Durkheim: How is it possible to rebuild society after the turmoil and division of faith?

▲ 涂尔干（Emile Durkheim，1858-1917）

A French-Jewish sociologist and anthropologist, he is known as the three founders of sociology along with Marx and Weber. "The Theory of Social Division of Labor" is one of his representative works. Durkheim believed that the division of labor is not a purely economic phenomenon, and thus put forward the concepts of "social solidarity", "collective consciousness", "function", "social capacity", "moral density", and "social differentiation and social integration", which have been followed, revised and debated by sociologists since then, and also explored the basic laws of historical evolution through the vertical binary division of "mechanical solidarity" and "organic solidarity", "link society" and "divided society", and "repressive sanctions" and "restorative sanctions". Unlike Weber, who focused on "struggle of power" and Marx, who focused on "economic conflict", Durkheim did not focus on the destructive forces that lead to conflict, but started from the analysis of unity, asking "what brings us together, why society is not falling apart?" After the turmoil and division of the faith, how is it possible to rebuild society? How can we find a dynamic cohesion between national sovereignty, collective consciousness and individual rights?

Professional Ethics and Civic Ethics

Durkheim's new construction of the relationship between state and society

Text | Qu Jingdong

1. The origin of the problem

In recent social theories, whether it is Parsons's social studies that have tended to be meso-micro and meso-micro, or the generalized power analysis represented by Foucault and Bourdieu, or Luhmann's social system theory and Habermas's concept of the public sphere and the life-world in the opposite way, all seem to show a kind of "depoliticization" ideological tendency, consciously or unconsciously. This preference for "sociality" tends to presuppose an antagonistic structure between the state and society, or to explain the constitution and operation of politics in a radical or soothing way with a diffuse notion of social power, or to simply believe that all existence is a rheological process. Undoubtedly, all these efforts of social theory are aimed at the search for a suprapolitical emancipation, whereby the politics of life becomes the ultimate basis for the search for a new freedom and order, and even the sociologist must assume the role of such a subjectivity.

This strong social trend is related not only to the general reflection on authoritarian politics after the Second World War, but also to the critique of capital and its derivatives and its ubiquitous invisible control in all corners of the living world. From the perspective of social research, it will inevitably affect the basic paradigms of observation and induction, deduction and analysis. Since the revival of Chinese sociology, it has been deeply influenced by this trend of thought or paradigm, and the theoretical and empirical research that has been formed for a long time is often based on the basic framework of the state and civil society, or directly cuts into the life of the bottom society to implement the intervention practice of sociology. However, in the face of such an era of overarching social transformation, or for those classical sociologists who have undergone such transformations, it is difficult to see the whole of the political system and its way of life purely on the basis of a preconceived society.

The reasons for this are, first, because it is difficult for sociologists to conduct on-the-spot empirical investigations into many aspects of political life, especially the specific structures and operating mechanisms at all levels, and it is easy to produce the kind of opinion-based abstract judgments mentioned by Plato, so the two ends of the state and society are often unequal in terms of empirical understanding. Second, based on this situation, sociologists are more inclined to judge the form and nature of the political system and its operating mechanism from the social effect of the latter, so they often use the concept of social analysis to explore the problems in the political field. Third, there is a paradox in research strategy, that is, the political and administrative system and the system derived from it are regarded as formal institutions, while other logics operating in the concrete life of society are not formal. This leads to a very big problem: it seems that all social life is formed on the basis of adaptation, disintegration or confrontation of the formal system, and the "informal" operation of social life becomes precisely the "deviance" of the "formal" institutional standards, thus dissolving its own logic; On the other hand, it is easy to form an institutionalist interpretation of political life, as if the political system operates according to a rigid structure, without any room for non-institutionalization, without any social component of emotion, morality and value. In fact, we can easily find counter-examples from Marx's political analysis in The Eighteenth Day of Louis Bonaparte and Weber's political theory of the three types of domination.

Over the years, with the gradual strengthening of the role of the government in social and economic life, sociologists have begun to turn their attention to the study of national governance, one is to push forward to the in-depth field of theory and history, and the other is to gradually deepen the empirical observation into the process of local government behavior, and then reveal the structural effects formed by the joint efforts of social, economic and political levels. However, the study of state governance and government behavior cannot be equated with the study of classical political economy or social theory on the general principles of state composition and its mechanism. If sociological thinking is to be extended to this field, it must also be traced back to the era of great transformation in which modern society was conceived and formed, to the historical pattern in which the problems of modernity were fully produced, and then contradictory and even crisis-oriented, and to find richer imagination from the overall thinking of the composition of that era, so as to obtain a new understanding of the current society and politics.

One of the main intentions of this essay is to try to go back to the classical social theorist Durkheim and find the intellectual resources for thinking about modern social and political issues. This thinker, who was even called a "sociologist" by later generations, has devoted his entire life to academic thinking in almost all areas of substantive issues, and we really should not forcibly classify him into a disciplinary category today. His time came in the wake of the French Revolution in a time of crisis and suspicion. The Revolution not only fully implemented the highest conception of modern politics for the first time, but also brought about "tyranny" in democracy, and the old system was restored again. After the Revolution, French society was in danger, with extreme individualism, suspicion, and abstract ideas and preconceptions everywhere; The disintegration of family ties, fierce and brutal economic competition, and the emergence of a class of extreme poverty; Politically, the masses are full of violence, and the upper echelons of power, because of the factional multiplicity and loss of legitimacy, often overturn and change in an instant, and then the whole society once again sets off a wave of demands for revolution. This is what Durkheim called the "state of anomie" into which society generally falls.

