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ABSTRACT
The paper argues that Durkheim’s positions on happiness and socialism are relevant in today’s neoliberal and post-affluent societies. Durkheim dissociates happiness from economic progress and makes it contingent upon the relationships between the individual and society. An important component of Durkheimian happiness is the dynamic equilibrium between desires and means. Therefore, his friendly criticism of the socialist project is that it promises to fulfil the desires that were released by a disembedded market economy. Durkheim’s point helps us to understand why the social democratic promise was broken and how the neoliberal imperatives of competition and unlimited wants sow unhappiness.
Correction Statement
This article was originally published with error. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum (https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2018.1513621)
Acknowledgements
The idea and a preliminary draft of the present article were elaborated during my first sabbatical leave at the Department of Economics of the New School of Social Research (2010). Then, the bulk of the research undertaken took place during my second sabbatical leave at the Institute of Management Studies (IMS), Goldsmiths University of London (2016). I am truly indebted to The New School and to Goldsmiths political economists, in particular Sanjay Reddy, Costis Repapis, Will Davies, Ivano Cardinale, Giorgos Galanis and Ragupathy Venkatachalam for the inspiring discussions I had enjoyed with them. Special thanks to the two anonymous referees for their extremely helpful and meticulous comments. All remaining errors and imprecisions are mine.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
George Liagouras is Associate Professor in Economic Analysis at the Department of Financial and Management Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. Before joining the University of the Aegean, he was a research fellow at the ‘Laboratory of Industrial and Energy Economics’ (National Technical University of Athens) and Adjunct lecturer at the Department of Economics of the University Paris VII. His research interests include social, institutional and evolutionary economics as well as philosophy and history of political economy.
Notes
1. For more on the clash of cultures that is manifest in the comparison between classical economy’s and Durkheim’s vision of society, see Liagouras (Citation2007). Regarding the evolution of Durkheim’s notion of the critique of political economy, see Steiner (Citation2011).
2. Arendt (Citation1969) opposes Aristotle’s notion of ‘zoon politicon’ with its Latin translation by Seneca and Thomas Aquinas as ‘animal socialis’. I think that if we stretch too much this difference we go against Aristotle’s ontology (nature, essences, potentialities, etc.).
3. Liagouras (Citation2007) provides a general account of the breakthrough in the notion of society implied by classical sociology (Durkheim, Weber), as well as the discontent of contemporary sociology in the context of post-industrial and globalised capitalism.
4. Regarding the important ontological underpinnings of Durkheim’s notion of collective representations, see Gorski (Citation2017, p. 93, 94). For comprehensive accounts of the relationship between Aristotle and Durkheim, see Challenger (Citation1994), McCarthy (Citation2003), and Gorski (Citation2017).
5. Durkheim’s collective representations can be viewed as ‘a sociological and historical reformulation of the Kantian critique of pure and practical reason’ (McCarthy Citation2003, p. 129). Yet, Durkheim’s first interest was in morals.
6. As Gorski (Citation2017, p. 102, note 21) remarks: ‘careful readers will notice that Durkheim’s language mixes Aristotelian terms (“character” and “the good”) with Kantian ones (“law” and “duty”)’.
7. In his classical study on Durkheim, Lukes (Citation1985, pp. 125–8) showed that Durkheim’s conception of happiness and unlimited desires has its origins in Rousseau. The proof can be found in Durkheim’s lecture notes on Rousseau’s Émile published posthumously (Durkheim Citation1918 [Citation1975], especially pp. 375 and 380). Yet behind Durkheim and Rousseau looms Aristotle (Challenger Citation1994, pp. 107–131). Finally, it must be noted that Durkheim (Citation1893, p. 195) himself recognises his debt to Comte. In the 4th volume of his Cours de Philosophie Positive (1839), Comte insisted on the incommensurability of happiness between different periods on the same grounds as Durkheim would a half-century later. His ambition was to carry out a ‘complete study of human evolution without any consideration of “progress”’ (Comte Citation1974, p. 163).
