Classical Social Theory, II: Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim

Abstract

Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim differ profoundly in their views about society. Durkheim was 24 on Marx's death in 1883 and rarely refers explicitly to the earlier thinker. Marx, for his part, did not subscribe to Durkheim's later nineteenth-century vision of a liberal impartial study of society, and on the few occasions where he used August Comte's term 'sociology', which had limited currency in the mid- to late nineteenth century it was to pour scorn on the pretensions of a bourgeois science of society. Yet despite these profound differences of outlook, Marx and Durkheim were both centrally concerned with the emergence of modern capitalism, and in particular with the rise of the modern system of the division of labour and the evolution of a market society. Both approach these developments by focusing on the effects that the spread of market relations had on solidarity and on society's ability to reproduce itself. Both therefore had to engage with the causes and implications of key developments - the Industrial Revolution in particular - as well as key events such as the French Revolution. Both sought to revise the simplistic and apologetic accounts of capitalist society commonly found in nineteenth-century social thought. Where they differ most strikingly is in the conclusions - the lessons - they draw from their intellectual engagement with modernity. This chapter provides an overview of the main intellectual projects of Marx and Durkheim, treating each thinker in turn. We consider how both Marx and Durkheim produce accounts of the nature of the modern division of labour and the nature of the state and civil society that in some respects are comparable and in other respects radically divergent. We begin with Marx.