In the face of this situation, Durkheim's work was, first of all, a comprehensive reckoning of the legacy of the Revolution in terms of people's hearts, institutions, and political conceptions, as evidenced by empirical studies such as "On Suicide." Durkheim then expands the historical resources for the formation of modern societies, and expands the chain of interpretation from tradition to modernity from the study of Greek, Roman, and medieval history. At the same time, he also opened up the question of the study of the sacredness of society in its own category to the primitive religion, revealing the theoretical ambition to respond to and reconstruct the modern problems laid down by Rousseau and Kant as a whole, and finally put forward a complete scheme for the reconstruction of society and politics from the general aspects of moral individualism, group organization, and state polity.

▲ Qu Jingdong, "Culture: China and the World" 30th Anniversary Commemorative Seminar

2. Public sentiment and politics

In the past, Durkheim's researchers were often willing to understand his social theory from the perspective of "society as reality" or "society as ontology". The former perspective likes to grasp the methodological implications from the perspective of positivism, emphasizing that Durkheim's investigation of social facts distinguishes between normal and abnormal phenomena according to the state of social distribution, so as to establish the basis of social norms. However, the latter perspective disagrees. Parsons argues in The Structure of Social Action that Durkheim's theory of collective representation in The Fundamental Forms of Religious Life has gone beyond the positivist perspective and sees the constitution of society as a symbolic representation of divine existence.

In short, the difference between the two understandings is that one focuses on the actual existence of society, that is, the scientific inductive judgment of social facts is used as a normative basis for providing social integration, and people often use "The Theory of Suicide" as a model for this research path. One is to take a transcendent religious existence as the ontology of society, and all the sacred rituals and practices used to reproduce this existence (i.e., practices) internalize social existence in the behavior and consciousness of each member, thus constituting the ultimate basis of social norms. Although the two sides seem to reflect the differences between Durkheim's social thought in the early and late periods, in fact they only present different aspects of Durkheim's overall problem. Positivism's emphasis on empirical reality shows that Durkheim has truly injected the metaphysical doctrines of Saint-Simon and Comte into the real empirical world, pointing out that norms do not come only from the level of ideas, but must be rooted in reality. Ontology, on the other hand, emphasizes that Durkheim was by no means a realist through and through, and that the basis for the formation of social norms lies in the fact that all existence is intrinsic in a dichotomy between the sacred and the mundane, and that unlike the consensual principle of the individual will, which is appealed to by contract theory, society is a self-contained (suigeneris) being, and it is only through the categorical schema of social ontology and the ritual activities of its sacred life that the moral and political order can obtain its ultimate basis.

Obviously, one of the difficulties in understanding Durkheim's social theory lies in how to reconcile the two tendencies of positivism and Kantianism within it, and how to find the key link between social reality and social ontology. However, even if this dilemma is solved, there is an even greater difficulty that cannot be overcome: most previous interpretations of Durkheim's social theory, including both of these views, have a sociological tinge, or what is often referred to as a "sociological" tendency. Most scholars believe that Durkheim's moral doctrine has a strong tendency to "depoliticize" and does not leave much theoretical space for national political problems: that is, the dissolution of the public politics of the revolutionary period into an obligation structure within the professional group, the transformation of the state problem into a public problem, and the ideological problem into a subjective problem of collective consciousness. Thus, the logic of the collective is placed above the logic of the state, and it seems that the only way to solve the crisis of modern politics is to replace political life with the social life of the group with a solidarity effect, and to establish morality on the basis of collective consciousness.

In fact, this sociological interpretation is quite one-sided, and it does not see the special exposition of national politics in Durkheim's social thought, let alone the subtle ideological inheritance relationship between Durkheim and those political philosophical sages. Durkheim's reputation as "pioneers of sociology" to Montesquieu and Rousseau shows that the lessons he learned from them were not merely critical. This means that the science laid down by Logos with "society" is not simply a replacement for politics, but rather a transformation. Durkheim once noted: "For Rousseau, social life is not the opposite of the natural order...... Rousseau says in some places that obedience to the authority of the legislator presupposes a certain social spirit". Commenting on Montesquieu, he also said: "Legal norms do not necessarily derive from the nature of society, they are hidden in reality unless some legislator can identify them and clarify them". This shows that Montesquieu and Rousseau seem to have known that there is a special social existence outside the legislator that affects the establishment and operation of the law, and even determines what type of government should be chosen.

Montesquieu once proposed in "On the Spirit of Law" that if we start from "law", that is, "the inevitable relations derived from the nature of things", to explore the order of a country's political life, we must not only examine the institutional structure of the distribution of power in the polity, but also examine the emotional structure of the people who can make the polity move, that is, the "mores" (popular feelings). In other words, the composition of the state is not determined by the form of government alone, but whether the nature of the government is compatible with the basis of the people's sentiments is the inherent requirement of the "spirit of law". For Montesquieu, the constitution of political law is based on the principles of nature, while the sentiment of the people is the human sentiment that makes the polity move, and which has the characteristics of a realistic diversity. This was the initial assertion of the relationship between the state and society. Durkheim fully affirmed the social science significance of Montesquieu's statement: "Montesquieu did not believe that law was arbitrarily manufactured; He insisted that both custom and religion were above the power of the legislator, and even that laws relating to other matters had to conform to the rules of custom and religion". At the same time, however, he criticized: "Montesquieu, despite his novel views, is still obsessed with the original concept", and although Montesquieu saw the spiritual meaning of the people's feelings, he still used the rational principles of natural law to make inferential investigations, or took the form of law or government as a necessary condition of real social life. Similarly, Rousseau, while systematically discussing the whole mechanism of the constitution of moral and political life, remained convinced that "perfection is possible only in isolation" and that only nature can provide "sancta simplicitas".

