Émile Durkheim's Division of Labor and the Shadow of Herbert Spencer

Abstract

This article assesses Durkheim's theory of the division of labor in advanced societies relative to Spencer's views on the subject. It seeks to correct a key chapter in the history of sociological thought, for it is in his classic 1893 work that Durkheim is presumed to have routed both Spencer's account of the division of labor and his larger theory of man and society. In fact, Spencer and Durkheim differ very little in their conceptions of the causes of an expanding division of labor (both identify population growth and concentration, and its impact, through heightened competition—group and individual—on specialization of function). They do differ, however, in their treatment of its effects, but Durkheim's explanation is not necessarily—as is commonly assumed in textbook narratives—an improvement of Spencer's. Indeed, many of the questions involved (e.g., whether and to what extent exchange presupposes or creates norms, or divided labor produces cohesion beyond that resulting from mutual need, or the division of labor itself is a moral or economic phenomenon) remain moot. Spencer and Durkheim championed explanations that derived from larger and generally competing perspectives, namely, the moral communalist and the “exchangist” (as Durkheim dubbed his opponent's position). One cannot actually banish the other, for each is a perennially serviceable intellectual outlook.