GERHARD VOWINCKEL

HAPPINESS IN DURKHEIMS SOCIOLOGICAL POLICY OF MORALS

(Received 1 February, 2000; Accepted 1 April, 2000) ABSTRACT. Emile Durkheims (18581917) concept of society has its most succinct expression in the call to view social facts, and especially moral norms, as things, as natural facts. A moral-political purpose is to prevent anomy. Anomy spreads when people view moral norms as contingent. It contains the seed of social anarchy and the source of unhappiness because it exposes humans to the chaos and the insatiability of their individual desires. The article places Durkheims thinking within its social historical contexts. KEY WORDS: anomy, Durkheim, happiness, modernity.

Emile Durkheim was born in 1858, the son of a rabbi. Having nished the coll` ege in his home town of Epinal with distinction, he was accepted after a time of preparation as a student at the famous Ecole normale sup erieure. Three years later, he passed the examination for the Agr eg e de Philosophie and was employed as a teacher in Sens and Saint-Quentin. During a one year sabbatical he studied social sciences, rst in Paris and then in Germany. After his return he published several articles e.g. about The positive science of morals in Germany and Philosophy in German universities. In 1887 he was appointed professor for pedagogy and sociology at the university of Bordeaux, and gave the rst lecture in sociology in a French university. After studies of precursors of sociology Durkheim nished his dissertation, De la division du travail social, in 1893. Two years later Les r` egles de la m ethode sociologique was published. In 1896 a chair for sociology was established for Durkheim, and the journal Lann ee sociologique was founded. In 1897 Le suicide appeared, Durkheims study of suicide as a social phenomenon. From 1902 onwards Durkheim taught pedagogy l at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1912 he published Les formes e ementaires de la vie religieuse. His chair was made a chair for sociology. In 1915 Durkheims only son was killed at the front in Saloniki. Coping with this tragic incident, Durkheim wrote two books: Lallemagne au-dessus e allemande et la guerre and Qui a voulu la de tout La mentalit guerre? Les origines de la guerre dapr` es les documents diplomatiques. Durkheim died in Paris in November 1917. He is the great classiee sociologique, a cal French sociologist. Around his journal Lann number of scholars assembled. Durkheim and the Durkheim school
Journal of Happiness Studies 1: 447464, 2000. 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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lastingly determined the development of sociology in France and other countries In his central methodological book Rules of sociological method from 1895 Emile Durkheim stated as rst and most fundamental rule (. . .): consider social facts as things (1964). As social facts he mainly designated what society forces people to commit or to omit: its normative structures. Durkheim reserved these things for sociology as its subject matter. Its own objects of study made sociology a science in its own right and Durkheim actually succeeded in establishing sociology as a science in French universities. Speaking about social facts as things was to determine not only sociological thinking but also social action (1965, p. 163). According to Durkheim societies are part of nature; the moral laws to which they conform are, as he asserted, as real as the laws of nature and as compulsory (1973a, p. 161, 300; 1977a, p. 317). By inquiring into these moral laws sociology helps people to realise the necessity of the laws and to comply with them voluntarily. It makes people virtuous and thus free (1973a, p. 161 f.). The following inquiry does not deal with the scientic aspects of Durkheims sociology but with its inherent moral policy. First the moral political problem that Durkheim tried to solve is elaborated. I will do this by drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw the same problem and described it even more bluntly than Durkheim. I will then attempt to analyse the cognitive structure of the moral-sociological way of thinking Durkheim suggests to the readers of his pedagogic and sociological writings. Relying on Piaget, I will describe this way of thinking as sociocentric, and will elaborate some of its qualities in use. My description focuses on the strategic place that personal happiness, the subjective enjoyment of life, occupies within Durkheims general line of argument. Finally I will interpret Durkheims sociological moral policy as a response to social challenges of his time, and will try to put it into the line of European sociological thought.