Durkheim's critique of nature and the doctrine of the state of nature was more accurately expressed in his later writings. He argues that neither the understanding of law as nature, nor the expression of government as nature, sees the essence of a higher being. In fact, it is not the duality of the nature of the polity and the feelings of the people that constitutes human life, but the duality of human nature and its actual conditions. Not only is the constitution of law and the state of government mixed with emotions and beliefs, but also the natural nature of human beings is also contained in the feelings of the people, because the existence of a state cannot be sustained only by a rational political system design, and must rely on sacred things of a religious nature to be established. In the same way, the existence of popular sentiment does not imply pure reality, because collective consciousness and moral order also require a higher expression of the soul to be formed. Durkheim then reversed Montesquieu's thesis and understood the state and social group as a kind of physical organization that actually exists, and the ultimate basis of its existence, or the ultimate basis of political and social life, is defined by appealing to the higher nature of existence in human nature. In this way, the individual sensations and volitional activities of reality become the bodily perceptual reactions of mundane everyday life, and the higher beings of their own kind, the kind of divine beings that ontology speaks, have the essence of the soul and determine people's social norms through forms such as concepts and categories, thinking and reason, language and religion, with the help of collective representations such as public festivals, celebrations, and various ceremonies.

Durkheim's assertion of the duality of human nature confirms the theoretical effort of The Fundamental Forms of Religious Life to prove the existence of "society". However, this Kantian proof is often misunderstood. It is often understood in correspondence with his earlier work, The Guidelines of the Sociological Method, which understands such an ontological "society" as the form of things in the sense of social facts, or as a form of social body that distinguishes it from all political bodies, and artificially opposes society and the state. In Durkheim's view, all collective forms that transcend individual existence and are believed, attached to, and obeyed by the individual, whether they are social or political, have moral force and a sacred collective appearance that can be presented in real life. Therefore, the study of the root of the formation of norms lies neither in the separation of ideas and materials, nor in the separation of state and society, but in the necessity of a divine existence above the daily mundane life, and only by this can people obtain a standardized moral order in thinking, language, and ritual activities. Moreover, precisely because the divine existence of a society cannot be created out of thin air, if it is completely separated from its traditions, all moral norms cannot survive, and all order will inevitably collapse.

It can be said that Durkheim's theories in various fields are based on the proofs of the above-mentioned society, and his theory of the state is based on this original premise. His book "Professional Ethics and Civic Morality" can be said to be the most comprehensive work that discusses the relationship between the state and society. The book, originally titled A Course in Sociology, is a compilation of a manuscript entitled "The Physics of Civil Sentiment and Rights." (1) From the subtitle of the original book and the new title given in the English edition, it can be seen that Durkheim deliberately explored the relationship between the political power structure and social customs from the concept and history of civil sentiment and rights, and then comprehensively revealed the intrinsic relationship between the group and the state, occupation and democracy, morality and politics, so as to provide the ideological direction of social and political construction in France after the Revolution.

3. Professional Ethics and Corporate Organizations

Throughout Durkheim's moral doctrine, the question of occupation was always a focal point. As early as in "The Theory of Social Division of Labor", his discussion of the division of labor is different from the utilitarian view, and regards the division of labor as the process of social organization in modern society, rather than the result of pure capital competition. In addition, he continued the analytical tradition laid down by Montesquieu in On the Spirit of Law, and also regarded the division of labor as a mechanism for the social effect of people's feelings. The widespread state of public sentiment in modern society is closely related to the exchange, flow, contagion and social density brought about by the social division of labor. Thus, Durkheim's science of rights is no longer fully based on the rationality developed by Hobbes and Rousseau's theory of the state of nature and Kant's philosophy of consciousness, but establishes a self-contained existence based on social entities outside of individual existence, and this activity of higher existence has a more essential rational meaning. In contrast to the doctrine of self-consciousness, Durkheim explicitly proposed a doctrine of collective consciousness. That is, the existence of man, or the essence of human nature, of human rights, is the essence of the group or collective (i.e., the social body) in which he exists, and although there are differences in the individual's nature, in the differences in personality brought about by his sensibility, and in the social functions determined by his occupation, what really constitutes the sacred basis of his moral life must come from the society to which he is attached. Society is the source of its reason, the source of its faith, and the source of moral solidarity.

However, the Theory of the Division of Labor in Society is only a presupposition and some historical fragments, and (2) it has not yet been fully demonstrated. In the same way, the proof of society as a natural principle will not be confirmed until much later in The Fundamental Forms of Religious Life. An interesting clue here is that Durkheim's 1902 "Preface to the Second Edition" of The Social Division of Labor was largely derived from his lectures on "Public Courses in the Social Sciences" at the University of Bordeaux between 1890 and 1900, which are the main part of the first three chapters of Professional Ethics and Civic Morality. It can be seen from this that Durkheim has clearly revealed that the discussion of professional ethics here is entirely an expansion and deepening of the discussion of the "Theory of Social Division of Labor".

In his historical study of occupational groups, Durkheim highlighted the influence of Grandge, Varqin and Ravasseur, among others. Drawing on the ideas of works such as The Ancient City-States, he pointed out that the corporate organization mentioned in the Social Division of Labor can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome. Historians such as Grandge have gone beyond the previous analytical perspective of the family and the city-state, and have taken the collective professional life and its sacred beliefs as the third thread to understand the classical era. Following this thread, Durkheim examined the historical form of the corporation in particular. The basic starting point of this investigation is to explore the foundations of the science of morality and rights.

