fulfilment as unavoidably egoistic and self-absorbed. This is not about positing the inherent goodness of human nature but suggesting a middle-ground position, which accepts violent and destructive proclivities alongside moral capa-bility and competence.

Closely related to the assumption of an amoral self is Durkheim’s belief that morality is a purely social achievement, established in the individual’s submission to society. It was shown how this assumption underpinned Durkheim’s main intellectual preoccupa-tion with the crisis of morality in the wake of the breakdown of traditional societies and community formations. The problem with this conception of morality, is that it fails to acknowledge immorality as a potential corollary of society (Bauman, 1989). This cri-tique problematises the shared assumption of moral decline sociologists that the weaken-ing of external agencies such as faith, community and tradition has put the moral order into a terminal state. It was argued that communitarianism is particularly vulnerable to this critique. Etzioni, Bellah and MacIntyre offer a romantic return to ‘community’, ignoring how the insistence on a common value system can undermine individual moral responsibility and silence or exclude alternative moral voices.

Last, it was argued that there are difficulties with Durkheim’s functionalist analysis of moral life. While this critique is less prominent in the work of Bell, Carroll, Lasch and Bellah, it is implicitly present in Etzioni, Rieff and MacIntyre. The main problem with the emphasis on ‘moral functions’ is that the substantive moral content of a society is downplayed in relation to the assumed societal goals of order, stability and cohesion.

Problematising key assumptions built into Durkheim’s ‘science of morality’, and showing how they inform the ‘cultural pessimist’ and ‘communitarian’ traditions, creates an alternative space for theorising contemporary morality outside models of loss and decline. The article points to how a more positive rendition of the contemporary moral condition can be retrieved from social theory by arguing for emotion, embodiment and notions of self-improvement and authenticity as important moral structures for everyday actors.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography

Nicholas Hookway is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania. His work focuses on the construction of moral identity in late modernity. His other research interests are kindness, reli-gion and spirituality, new media and online research technologies.



moral decline sociology: critiquing the legacy of durkheim

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