DURKHEIMS PROBLEM IN ROUSSEAUS WORDS: THE CONFLICT OF DUTY AND DESIRE

Durkheims problem and so its solution will now be described in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who writes: Human suffering consists of the opposition between our situation and our wishes,

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between our duties and our desires, between nature and social institutions, between man and citizen (1977, p. 239).1 Closing this gap between desires and social duties is the basic motive and central concern of Rousseaus philosophy starting from the rst Discours up to Emile and Contrat social. Only those people, he writes, who are civil by their nature and citizens by their desire will be one. They will be good and happy (1977, p. 239). Mens sufferings and misery arise from the social constraints to which they have to submit. But it is not the restrictions to their freedom of action as such that make men unhappy. The laws of nature, say that of gravity, also restrict the freedom of action and nobody would think of suffering from that. It is rather that the restrictions are due to commandments stated by men, to human arbitrariness, that makes them the source of human misery. And this already brings us to the solution of the problem in Rousseaus words: If the laws of nations could, like those of nature, have an inexibility that no human force could ever conquer, dependence on men would then become dependence on things again (1979, p. 85). One of Rousseaus most important educational principles elaborated in Emile is to represent the rules with which the pupil has to comply as inviolable laws of nature. Negative education, interning the pupil in a morally aseptic educational environment purged from all bad examples has to prevent him from experiencing and conceiving the rules as the contingent work of humans. Unrelenting compulsion has to convince him that moral laws are as irresistible as laws of nature. His personal moral habitus is moulded according to unquestionable social norms. However, this reduces the gap between duties and desires only from the side of the desires. From the other side it is the legislation through the volont e g en erale which brings social duties as close as ever possible to individual desires. In a paper representing Rousseau as a precursor of sociology, Durkheim emphasises those elements of the concept of volont e g en erale which it shares with his own concept of conscience collective. It is the question of the origin of the volont e g en erale respectively the common will arising from the conscience collective on which Rousseaus and Durkheims ways separate. By using the idea of a social contract Rousseau makes the common will result from the individual wills. From the point of view of moral policy he thereby risks the realisation, that moral norms are not absolute but contingent and socially constructed. Durkheim attacks this idea, that the common will, i.e. the

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social facts, might arise from mens individual wills as sociological atomism (K onig, 1965, p. 33). Again and again he obliges his readers to view common consciousness as a reality sui generis, as a contraint that intrudes and imposes itself on individual consciousness from outside. In his opinion, arguing against this constraint by referring to the wills of individual humans even if united in a common will is sociologically incorrect, morally questionable and, as we shall see, dangerous to human happiness.

DURKHEIMS SOLUTION: MORAL REALISM

As part of his psychological research on the development of intelligence Jean Piaget also investigated the development of moral thinking. As levels of moral thinking he distinguishes morals of authority in children from ve to eight years of age, which normally give way to morals of mutual respect at the age of nine to twelve years. The main feature of morals of authority is what Piaget terms somewhat misleadingly moral realism. The children do not differentiate between moral laws and laws of nature. They ascribe to both of them the same kind of validity, a validity that is independent from human judgement. However, they do not use the empirical concept of nature from modern science but an idealistic-metaphysical concept of nature. This is the concept of an essence in which is and ought are not differentiated. The laws of this nature are laws of a higher, transcendental reality which are not falsied (scientically) by a deviating empirical reality on the contrary: they (morally) falsify empirical reality. The children view human deviations from these moral laws of nature as culpable offences, in a way as a sort of degeneration. Durkheims faits sociaux, too, belong to these laws of nature: they are as indubitable, as independent from human opinion and as little disprovable by human offences. Rousseau writes in Emile: Keep the child in dependence only on things. You will have followed the order of nature in the progress of his education (1979, p. 85). Still, he could not seriously have insisted on the thing-like quality of social norms without contradicting himself. Durkheim insists on it. What in Rousseau seems to be a pious educational fraud, Durkheim really means. According to his rst and fundamental rule of sociological method, moral norms really have an existence independent from human judgment. The force of the common feelings behind them is as real and as effective as the forces that move