Durkheim begins his book Professional Ethics and Civic Morality by saying, "Anyone who wants to survive must become a citizen of the state." What is clear, however, is that there is one category of norms that is diverse; Together, they make up the ethics of the profession". This means that norms essentially have two forms, one is a uniform political norm, that is, each individual citizen under the community of public will mentioned by Rousseau, whose rights are formally sovereign in the form of the people, and at the same time as a subject of the state, must have their prescribed obligations. Durkheim said: "These obligations have similarities in their essential characteristics, such as the duty of loyalty and service, whenever and wherever they are". The second type of norm is different, for professional life, the obligations imposed by different professional organizations are often very different, and the professors and merchants, soldiers and priests each perform their own professions, and the normative requirements are not only very different, but even opposite. That is to say, professional ethics is different from civic morality, it is different from the logic of the family and the logic of the state, and must be protected by group organizations. It must appeal to a collective authority, which cannot be attributed to the special will of the individual, but can only derive from the requirements of functional professional norms, as well as from the collective sentiments and values of living together.

Obviously, the obligation of a State requires that the common provisions of political doctrine cannot be abandoned because of individual differences; The obligations of occupational groups are not only constrained by their differentiated organizational disciplines, but also inevitably have a mutually open functional space, which is quite consistent with the mechanism of mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity proposed in the "Theory of Social Division of Labor", that is, professional ethics and civic morality together constitute the public normative life in each historical era. Moreover, how to rise from an individual to a group, from a group to a state, and how to effectively combine professional ethics with civic morality in a step-by-step manner are the most important tasks of social science in this era.

In Durkheim's view, the establishment of normative science must be examined in the historical state of the origin of civilization. Durkheim traced the institutional system of the Roman "Hundred" and pointed out that this kind of professional organization with the characteristics of the handicraft guilds, although in its infancy, had already taken on the basic characteristics of the corporate system.

In Rome, corporations had the characteristics of religious societies, each with its own unique deities and rituals. Just as every family has a family god and every city has its own public god, every community has its own protector god, the shrine god. It is precisely because of the sacred worship of the Dharma, that the sacred common life becomes a bond in such corporate activities: whether it is a sacrificial ceremony at a festival, a banquet, a celebration, a public fund that can give members regular help in their lives, a public cemetery where members are buried after their deaths, and finally the word "Jingsha" engraved on their tombstones. Suffice it to say that the craftsmen in the professional societies lived a communal life, calling each other "brothers", as if they were brothers of the same clan, but not as narrow as the constraints of the family system, and whose intimacy could be compared to kinship, but beyond the ties of blood. These professional societies are combined into larger industrial organizations based on professional life and the beliefs of the community within their exclusive sphere, leveling the vertical hierarchical structure of the family and politics, and initially taking on a social dimension.

In Durkheim's view, the framework to which Christian societies belong is different from the model of city-state societies. The development of the corporation in the Middle Ages took on a different shape than that of Roman society. Undoubtedly, the influence of Christianity has not only cultivated people's concept of "work" in the religious dimension, but this occupational group has also played an increasing role in public politics. Citing Ravasseur's research, Durkheim pointed out that an incorporation was often formed in a specialized church, and after a solemn Mass, the members began a feast to bring together people of the same profession to make a testimony of faith through merit. In such organizations, there is a balanced budget system and a public fund of a charitable nature, with clear obligations between employers and between employers and employees; The trade association has strict rules for the employment methods, technical standards, trading rules, credit system, etc. of the industry. In this way of organization, people are connected, dependent, and share common ideas, interests, emotions, and careers. Common affairs are combined with common life to form the whole of moral norms in the everyday state.

Far from being a continuation of an old tradition, the revival of the corporation in the Middle Ages became "a regular structure made up of a part of the population". And this part of the population is precisely the origin of the third estate, the plebeian class or the bourgeoisie, that is, the origin of the modern world. From the perspective of social morphology, the bourgeoisie, which was originally an industrialist and merchantist, gradually transformed the market opened up by the aristocracy in their own territory into a gathering place for the industrial and commercial population through workshop production and trading activities, and the process of urbanization began as a result. Once the town became the center of manufacturing and trading activities, and the artisans and merchants became the main townspeople, the town was freed from the guardianship of the nobility and took on the character of a free city. Durkheim noted: "The words merchant and resident are synonymous with citizen: both apply equally to citizenship and residenthood." In this way, the structure of the handicraft industry became the earliest structural form of the European bourgeoisie". In other words, the acquisition of urban dwellers means the initial establishment of modern citizenship.

The establishment of the bourgeois dual-power structure shows that the development of the corporate organization in the middle and late Middle Ages not only strengthened its original professional character, but also revealed its public political nature in the process of urban liberalization. If the acquisition of residency is related to the professional nature of the corporation, then the acquisition of citizenship is also derived from this, at least within the limits of free towns. Therefore, the establishment of the corporate system in the Middle Ages was in fact closely linked to professional ethics and civic morality, and the process of professional organization of the corporation was inseparable from the constitution of civic politics in modern countries. This discussion also echoes the subtle relationship between public sentiment and rights in the early modern society, that is, the moral contagion mechanism of occupational groups, and the formation and regulation of the basic power structure of modern politics are just two sides of the same development process.

The independence of towns and cities due to the development of corporations led to a trend of "de-aristocracy" in Europe at that time, both morally and politically. In response to this trend, the corporation was also expanded, gradually forming a collection of guilds, and then forming a new form of commune organization. In almost all communes, the political system and the election of magistrates were based on the division of citizens into various craft guilds. Elections were often carried out through craft guilds, and the heads of corporations and communes were often elected at the same time. The corporation eventually laid the foundations for the entire political system, which emerged precisely from the development of the commune.

However, the advent of the large-scale industrial society has had a devastating effect on the once-existing corporate system, and in the face of the coercion of capitalization, the traditional occupational groups have been unable to adapt to the new competitive needs and have fallen apart. "All these facts explain the state of corporation on the eve of the Revolution: it became a walking corpse, a stranger who survived only in the social organism". Modern economic competition will uproot all the traditional elements that have existed in civilization in the past, and the fundamental driving force of modernity is to sweep away all past group forms and incorporate all social relations into the economic structure of big industry, which is also politically embodied in the situation of all-round revolution.

