By his ill-considered and scientifically pretentious psycho-mysticism Durkheim has contributed to give the color of justification to the new religion of the altar of divus Augustus and to the neopagan philosophy of Caesar-worship. This (scholastically speaking) "realistic" attitude toward society, although applied by Durkheim in sociology, as by Gierke in jurisprudence, for the benefit of the group, was philosophically indispensable for the new religion of the state. Political monism reappeared, out of the political pluralism in vogue in the first quarter of this century, in a form more formidable than even Hobbes ever dreamed.
The significance of Durkheim's concept of fatalism in Suicide is wholly unappreciated. The idea is seldom discussed and then only in relation to the study of suicide. Unlike anomie, it has had a most undistinguished sociological career. This is curious because if anomie can serve to illuminate in a quite general way the nature of social disorder, why should fatalism not be regarded as having the capacity to provide an explanation of order that is of equally wide scope? The aim of this essay is to show that hidden in the concept of fatalism there is indeed such a theory, though it bears little resemblance to what is taken to be Durkheim's major contribution to the analysis of social integration.
It is understandable that fatalism should have been neglected because Durkheim devotes no more than a few lines to the concept, and then only, it would seem, out of a logical instinct for symmetry. It appears as the opposite social state to anomie, which is a condition in which normative rules suddenly lose their power of regulating the wants of individuals. Consequently, fatalism is defined as 'excessive regulation', 'excessive physical or moral despotism', as a situation in which the future is 'pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline'. At one pole, then, there is an extraordinarily weak social regulation of wants, at the other an unusually stringent limitation of them. If anomie means that horizons become abruptly widened so that aspirations know no bounds, fatalism refers to hopes so narrowed and diminished that even life itself becomes a matter of indifference. As examples of the latter, Durkheim refers to suicides committed by slaves, and he concludes by saying that in order to 'bring out the ineluctable and inflexible nature of a rule against which there is no appeal, and in contrast with the expression "anomy" which has just been used, we might call it fatalistic suicide.
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