The Division of Labor in Society

Citation

Durkheim, É. (2014). The Division of Labor in Society (S. Lukes, Ed.; W. D. Halls, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1893.) Free public-domain French text: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/De_la_division_du_travail_social

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Durkheim's doctoral thesis sets out to build a science of morality with the methods of the positive sciences. The question that started it, as the 1893 preface puts it, is how the individual can become at once more autonomous and more dependent on society. His answer is that the growing division of labour changes the kind of solidarity that holds a society together. The book has three parts: the function of the division of labour (Book I), its causes and conditions (Book II), and its abnormal forms (Book III). Throughout, law is used as the visible, measurable index of solidarity.

Prefaces and Introduction

For the second edition (1902) Durkheim added a long preface, "Some Remarks on Occupational Groups". It diagnoses a state of legal and moral anomie in economic life, surveys Roman colleges and medieval guilds, and argues that occupational groups should be rebuilt as public institutions that give economic life a moral discipline. He also cut about thirty pages from the original introduction. The introduction itself asks whether the division of labour, which economists treat as a law of progress and biologists find in organisms, has moral value.

Book I, Chapter 1: Method for Determining This Function

Raising productivity cannot be the division of labour's main function, Durkheim argues, because civilisation as such is morally neutral. Using friendship and marriage as models, he suggests that difference can bind people together. To measure such bonds he classifies legal rules by their sanctions: repressive sanctions (criminal law) inflict suffering, while restitutive sanctions (civil, commercial, procedural, administrative and constitutional law) restore things to their normal state.

Book I, Chapter 2: Mechanical Solidarity, or Solidarity by Similarities

A crime is defined as an act that offends strong and defined states of the "collective consciousness", the beliefs and sentiments common to the average member of a society. Punishment is a passionate reaction that protects these common sentiments, and Durkheim reconciles the expiatory and protective views of it. The solidarity expressed by penal law rests on likeness and is called mechanical.

Book I, Chapters 3–4: Organic Solidarity; Another Proof of the Preceding

Restitutive law corresponds to a different bond. Property law expresses only "negative" solidarity, but family, contract, commercial and administrative law express cooperation that comes from the division of labour. This organic solidarity needs individuals to have their own sphere of action. Chapter 4 confirms the distinction historically: the more primitive the society, the more alike its members and the more of its law is penal.

Book I, Chapters 5–6: The Progressive Preponderance of Organic Solidarity and Its Consequences

Through a classification of crimes and comparisons over time, Durkheim argues that many types of crime have disappeared as the collective consciousness has weakened, and that mechanical solidarity loosens as societies develop. Chapter 6 links each solidarity to a social structure: "segmental" societies made of similar clans, and organised societies of differentiated organs around a central organ. It ends by rejecting Herbert Spencer's account of individualism.

Book I, Chapter 7: Organic Solidarity and Contractual Solidarity

Against Spencer's picture of industrial society as a set of free contracts, Durkheim argues that non-contractual regulation grows alongside contract: family law, the binding rules within contract law itself, and administrative law and the state. A closing summary restates Book I: social life has two sources, likeness and the division of labour.

Book II, Chapter 1: The Progress of the Division of Labour and of Happiness

The economists' explanation, that specialisation grows because people want more happiness, is rejected. Happiness has natural limits, there is no evidence that it rises with civilisation, and the rising suicide rate in civilised societies points the other way.

Book II, Chapter 2: The Causes

Here is the book's central causal law: the division of labour varies in direct proportion to the volume and the "dynamic" or "moral density" of societies, meaning how many people are in active contact. Durkheim gives an argument modelled on Darwin: in denser societies the struggle for existence sharpens, and specialisation lets competitors survive side by side.

Book II, Chapters 3–4: Secondary Factors

Two factors make the process easier. The common consciousness becomes more abstract and indeterminate as societies grow, as tradition loses authority and as large cities loosen collective supervision. Heredity also loses its hold: what is inherited becomes vaguer and more plastic.

Book II, Chapter 5: Consequences of the Foregoing

Civilisation is a necessary consequence of growing volume and density, not the motive for specialisation, and individual psychology derives largely from the form of the group.