However, Durkheim made a clear judgment on the social crisis after the Great Revolution in "On the Division of Labor in Society" and "On Suicide": the reason for the anomie in which the whole society is in place lies precisely in the fact that the operation of society and politics has eliminated the role of all traditional factors. On the one hand, everyone is no longer protected by the traditional family, community and occupational group, and the atomistic individual with extreme egoism due to social alienation is immersed in the delusion of abstract consciousness and cannot extricate himself. On the other hand, the body politic, lacking the protective belt of the middle groups in society, has fallen into the vicious circle of permanent revolution. Therefore, it has become the basic way to rebuild society by finding a practical intermediary link between tradition and modernity, allowing lonely individuals to regain a sense of group attachment and moral self-sufficiency, and at the same time allowing modern democratic politics to be implemented in a link that can not only effectively organize economic life, but also fully represent public political demands.

4. From consensual contracts to fair contracts

From the perspective of political philosophy, the ideological basis of the so-called public politics of the Great Revolution was the theory of contract. Whether it is Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, etc., they are all the founders of contract theory. Therefore, in order to carry out a general reckoning of these doctrines, it is necessary to reconstruct the understanding of the social contract for people theoretically and historically, and to break down the notion that the political community from the individual will directly constitutes the universal will, which is also an important task for the reintegration of society and the state.

Durkheim pointed out that "for most people, the idea of contract is a very simple idea, which can be regarded as the first fact from which all other social facts originate". The modern concept of contract seems to have a logical self-evidentness, that is, based on the consensual state reached by free will, the relationship between rights and obligations is clearly determined, and all the social constraints in reality are also formed. Durkheim, in his essay "Individualism and the Intellectuals", said that Rousseau's social contract theory is based on the so-called "infallible" universal will, "which constitutes an impersonal average standard, to the exclusion of all individual considerations"; Similarly, according to Kant, "I can be sure that the ultimate action is justified only if the motives that affect me have nothing to do with the particular circumstances in which I am placed in them, but with my character as an abstract human being". For these two thinkers, the only form of moral obligation is the one that applies to all, and therefore necessarily presupposes a form of the idea of a "universal man."

However, although such a contractual element is based on a judgment of a state of nature, or a basic moral presupposition, it is so demanding that it can never be a system of early human origin, and must have arisen quite late. From the perspective of the history of political institutions and the history of people's feelings, the standard of contract theory is to use the design of concepts to remove the reality of society, which is difficult to accommodate the different ethical forms of diverse occupational groups, and at the same time ignores the sacred basis of contract. So, "there is nothing more deceptive than this apparent clarity". Since the above understanding of contract is only a hypothetical understanding and not an understanding based on social reality, and since contract reflects a socially binding relationship, its origin cannot be very early, so we should examine the historical origin of this binding relationship with a legal or moral nature.

In fact, this binding relation of contract comes from two different sources: or "derives from a state or condition in which a thing or person exists in a relationship in which these objects or persons possess (temporarily or permanently) certain properties in a particular environment and possess certain acquired properties by means of public consciousness"; or "from another state that is not a state of existence of a thing or a person, but only a state that both parties wish or desire to achieve." Obviously, the latter is what we call the contractual state today, but the history of the formation of the former helps to reveal the nature of this binding relation, that is, that the origin of rights is the basis of the sacredness of some universal thing or person; Even if it is the will of the individual, it is only the result of the transmission of this sacredness.

Citing anthropologist Robson Smith's work on blood contracts or covenants, Durkheim pointed out that in early societies, the bonds on which groups depended were those of the natural groups to which people belonged. "Food makes blood, and blood creates life", people eat the same food, which means sharing the same resources of life and sharing the common gods. Whether it is the alliance of blood or the wine and bread of the Christian Eucharist, they bind themselves by sharing holy things, or only through the fusion of blood to obtain membership in the community. In this case, the state of existence of the thing or person is sacred, above all human beings and becomes the self-contained source of rights, and all other beings are derived products. Similarly, in Roman and Germanic law, the contract of rem, i.e. the rights and obligations of a person in relation to something, "depends on the state and condition of the thing, as well as on its legal status". Generally speaking, the subject of the contract is hereditary property, and since the object of the transaction is part of the hereditary property of the other party, the party receiving the thing becomes the debtor. Therefore, he is obliged to restore it or hand over the corresponding equivalent as a sign of respect. This is where the custom of paying a deposit (arles) comes from. (3) However, it is also common to symbolically use "something of no value", such as straw to symbolize sacredness or gloves used in Germanic law, to represent the sacred equivalent in the exchange of hereditary property. The Roman custom of taking the oath to the extreme of the above symbolism. In the so-called solemn covenant, people give a divine power to words and rituals, and once spoken, words cease to belong to the speaker and cannot be revoked. Through vows and beggars, the divine being becomes a protector of the exchange of promises, and the binding relationship is finally established through sacred solemn ceremonies.

It is only when the continuous development of trade, as Montesquieu said, leads to a sudden increase in social density, and people will dilute the ritual character due to the strangeness of the trading subjects in the market, so that language is only used to express the will. That's when the consensual contract comes in. The result of the consensus of the will seems to be that the two parties can produce a contractual binding relationship according to their common will, just as the classical contract theory assumes, and the simple declaration of will is the ultimate basis for the conclusion of the contract. But Durkheim believed that this so-called consensual contract was still insufficient. Because since the reciprocal will can be achieved at will, it can also be reversed and revoked at will, and from the will alone we cannot obtain anything certain, nor can rights be derived from it. In fact, the rapid expansion of modern economic life has "demystified" the various rituals of the original contract, making the bond of contract more secular. Just like the anomie depicted by Durkheim, in the midst of brutal economic competition, people "move these boundaries almost arbitrarily", and the will to equality appealed to by contract theory is reduced in reality to the will of only the strongest power to have the upper hand, and "freedom is only a false name".