8. Durkheim’s analytical distinction between social integration and discipline of desires overlaps with the opposition between neo-Aristotelian and neo-Epicurean notions of well-being in recent environmental political thought (O’Neill Citation2006). The main difference is that in Durkheim the limitation of desires far from being a question of private life (choice) is realised through the constraints imposed by society-morality on the individual.
9. It is in these terms that Durkheim in the beginning of his career praised Schäffle (Citation1874) for his conception of socialism. As Steiner (Citation2011, p. 14) remarks following Filloux (Citation1977): ‘By defending Schäffle … he therefore defended the formulation of his own intellectual project as it has developed during the years 1881–3’.
10. Durkheim was aware of the limits of his argument regarding the ‘inheritance’ of what P. Bourdieu referred to as human and social capital. At the end of his lectures on Professional Ethics and Civic Morals he asks: ‘But is it any more equitable that he (the man) should be better treated because he was born of a father of higher intelligence or in a more favourable moral milieu?’ (Durkheim Citation1898–Citation1900 [Citation1992], p. 220).
11. In Durkheim’s eyes, workers are not carriers of an alternative morality; they too are subject to the ‘illness of infinity’.
12. As Durkheim (Citation1917a [Citation2009], p. 4) summed it up at the end of his life: ‘Some great minds realized that economic life could not go to such an extent against the fundamental conditions of life in general, that it could not be made up of anarchic, discordant movements, from which order and harmony were born miraculously, but that economic life presupposes an “organization”. Such is the principle that Saint-Simon and his disciples helped, more than anyone, to bring to light’.
13. Regarding the analysis of modern society, Durkheim’s defence of religious origins is not very convincing. Even if at the origin everything is religious, it is not clear why at a certain point in history religious transformations could have not lead the economy into an autonomous and dominant social sphere.
14. According to Besnard (Citation1987, p. 124), Durkheim wrote for the first time his course on Moral Education during the academic year of 1898–9, that is, after the publication of Suicide.
15. Behind late Durkheim and Freud’s affinities one can detect Schopenhauer’s Lebensphilosophie (Mestrovic Citation1988). In the latter, the body–soul dichotomy of philosophy is reinterpreted as the contradictory unity between a sensorial and irrational ‘will’ and a rational and abstract ‘idea’. The fact that the above contradiction cannot be settled in favour of one of the two poles creates an irreparable scission in the fabric of human life, which is a source of major suffering.
16. Habermas (Citation1987) in his Theory of Communicative Action adopted Durkheim’s argument about the tendency of human societies towards increasing complexity. But he used it to argue that the economic and political subsystems, operating through the ‘steering media of money and power’, cannot be changed from within without provoking important distortions in the functioning of society. This idea is closer to the thought of Parsons and Luhmann than to Durkheim (Citation1898–Citation1900, Citation1902).
17. The most plausible distinction for contemporary advanced economies is between export-led growth and consumption (debt)-led growth. As Baccaro and Pontusson (Citation2016) showed, the two growth regimes have different implications for distributive conflict. Still, it seems that Durkheim’s critique about the limits of distribution applies here too; it also provides a plausible solution to the paradox of the ‘non-death of neoliberalism’ (Crouch Citation2011) after the 2008 crisis.
18. Obviously, there is a ‘happy’ coincidence between the social and environmental limits to prosperity. However, the questions of environment and growth (e.g. Jackson Citation2017, Kallis and March Citation2015, van den Bergh Citation2011) are beyond the scope of the present article.
19. In a similar vein, see Cumbers and McMaster’s (Citation2010) definition of socialism as the enhancement of individual dignity.
20. Unavoidably, what is missing from the above ‘Durkheimian’ account is the intermediate agenda of economic policy. Even though economists sometimes exaggerate the social efficiency of taxes and incentives, public policy voluntarism is crucial for allaying the existing positional ‘arms race’. For more on this issue, see Frank (Citation2009) and Skidelsky and Skidelsky (Citation2012, pp. 192–218).