“What are the basic questions which inspired Durkheim to study the division of labour in society? Critically comment on his conclusions.” (1992)
Émile Durkheim’s doctoral work The Division of Labour in Society (1893) was written in Third Republic France, amid industrialisation, class strife and the decline of Church authority. The book is less about economics than about the moral basis of modern social order.
The basic questions
- The individual–society puzzle: in the Preface he asks how the individual, while becoming more autonomous, depends ever more closely on society. How can personality and solidarity grow together?
- What is the function of the division of labour? Durkheim rejected the economists’ answer of productivity (Adam Smith). He asked whether it has a moral function, that of creating solidarity.
- How can solidarity be observed scientifically? A moral fact cannot be seen directly, so he needed an external index, and found it in law.
- What causes the division of labour? He rejected the pursuit of happiness and Herbert Spencer’s individual contract, and sought a social cause.
- Why does modern society show conflict and discontent? If specialisation integrates, why the crises and class war?
His conclusions
- Simple societies rest on mechanical solidarity (likeness, strong collective conscience, repressive law). Advanced societies rest on organic solidarity (interdependence, individualism, restitutive law).
- The cause is growth in volume, material density and moral (dynamic) density. Specialisation is the peaceful solution to intensified competition.
- Contracts rest on a non-contractual moral base, since society regulates what individuals agree.
- Present disorders are abnormal forms (anomic and forced), not the essence of the division of labour. They call for occupational corporations and equality of opportunity.
Critical comment
- Law as an index: Bronisław Malinowski (Crime and Custom in Savage Society, 1926) found reciprocal, restitutive obligations among Trobrianders. Richard Schwartz and James Miller (1964) found that mediation and damages appear before police in legal evolution, which reverses Durkheim’s sequence.
- Causal weakness: density explains poorly. Lewis Coser found the argument mechanistic, and the dense agrarian societies of Asia did not automatically develop organic solidarity.
- Conflict read as pathology: for Karl Marx, what Durkheim called “forced” division of labour is the normal condition of capitalism. The normal type remains an ideal never observed.
- Evolutionary dichotomy: tradition and modernity coexist. In India, caste is a hereditary division of labour that is also sacralised. B. R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936) called it a division of labourers, graded and forced, not spontaneous.
- Modern evidence of anomie: India’s gig workers are interdependent with platforms yet lacked a legal code until the Code on Social Security, 2020, came into force in November 2025.
- Enduring strengths: Talcott Parsons built on the non-contractual element of contract. Durkheim’s corporatist remedy anticipates social-democratic labour regulation.
Conclusion
Durkheim’s questions were sharper than his answers. The claim that specialisation can integrate society holds only when rules and justice keep pace, and that is precisely the condition modern and Indian societies struggle to meet. His lasting insight is that economic interdependence alone does not create solidarity; moral regulation has to accompany it.