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the physical world (1973a, p. 139). It is these sound facts and not ideals of humanity far from reality which must guide action. Sociology is secularised theology, which testies to the moral and mental superiority of society, that reality which humans of pre-modern societies knew and worshipped as deity (165, p. 203). Durkheim systematically mixes up the metaphysical and the empirical concepts of nature. Thus he can quite naturally recommend scientic lessons as a preparation for moral education. They promote, as he puts it, sound intellectual habits, from which morality can benet, for the social world repeats the main features of the natural world (1973a, pp. 300, 308). Scientic teaching has to achieve in lay schools, what religious teaching had once achieved: the strengthening of morality. The scientic conception of determinism contributes to this end by conrming the idea that the person himself or herself is bound to absolute laws (1977a, p. 313 f.). Durkheims sociology takes up the tradition of Auguste Comte, whose positive philosophy was to establish scientically the principles of morals so rmly, that they would leave no more room for weak excuses (1974, p. 507). Like Comte but less obtrusive, Durkheim also endows social facts with attributes of divinity. The scientic reconstruction of God as the concrete symbol of society must not, as he says, deprive the latter of its holy, sacrosanct nature (1973a, pp. 64, 151). Moral education must preserve to the norms the natural dignity, the authority of a higher reality, otherwise it does not work. Durkheims society takes that place tre, in secularised thinking, which God has in religion, that of the grand e of humanity in Comtes thinking. The sociologically established understanding of their own dependence and inferiority must bring humans to voluntary submission (1965, p. 203). In the thinking mode of moral realism, as Piaget calls it, judgements about good and evil are understood to be judgements about facts. Positive or negative moral values the judging person attributes to a human action or to an acting human are in his view actual qualities of the actions or humans. His or her judgements are irreversible, for there can be no arguing about facts. Following Piaget we call such judgements sociocentric. Judging sociocentrically means judging from a particular normative point of view without being aware of this point of view as the centre of a particular valuing perspective. While proceeding from morals of authority to morals of mutual respect, humans decenter their sociocentric judgements. Judgements about good and evil become contingent and thus reversible, supposed objective facts become (inter)subjective attributions of value.

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THE DISMISSED ALTERNATIVE: MORAL RELATIVISM

Having lost their appearance of indubitable and irrefutable metaphysical facts and thus their self-evident validity, societal values need to be justied. The value standards of this justication can only be taken from beyond the societal values. For example, in the social and moral philosophy of the 17th and early 18th centuries the interests (the happiness) of the humans in a society constituted the criterion by which social institutions and norms for individual action were valued (cf. Vowinckel, 1989). Normative restrictions to individual freedom of action were justied, if the involved people could agree with these restrictions in their own well-considered interest. The concept of selfinterest summarised the various leanings, needs, passions and desires of the non-socialised, pre-moral person. Thus the criteria by which moral or legal norms were valued were not moral themselves. Moral virtue showed itself in the far-sighted management of the opportunities to satisfy ones own pre-moral needs. As Thomas Hobbes and others declared, to act morally was a dictate of reason in the interest of ones own happiness. The means of thinking provided by this happiness doctrine were used in the upper classes of the 17th and 18th centuries and especially in the aristocracy (see Vowinckel, 1992). The dissemination of middle class morals during the second half of the 18th century, in Germany above all Kantian idealism, put a nal end to the happiness doctrine (Vowinckel, 1989). When this doctrine had already fallen into disrepute within the middle class public, Jean Paul wrote its obituary:
There is no teaching that has so many teachers as the happiness- or pleasuredoctrine as if it had not already established its chair and throne in every cats, vultures and other animals heart. If you arouse enthusiasm for the pure dignity, justice, and religion with something other than with the gure of these heavenly children themselves (. . .), then you have sullied the pure spirit and made it hypocritical and low (. . .). (1963, p. 214)

In a moral paradigm shift, the middle classes re-established the morals of authority, which no longer tolerated justifying norms by the claims to happiness of the people involved. The commandment of duty was made independent of such justications; it was made absolute. In the words of Immanuel Kant, the judging person had to imagine it in its whole appearance, sufcing itself and not needy of any other

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inuence (1978, p. 131). This concept of duty, the regard for the norm because it is the norm, the subjugation of ones own nature is for Durkheim the most important achievement of post-ancient European culture (1977a, p. 194). In view of duty, which is xed heteronomously, by society, there must not be reection, no assessment of consequences, only obedience (1973a, p. 84 f.; 1981, p. 286). Middle-class teachers of virtue at the end of the 18th century rejected the rational morals of happiness doctrine, mainly arguing that it was immoral. Durkheim adds that it also is unscientic. Self-interests are unt for establishing lasting and solid social bonds. For where interest alone reigns, he writes,
as nothing arises to check the egoisms confronting one another, each self nds itself in relation to the other on a war footing, and any truce in this perpetual antagonism cannot be of long duration. Self-interest is, in fact, the least constant thing in the world (1984, p. 152).

The emergence of law and morals cannot be explained by their usefulness for the humans involved. Well-reasoned self-interest is unable to restrain human desires and passions. Mens passions, Durkheim asserts, are only stayed by a moral presence they respect. If all authority of this kind is lacking, it is the law of the strongest that rules, and a state of warfare, either latent or acute, is necessarily endemic (1984, p. xxxii f.).