Therefore, we must pay attention to another fact that the contract exists: if the contract is to avoid the arbitrariness of free will, it still needs security and protection, and the solemnity of the contract has not been completely eliminated. In other words, in modern society, the kind of contract in Roman society that requires witchcraft and sacred processes to be protected, that is, the form of the mandatory contract, although the secularization process expelled the position of the gods, still needs to establish a double binding relationship. The conclusion of any consensual contract is not sufficient to rely solely on the consensus of the will of the reciprocal people, and it also needs to rely on the existence of a supra-individual will as the ultimate basis. Durkheim pointed out: "If God had been a party to the contract, He bound them with God; If society also intervenes in the people who represent it, it also has a binding effect on them". Even if the ancient gods withdrew, there must be a higher self-contained being who appears as the ultimate guarantor of the contract, so that the consensual contract can have the conditions of the essential contract and thus continue to exist effectively.

Only in this way can a new fair contract be formed. The emergence of fair contracts will transform the entire property system. It completely refutes the idea that property is dependent on inheritance as its primary source, and thus has a direct and significant impact on the structure of rights in society as a whole and on the concept of human rights: "Fairness requires that we cannot value the services that people provide or exchange in a way that is less than their value". This means that "whatever value a person receives must be equal to the services he provides". In the event of an inequivalence, it means that the excess value of the privilege must come from the labor of others, and not from their own labor, which is precisely the part of others that they have unlawfully deprived of. Therefore, this distribution will be fair only if the distribution of things between people corresponds to the social deportion of each person; It is only when each person's property corresponds to the social services he provides that he truly clarifies his rights and obligations. Only in this way will the individual become a social being, and he will gain more sympathy and goodwill, because he will become a moral entity in the true sense of the word by identifying himself as a subject through social distribution.

The essence of a fair contract is that the rights and obligations of the people stipulated in the contract are not simply determined by the agreement of the parties to the contract, but are determined by the distribution mechanism formed by the whole society to maintain and safeguard the interests and values of the whole. The freedom of the will in the contract must first be divided into the content of social existence and acquire moral attributes before it can become true freedom. Durkheim pointed out that in the morality of human behavior, there are often two kinds of obligations: one is the obligation to decide fairly, and the other is the obligation to decide with benevolence. Although fairness is a social effect produced by law or system, it must also be rooted in the emotional law of "compassion". The sympathetic basis of the contract is, firstly, to provide social-emotional support to those who give more than they receive and who are not compensated for their services, and secondly, to give an emotional balance to all previously unequal states, ensuring that everyone receives the emotional structure of an equal society. The inequalities of reality, which arise from differences in individual endowments and merits, must be transcended by the human emotional principle of charity. It is a kind of universal emotion that is based on the development of human sociality itself, and it can overcome the differences caused by "all genetic talents and mental powers". Benevolence in the concept of universal harmony is a kind of divine sympathy, an emotional transcendence of the existing world based on the universality of human beings. Durkheim repeatedly emphasized that only the religious dimension of human nature to constrain the free exercise of the will can establish the ultimate basis for fairness for contract. "Only society can exercise total dominion over nature, legislate for nature, and place this moral equality above the material inequalities inherent in things."

Durkheim's transcendence of the traditional contract theory aims to prove that: 1. Taking the totality of society as the ultimate basis, the principle of fairness goes beyond the scope of the right of contract and becomes the basis of the sacrosanct property right; 2. The conclusion of the contract is not only the consensual result of the will of the individual, but must also be bound by a higher social existence as an equitable constraint; 3. The contract stipulates not only a legal relationship, but also the norms formed by society have both legal effect and emotional effect based on sympathy; 4. The duality of human nature enables people to establish a common religious sentiment in common consciousness, reason, and language, thus balancing all inequalities that exist in reality.

5. Civic Ethics in Democracy

From the perspective of theoretical development, the discussion of contract rights and property rights in Professional Ethics and Civic Ethics clearly echoes the unfinished discussion of two types of social solidarity in Social Division of Labor. In his early works, Durkheim only saw the social basis of the modern division of labor from the difference between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity, or the overall social equilibrium from the transition from repressive law to restorative law, but rarely analyzed the social roots of its formation from the contract theory basis of civil politics.

Now, with the further combing and criticism of contract theory, the basis of social existence has been implemented in the field of civil politics, and the theoretical problem of the state has come into view. Clearly, Durkheim made a reversal of the question of mechanical and organic solidarity here, that is, the relationship between the two is not only a relationship of contrast between the past and the present, but also a dual relationship that exists in modern society: that is, people are both concretely in professional life and in civil politics in general, both of which reveal the ultimate ground of "social existence". In a morphological sense, it is not the social organization that ultimately abolishes the state, but together with the state it constitutes a double bond of unity. Accordingly, Durkheim regarded professional organizations such as corporations as a "sub-group", while the state to which all belonged was called a "primary group". The size and scope of the state, as a political society, is clearly greater than that of all group organizations. But on the question of the relationship between the two groups, Durkheim clearly focused more on Montesquieu's doctrine than on the super-volitional state as constructed by traditional contractualists.

Citing the discussion in On the Spirit of Law, Durkheim pointed out that Montesquieu had long recognized that "the form of society that can be most fully organized is the monarchy". This form contains "intermediate, subordinate, and subservient powers." Durkheim argues that Montesquieu's discussion reveals a secret of modern political formation: that these subgroups "are not only necessary to direct particular family or professional interests, but also constitute the first condition of a higher organization." This social group not only has the right to rule, but is also called the state in a more special way, which is not diametrically opposed to the state itself, but on the contrary, its existence is the premise of the state: only with them can there be a state". In short, the constitution of a modern political community is not merely a consensual state formed by the direct transfer of rights by all individuals, just as a contract is not only a consensual state reached by the will of two individuals. On the contrary, the formation of the political state is first and foremost based on sub-groups such as professional organizations, rather than on the form of sovereignty formed by the transfer of rights by all individuals.