Book III: The Abnormal Forms (Chapters 1–3)

The anomic division of labour (Chapter 1) appears in commercial crises, conflict between labour and capital, and the fragmentation of science. It arises when the relations between functions are not regulated. Durkheim rejects Comte's view that specialisation itself causes disintegration: a normal worker sees that his task serves an end beyond itself. The forced division of labour (Chapter 2) arises when class or caste assigns functions against people's abilities: solidarity requires that the division of labour be spontaneous, which presupposes equal external conditions and just contracts. Chapter 3 adds a third form, poor coordination when functions give individuals too little activity.

Conclusion

The rule "specialise" is shown to be as moral as the older rule "resemble others", since both secure solidarity. Durkheim concludes that morality consists in dependence on a group, not in freedom. Present unease, he argues, comes from anomie and injustice, and the remedy is to build a new morality, not to revive old traditions.

Key Concepts

Book I

• Mechanical and organic solidarity: cohesion based on shared beliefs versus cohesion based on interdependence among different functions.
• Collective consciousness: the set of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society, which crime offends.
• Repressive and restitutive law: legal rules sanctioned by punishment versus rules that restore disturbed relations; Durkheim uses their proportions to measure the two solidarities.
• Segmental and organised structure: societies of similar, repeated units versus societies of differentiated, coordinated organs.

Book II

• Volume and dynamic (moral) density: the size of a society and the intensity of contact among its members, the main causes of specialisation.
• Indeterminacy of the common consciousness: the growing abstraction of shared beliefs that leaves room for individual variation.

Book III and Conclusion

• Anomic division of labour: specialisation without rules regulating the relations between functions.
• Forced division of labour: specialisation imposed by unequal conditions, which breeds conflict instead of solidarity.
• Morality as solidarity: Durkheim's conclusion that whatever binds individuals to others and to society is moral.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear, testable architecture. The book states its question, divides it into function, causes and abnormal forms, and closes each stage with explicit summaries.
• An objective index. Using types of legal sanction as a measurable sign of solidarity is the book's methodological core, and it shows Durkheim trying to turn moral questions into empirical ones.
• Sustained argument with rivals. Spencer, the classical economists and Comte are criticised in detail.
• Lasting concepts. Collective consciousness, anomie and the contrast between the two solidarities became core sociological vocabulary, and the 1902 preface on occupational groups sets out a concrete institutional proposal.

Limitations

• The legal index is fragile. The claim that early law was mostly penal rests on selected historical and ethnographic sources of the 1880s.
• Dated evolutionary framework. Biological analogies, a ranking of "inferior" and "superior" societies, and the chapter on heredity and race reflect nineteenth-century science and need critical reading.
• Abnormal forms stay thin. Book III is short compared with Books I and II, and the remedies for anomie and inequality are only outlined; the 1902 preface fills part of the gap.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is one of two primary sources in the course, alongside Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism and Other Writings. Reading both shows two contrasting founding approaches: Durkheim explains modern society through social structure and law, while Weber explains the spirit of modern capitalism through religious ideas. For orientation before or alongside the text, Ian Craib's Classical Social Theory and Allan and Daynes's Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory are introductions to the founding thinkers. The edited reader Classical Sociological Theory places selections from Durkheim next to Marx, Weber and others. After reading the book, Giddens's Capitalism and Modern Social Theory compares Marx, Durkheim and Weber on capitalism and the transition to industrial society, and Nisbet's The Sociological Tradition follows ideas such as community and authority across these thinkers.

How to Use This Book

No technical background is needed, but the argument is long and dense with legal and ethnographic detail. A practical order is: the 1893 preface and introduction; Book I, Chapters 1–3 in full, since they define the key concepts; the summary at the end of Chapter 7; Book II, Chapter 2; Book III; and the Conclusion. Chapters 4–6 of Book I and Chapters 3–5 of Book II can be skimmed for their conclusions on a first reading. Read the second-edition preface last, when the idea of anomie is familiar. Keep a two-column table (mechanical / organic) recording the law, structure and morality Durkheim assigns to each.

Edition and Sources

This guide is based on the public-domain French text, not on the Halls translation: the 1893 first edition (Félix Alcan) on French Wikisource, and the second-edition preface in the 1922 Alcan printing digitised by the Internet Archive (identifier deladivisiondu00durk). The 1893 preface, the introduction's opening and conclusion, the opening of every section of every chapter, each chapter's closing pages and the main passages of the Conclusion were read, with the opening and historical parts of the 1902 preface. Chapter titles above are translated from the French and may be worded differently in the Halls–Lukes edition, whose introduction was not read.