ANOMY AS SOURCE OF HUMAN MISERY

Durkheim makes use of an old theological and anthropological idea, the notion of a distinguished position of man among the creatures: Governed by their instincts animals live in natural harmony with their social environment. It was the awakening consciousness which in animals disrupted the state of balance in which they were peacefully sleeping (1973b, p. 282). The awakening consciousness has widened the horizon of human desires beyond any limit or measure; it has withdrawn to the passions the rm hold within here and now. It is human intelligence or, biblically speaking, eating the fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that becomes the source of human misery. It bursts the restriction of the wishes to the spatially and timely presence

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and opens to them the innite space of the imaginable. Where hoping no longer nds a hold in the real world, it must necessarily be disappointed. For unlimited wishes are, as Durkheim writes, by their denition unfullable; and it is not without reason that this insatiability is seen as the symptom of an illness. (. . .) There is (. . .) nothing that could appease them. An insatiable thirst is a never-ending chastisement (1973b, p. 281). Durkheim varies this theme again and again:
A need or a desire that knows no bounds and no rules (. . .) can, for the people it affects, only be a source of permanent agony. (. . .) Is there anything more disappointing than to aim for a goal that cannot be reached because the closer we come the more it recedes? It is vain haste which does not differ from walking on the spot and which leaves only sadness and discouragement in its wake. (1973a, p. 93)

Exiled from the paradisical narrowness of animal existence after eating from the tree of knowledge, man can regain happiness and peace of mind only through submitting humbly to the commandments of society or of God, its pre-scientic symbol. The entirety of moral rules, writes Durkheim,
is in fact an ideal protective wall around each person against which the waves of human passions break. (. . .) Since they can be restrained, it is possible to satisfy them. If the wall gives way at any place, the primitive human forces will immediately break their way through the breach. Once released, they meet no more connes (. . .); they can only painfully rush at a goal which permanently escapes their grasp (1973a, p. 95).

Moral education must teach the child that happiness does not indefinitely increase with power, knowledge or wealth. The child has to learn that the means to be happy consists in adopting achievable goals (1973a, p. 102).
Discipline is, in other words, not only useful in the interest of society and the indispensable means without which there can be no regulated co-operation. It is in the interest of the individual too, for it teaches us that restraint in our wishes, without which humans cannot be happy. (1973a, p. 101)

When Durkheim speaks about discipline he does not mean selfdiscipline, which could arise from the worldly wisdom of the acting individuals. The discipline he means arises from the compelling

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strength of common consciousness. If common consciousness loses strength then the dams that restrain human desires and passions get leaky. Anomy spreads. Divested of its outer support, individual mental life plunges into chaos, into a whirl of conicting and insatiable desires even down to the extreme consequence: suicide. According to Durkheim, the number of the so-called anomic suicides always grows when and where common consciousness loses its strength, which disciplines individual mental life (1973b, p. 296). Especially in economic life the unchaining of competition and of industrial progress has destroyed socially binding standards to which humans could orient the objectives of their individual lives, and which they could adopt as criteria of happiness and satisfaction. Thus the feverish activity in this sector of society which has spread to all others. From the top to the bottom of the ladder covetousness is aroused. (. . .) Nothing will be able to appease it (. . .) (1973b, p. 292 f.). Anomic suicide is typical for modern societies and according to Durkheim its statistical increase proves the decrease of average happiness. What the mounting tide of self-inicted deaths proves is not only that there is a greater number of individuals who are too unhappy to bear going on living (. . .) but that the general happiness of society has decreased (1984, p. 193). Anomy in Durkheims sense is associated with an increase of the general awareness of the contingency of social norms. Social facts lose the appearance of things. Judgements about facts that ascertain the objective goodness or evilness seemingly inherent in humans or their deeds become value judgements attributed to humans and their deeds by the persons judging. These value-judgements result from a particular value perspective, which turns out to be one among a variety of perspectives and thus reveals the contingency of the judgement. What Piaget describes as decentration, as the overcoming of childlike sociocentrism, namely the transition from morals of authority to morals of co-operation, in Durkheims sociology it takes the appearance of a disastrous development for society and the involved individuals.