Thus, if the state is the agency of the ruling authority, then political society should refer to a composite group, with the state as its supreme body. And the real relationship between the state and society is: "When the state thinks and makes decisions, we cannot say that society thinks and makes decisions through the state, but only that the state thinks and makes decisions for the sake of society." The state is not merely a tool for guidance and centralization, but in a sense it is the nucleus of the organization of the subgroups themselves". In fact, the emergence of the modern division of labour not only created the conditions for the formation of diverse occupational groups, but also established the moral basis through the organic solidarity of the collective consciousness. However, although this concrete moral consciousness overcomes the abstract state of contract theory that is purely deduced from individual wills to public will, it still cannot form a broader basis for identity. There is still a danger that the morality maintained by corporations alone will continue to diverge due to the intensification of the division of labor and competition. Therefore, how to integrate the ideals of the state with the ideals of humanity is the key to laying down the universal moral obligations of mankind. ④

It is also in this sense that the state is also a kind of group, a kind of supreme group of its own, carrying the emotional identity of a nation. At the same time, the state is also a group of public officials in the sense of its practical function, and the so-called public service is the service of the state, and the courts, the army, and the church are all the organizational forms of the state's public office. Unlike the corporation as an occupational group, the corporation is the vehicle of a wide variety of collective emotions and collective mentalities in society, and the state can only hear the "faint echo" of these emotions and mentalities. The corporation is an organ that shapes the moral foundation of society by constituting collective emotions, and the function of the state is mainly reflected in social thinking: the representatives in the representative system do not come directly from the individual citizen, but from the various professional groups that represent the individual, and they combine various ideas and emotions from different groups to form a resolution, which is then handed over to the executive body for specific implementation. The State is prominently embodied in deliberative collective thinking activities, in which general political rights are "expressed" through the "representation" of sub-organizations. (5) The administrative branches, on the other hand, only act as representatives of the executive and do not embody the will of the state as representatives of the life of the state, as is the case with the representatives of the corporation. Durkheim metaphorically said that the relationship between the state and its administrative departments is like that of the central nervous system and the muscular system.

Durkheim's political structure through the mediation of the corporate system is quite profound: only through the functionalization and moralization of the professional group can the individual truly construct a higher political body and realize the political rights of each individual. The starting point of this political theory is to overcome the dual path of traditional liberalism and socialism in the construction of modern politics, which is different from the understanding of the state as the overseer of social life as conceived by liberal economists, nor the understanding of the state as a huge machine of economic operation, as the early socialists did. Similarly, as far as political systems are concerned, while both liberalism and socialism profess to follow the principles of democracy, one emphasizes only democracy based directly on the freedom of individual will, and the other emphasizes only democracy based on general social equality; In terms of the function of social thinking, one "comes from the collective masses of society and is scattered among the masses", while the other "comes from specialized institutions such as the state or government". Durkheim believed that although these two types of political theories established the basis of the legitimacy of modern politics from their own perspectives, they both became the source of chaos because they were biased.

Proceeding from the substantive issues, the true nature of democracy includes two aspects: first, the radiation scope of government consciousness, that is, the scope of individual consciousness that the government can integrate is very large; Second, there should be very close communication between the consciousness of the government and the consciousness of many individuals. Durkheim starkly pointed out: "In fact, the role of the state is not to express and generalize ideas that have not been considered by the masses of the people, but to add to them a more deliberate thought, which is very different." The state is, and must be, a new, original representative nucleus that enables society to function itself more rationally, rather than dictated by vague emotions". At the same time, he stressed: "All these deliberations, all these discussions, all these statistical surveys, all this administrative information, are at the disposal of the Council of Government, and it is constantly expanding in size: all this is the starting point of a new spiritual life". This means that the state can neither become a special ideology apart from all individual consciousness, nor is it directly subordinate to the citizens, and reduced to a mere response to the will of the citizens and public opinion. In fact, the "tyranny of democracy" may come from the chaotic state of dispersion, hesitation and fragmentation caused by the will of many individuals, or from the absolute authority that arises in response to this state. ⑥

Durkheim pointed out that "our social ills have the same origin as our political ills", that is, "the lack of sub-organizations capable of connecting the individual with the state". In order to avoid the crisis state of chaos and swaying from side to side that modern politics shows, it is necessary to face up to the importance of sub-groups in political construction. Durkheim made a clear judgment about the social anomie and political crisis since the Revolution, that is, in political principle, "these subgroups play a vital role if the state does not suppress the individual; These groups are also necessary if the state wants to fully get rid of the individual". In other words, if the main function of the state is to respond to the ideas and emotions of the majority of the people who make up the sentiment of the people through the form of deliberative thinking, then it cannot rely solely on the so-called authoritative judgments it makes to enforce the will of the state, nor can it rely solely on the suffrage of representatives to calculate the number of people who support a certain opinion, which is tantamount to "almost completely abandoning the idea of the state". If this is avoided, it is necessary to build a comprehensive public bond between the individual and the state in the political system, so that the design of the electoral system and the representative system should make professional groups such as corporations a real electoral unit. For in a modern society of division of labor, it is the moral discipline that develops in professional life, rather than the traditional local loyalty, that can establish such political ties.