BETWEEN SCIENCE AND POLITICS OF MORALS

Piaget writes about Durkheims primitive sociocentrism (1973b, p. 227), not to impugn his personal morality but to characterise the type of morals, which Durkheim identies in his sociological writings

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with morals as such, and which he also makes the ideal of his moral pedagogy. Piaget holds against Durkheim:
Contemporary civilized society, that, namely, to which we are seeking to adapt the child, is tending more and more to substitute the rule of co-operation for the rule of constraint. The essence of democracy resides in its attitude towards law as a product of the collective will, and not as something emanating from a transcendent will or from the authority established by divine right. It is therefore the essence of democracy to replace the unilateral respect of authority by the mutual respect of autonomous wills. (Piaget, 1965, p. 362 f.)

One may ask, whether Durkheim really failed so see this. In my opinion he did not want to see it. At many points his thinking shows the distinctive inconsistency of an enlightened conservatism that itself has long ago lost the ingenuousness and moral innocence it bemoans. Like Arnold Gehlen, Durkheim brings forward the changeability of morals and social structures (1977b, p. 115) to show how unrealistic are univeralist concepts of morals and society, which refer to general natural rights or human rights. In view of the thus revealed contingency of moral norms, it is hard nonetheless to defend the indubitable validity of the norms of ones own society. Durkheim therefore changes from the empirical analysis to moral-political considerations when necessary: If realisations like that of the contingency of norms do not do good to society and humans, are they not wrong then? Undoubtedly from a moral-political point of view one could say that they are wrong. Every doctor, educator or politician knows, that he must handle truth cautiously. However, it is deceptive afterwards to claim moral-political falsity as empirical falsity.
RATIONAL THINKING AND ALIENATION

At any rate, the moral-political considerations Durkheim uses to establish his predilection for sociocentric morals calls our attention to facts of the matter which Jean Piaget and after him Lawrence Kohlberg (Colby and Kohlberg, 1978) and his followers among German sociologists have given little attention. In analysing the developmental stages of moral thinking they focused on cognitive achievements. It went largely unnoticed that cognitive upgrading of moral thinking is associated with increasing alienation of the person thinking. Table I puts side by side the cognitive efciency of the different thinking modes and the

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TABLE I Stages of the cognitive development of moral thinking as stages of the alienation of the person thinking (Alienation understood not in the metaphysical but in the psychological sense as reexive inhibition of spontaneous action through the cognitive, and along with this emotional, activation of alternative schemes of action.) Mode of thought Sociocentric (morals of authority) Intellectual capacity Moral realism, self-government through internalised self-constraints (anticipated foreign constraints), mastery of the internalised normative order, but incapacity to deal with anomy and foreign normative orders Moral relativism, self-government through legitimacy-proved self-constraints, capacity to deal with anomy and social disorder productively Elements of alienation Spontaneous pre-moral desires inhibited through self-constraints, conict between desire and sense of duty, but certitude about what is good and evil Cognitive and emotional conicts multiplied by awareness of normative contingency, certitude about good and evil weakened

Decentered (morals of mutual respect)

elements of alienation associated with them. (For a detailed description see Vowinckel, 1996.) With the transition from the morals of authority, from sociocentric thinking, to the morals of co-operation, to decentered thinking, intellectual performance increases, but at the same time the alienation of the person judging increases. The advantages of greater versatility, adaptability, and autonomy are opposed by disadvantages in the form of uncertainty, reexive inhibition, and emotional conict. Moreover, the advantages of decentered thinking are advantages only where versatility, adaptability, and autonomy have a range of activity. Where the constraint of social facts gives too little scope, there the cognitive and emotional expenses of decentered thinking only interfere with the execution of the inevitable. As to the normative structures, by connecting to sociocentric thinking they are cemented. The afrmative sociocentric2 is rmly based on the existing social order and says, so to speak, Here I stand, I can do no other (Luther). Users of decentered thinking, however, can do other; for them the existing order is contingent and thus reversible. From the point of view of the existing moral order, those who have unconditionally identied themselves with its rules are reliable followers while those who are able to change their moral standpoint cognitively, are shifty fellows. But when the social facts lose their compelling strength,

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TABLE II Social environments, and the modes of moral thinking the development or adoption of which they support
Social relationships are reliably organised throug h norms Sturdy normative structures regulate the most important problems of social nature. The acting person can neither evade nor influence them. Social relationships are moving and insecure There are both conflicting interests anomy, diversity of values etc. and common interests. Relationships are open to negotiation and organisation.

The sociocentric mode of thinking is best suited for this everyday situation of common people within a consolidated social order. The decentered reversible orientation would have no range of activity; unlike the sociocentric one it would produce reflexive inhibitions.

The decentered mode of thinking is best suited for this situation of moving, insecure and manageable mutual dependencies. The irreversible sociocentric orientation is committed to the execution of that order to which it has been tuned and remains helpless.

when the supposedly solid ground of the existing moral order begins to shake, then the expelled and homeless sociocentric thinking is hardly suited to organise social order anew. Then decentered thinking develops its virtues. These considerations can be summed up in the socialecological theory of moral thinking modes which is outlined in Table II.
SOCIOLOGY AND THE TERMINATION OF THE REVOLUTION

Emile Durkheims sociological method produces a picture of society that is largely one of the morals of authority, of sociocentric thinking. I believe that Friedrich Tenbruck gives the decisive, namely moral-political reason, when he writes:
France, where enlightenment and revolution had deliberately and thoroughly destroyed the old groups and living conditions, came to be the natural ground

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for sociology, which from Saint-Simon and Comte up to Durkheim subscribed to the mission of creating new and durable social groups from a mass of individuals, i.e., socially organising the non-state sphere. (1981, p. 332)

Thus, the meaning of Durkheims rst and most fundamental rule of sociological method was not only and perhaps not even primarily to understand social reality, but to create and stabilise normative structures and to bind people to common moral standpoints. The consolidation of territorial states and the rise of the middle classes had ended the cultural predominance of the happiness doctrine which I described above as a decentered mode of thinking. To the degree that the state gained solidity, the men and women of power, the aristocrats, their morals, and their code of behaviour lost inuence. At the same time the perspective and the sociocentric morals of those under power, of the subjects, gained ground among the general public (Sennett, 1983; Vowinckel, 1983). The idea of a true, natural, and objectively right social order that must be preserved or, in this case, established or restored, became the core of revolutionary mentality.3 But the reality of the revolution resembled this idea as little as the reality of the ancien r egime. Friedrich Schiller wrote: Naught rests to hallow; burst the ties / Of shames religious noble awe; / Before the vice the virtue ies, / And Universal Crime is law. (1864, p. 230 f.) What the French revolution had brought about violently, the abolition of feudal constraint or, as one can also see it: feudal security, took place in other European countries during the 19th century. The resulting decit of social ties, of Gemeinschaft (Toennies) or community could not be compensated for by the state, the realm of politics and thus of arbitrariness. So the society, the sociological concept of which absorbed a great deal from the experience of resistance met by rational political organising efforts, could become the perfect example of a naturally grown, organic order. In the middle of the 19th century the German sociologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl wrote: The statement, that the organic natural formation of society is a divine order, has rapidly gained thousands of confessors (1861, p. 7). Durkheim thus propagated a concept of society that met common needs. He played his part in freeing it from the religious symbolism of traditional thinking, in formulating it anew in the language of modern science and in making it the source of the secular morals of a republican rebirth (Tenbruck, 1981, p. 345). Durkheim designed his sociology as a remedy to that social disease he described as the disease of the modern and not only of French society,

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namely the erosion of sociocentric certainties or in his word: anomy. There were, of course, completely different answers to the questions of the time. Karl Mannheim wrote in his book Ideology and utopia that to-day the internal condition of the social and intellectual situations is reected most clearly in the diverse forms of sociology (1991, p. 226). For him, one of the typical gures of sociology was the sociology of knowledge, which he described as the systematization of the doubt, which is to be found in social life as a vague insecurity and uncertainty (1991, p. 45). Insecurity and uncertainty had been brought about by rapid and thorough social and mental transformations which had shattered the absolute validity of world views. There were too many points of view of equal value and prestige, each showing the relativity of the other and allowing the insight, that every point of view is particular to a social situation (1991, p. 75). In view of this situation of social and mental crisis, Durkheim saw the task of science as establishing a functionally equivalent substitute for the lost certainties of religious consciousness. Mannheim on the other hand spoke of the
imperative in the present transitional period to make use of the intellectual twilight which dominates our epoch and in which all values and points of view appear in their genuine relativity. We must realize once and for all that the meanings which make up our world are simply an historically determined and continuously developing structure in which man develops, and are in no sense absolute. At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientic thinking to become masters of the situation (Mannheim, 1991, p. 76).