Durkheim boldly envisioned the future political structure of the state: "We can imagine what it would be like to establish or revive a corporation according to the plan we have outlined: at the top of each corporation there is a committee that directs the corporation and manages its internal affairs...... Corporations and their institutions are always functioning, so that the meetings of the Government constituted through them must not lose their links with the various committees of society; They will never risk dividing themselves, but will quickly and proactively feel the changes that are taking place in the people at a deep level. We can guarantee their independence without having to interrupt the communication between them." Only in this way can the integration of interdependent and mediated morality and politics between professional ethics and civic morality be truly established.

In Durkheim's view, the relationship between society and the state is not an antagonistic relationship that follows their own logic and limits each other; Nor is it a natural transition from the empirical utilitarian life of the individual to the political state through the occupational group. In professional ethics and civic morality, "society" plays a multifaceted role: first, society activates the present life of historical traditions, and the form of community of corporations, as well as the rituals, consciousness, and spirit that condense the collective public nature, are indispensable foundations for the construction of modern morality. Secondly, the occupational group constitutes an important intermediary connecting the individual and the state, which can not only serve as the organizational carrier to which the individual is attached, but also constitute a flexible protective belt for the national politics, so as to avoid the repeated changes of the blind individual due to political dissatisfaction and the formation of permanent revolution and restoration. Another significance of the existence of society is to revise the simple understanding of democracy as one person, one vote, if only "democracy is understood as the political form of social management itself...... It is tantamount to saying that democracy is a society without a state"; The democratic subject of a representative state, in which the professional group exercises the supreme state power as representatives, thus closely integrating the specific feelings of the people with the general form of government, is precisely the response to the substantive question raised by Montesquieu.

After the baptism of the Great Revolution, Durkheim realized that the political composition of modern society has always faced several difficulties. The rapid expansion of modern economic competition often has a tendency to destroy old social and cultural traditions. The abstract political design laid down from the theory of voluntarism and the theory of contract often cooperates with this, either to the extreme of abstract egoism, to which people are widely scattered in all kinds of absolute opinions, but to make their hearts fall into greater unease; Either abstract totalitarianism is pushed to the extreme, and it is rendered with conceptual nationalist sentiments, so that politics is always in a latent state of war. (7) Thus, both individual rights and State sovereignty need to be regulated, regulated and lubricated in a new way.

In people's overall life, the individual, the family, the professional organization and the state are a basic structure that is interconnected and constituted. However, different paths have been tried for the construction of this general life. Most liberals emphasize the rights of the individual, and the politics deduced by the contract theory are also the consensual results of the individual's will. On the contrary, the early French socialists mostly started from the systematic structure of modern society, and either regarded the state as an expansion of an economic organization or a systematization of industrial organization, so they developed either anarchism or the historical consequences of statism.

Compared to the above two paths, Durkheim's perspective is very different. He first understood the logic of modern social and political composition from the perspective of people's feelings, and clarified its organizational form by tracing the history of traditional society, so as to establish the social basis of individual morality and ethics in modern society. At the same time, he also comprehensively criticized the modern view of the state from the perspective of contract theory by meticulously tracing the historical structure of contract. Durkheim pointed out that the formation of democratic politics is neither the result of the transfer of individual will and rights, nor the embodiment of pure state authority, but the intermediary role formed by professional groups such as corporations as the basic unit of politics, and the final implementation of national politics on the basis of the combination of professional ethics and civic morality.

Today, in the midst of China's far unfinished process of modern change, it is instructive to reflect on Durkheim's social and political theory. It is precisely because of the history and reality of successive revolutions that Durkheim realized that relying only on the general principles of politics to construct an abstract national consciousness will inevitably ignore the most basic popular sentiments of society, destroy traditional values, and devour all rational elements of reality. In the same way, resisting national politics by relying solely on conceptual social consciousness will drown people in a sea of opinions, and in turn will quickly disintegrate the political order and civic morality. Therefore, the social reconstruction after the Great Revolution is by no means a kind of "depoliticized" social reconstruction, but by re-finding and restoring the traditional life in reality, comprehensively establishing an intermediate organization group that protects individual rights, cultivates professional ethics and maintains social unity, and uses this as a representative subject to construct the political system of the state, so as to avoid abstraction at both the individual and the state level. More importantly, the State, as the primary group to which all belongs, is established not only on its own interests and its power in the performance of public services, but also on the basis of the more universal ideals of humanity to provide its citizens with the most worthy of attachment and the most worthy of obligations. In short, only the reasons of the State, which are rooted in the sentiments of the people and their traditions, have their sacred basis and are the surest guarantee of civil rights and morality.

(1) In fact, Durkheim offered a course called "The Physiology of Rights and Sentiments" in the 1890-1891 academic year, which was interrupted for five years, until 1896, when it was first taught under the title "Physique générale des moeurs et du droit" (General Physics of Sentiment and Rights). After leaving Bordeaux, Durkheim lectured at the Sorbonne in 1904 and 1912, a few years before his death.

(2) See Chapter 1 for a discussion of primitive tribes, Greece and Rome, Judaism, and early Christian doctrine.

(3) 对此问题的详尽考察,可参见莫斯对于总体呈现体系(total benefits system)的研究。

④ 参见米勒对涂尔干关于人类的爱国主义(human patrie)与大同论(cosmopolitanism)之关系的讨论。

(5) In Durkheim's theory, the concept of "representation" in political doctrine and "representation" (or "appearance") in religious doctrine is représentation, which precisely shows that representative system in the political sphere is like the process of representation in religious activities, which is an expression of divine existence and the presentation of social emotions.

(6) See Wei Wenyi's analysis of the phenomenon of the parallel emergence of abstract individualism and ultra-nationalism after the French Revolution.

(7) See Durkheim's analysis of the pathological volitional activity in the First World War in Germany above all.

*This article was originally published in Sociological Research, No. 4, 2014.

"Theory of the Division of Labor in Society" by Emil Durkheim and translated by Qu Jingdong

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