REFLEXIVE DE-MODERNISATION

It is true that the crisis of social consciousness opened to the social sciences the view behind the scenery of the socially established sociocentric ideologies. It is equally true that the social sciences had their share in giving rise to this crisis. The ideologies of the 19th century were imbued with trust in civilising progress as a secular process of salvation. The more these ideologies lost their persuasive power, the more intellectuals began to ask about their social functions instead about their scientic truth. Gustave Le Bon investigated the mechanisms of mass suggestion,

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and George Sorel the myth-founding power of collective violence. Friedrich Nietzsche revealed Christianity to be the religion of the weak, and of weakness and preached the Ubermensch . Max Weber analysed the working of charismatic leadership, and Vilfredo Pareto unmasked political platforms and ideologies as pious cloaks for the single motive, that motivated every political actor: the will to power. As the sole historically inuential movement Marxism remained unweakened by scepticism and relativism; Marxists conned their criticism of ideology to political rivals (Mannheim 1978, p. 121 f.). The disenchantment (Max Weber) of the world went along with disillusionment. Many felt the alienation associated with this disenchantment. People learned that the rationalisation of the images of man and society, the relativism of all values, paralysed the determination, the willpower, the resolution to maintain ones cultural identity and political existence. Responses to such disillusionment were quite different. Max Weber called on his students, to manly endure the fate of our time with its characteristic rationalism and intellectualism, and above all: disenchantment of the world (1992, p. 109 f.). Emile Durkheim set his hand to the reenchantment of the world by means of sociology. Many, however, cultivated the modern intellectualistic romanticism of the irrational (Weber, 1992, p. 109 f.) which was then systematically exploited by Fascism and Nazism. Hermann Rauschning described Fascism and Nazism as revolutions of nihilism (1938). For many of its promoters racist Weltanschauung consisted, as did its rival ideas, of rationalisations, of myths, which were consciously used as ctions. They were means by which
the feelings, the emotional residues in people could be put in motion and lead to political actions (. . .). That which Sorel and Pareto were the rst to fully consider in their myth theory and in the doctrine of elites and the advance guard is put into practice here (120).

Rauschning, who knew the Nazi party and its leaders from inside, wrote:
Now that all norms are exposed on the suspicion of ideology even rationality is devalued. The anti-intellectual and antinoetic attitude of dynamism is not a fancy but rather the necessary expression of the total absence of norms. Man is not a logical being, not a rational or spiritual being but rather an instinctive being

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following impulses like an animal. This is why reason is unable to be the mainstay of a social order or political system. (1938, p. 49)

According to Rauschning the so-called Weltanschauung was nothing but a propaganda scenery, which was staged by the elite for controlling the masses. Ideas were nothing else but a means of legitimising political power (Rauschning, 1938, p. 55). Notwithstanding the moral abyss separating Durkheims sociology and other sociological teachings of the time from the political philosophies of Fascists and Nazis: they have one common denominator. Borrowing from a term coined by Ulrich Beck (reexive modernisation) it can be called reexive de-modernisation, meaning a deliberate and forced return to premodern, traditional, or even primitive institutions and ideas in response to effects of modernisation such as disenchantment, alienation and anomy. Characteristic of this reexive de-modernisation is the ambiguity of thinking. More or less clearly, more or less explicitly aware of the contingency of social facts it nonetheless propagates sociocentric certainties.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Robert Lundy (Orange) and an anonymous translator of the Bundessprachenamt (H urth) for emending the worst mistakes of my translation into English.
NOTES Quotations from German books and German editions of French books have been translated by Gerhard Vowinckel and an anonymous translator of the Bundessprachenamt. 2 The afrmative sociocentric thinking Durkheim promotes must be carefully distinguished from utopian sociocentric thinking. Both have in common the idea of a true, really good moral and social order, a natural order in the metaphysical sense of natural. Afrmative sociocentric thinking, however, takes the empirically existing order for the earthly appearance of the true order, more or less polluted by human imperfection, while utopian thinking is centered in an alternative vision, in an utopia. Viewed from this utopian perspective the empirical order appears as fundamentally depraved, as an empire of evil. (Cf. Vowinckel 1996, 50 ff.) 3 Cf. note 1 about afrmative and utopian variants of sociocentric thinking.
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Address for Correspondence: Dr. GERHARD VOWINCKEL Universit at der Bundeswehr Institut f ur Gesellschaftswissenschaften P.O. Box 7008222 D-22043 Hamburg, Germany