Re: Durkheim on historical origin versus current utility

From: Steven Thiele (sthiele@metz.une.edu.au)
Date: Fri 13 Feb 2004 - 04:11:48 GMT

  • Next message: John Wilkins: "Re: Durkheim on historical origin versus current utility"

    Durkheim spent his entire academic life arguing against individualism, which is precisely why he is so important in sociology. Besides, what might it mean to say that an idea can be applied without agreeing with it? Why is it that whenever supposedly scientific minds begin to look at social life that they turn to water, that they begin to repeat all the mistakes that sociologists have fallen into? The only way to understand social life is to study it, which memeticists (and most sociologists - including Durkheim) simply refuse to do. For both, inquiry amounts to little more than the collection of bits and pieces of information to back up taken for granted assumptions about how the social world works.

    Steven Thiele University of New England Armidale NSW Australia

    At 02:54 PM 13/02/2004 +1100, you wrote:

    >On Friday, February 13, 2004, at 02:36 PM, Steven Thiele wrote:
    >
    >>Durkheim:
    >>
    >>'The fault of the biological sociologists was not that they used it
    >>[analogy] but that they used it wrongly. Instead of trying to control
    >>their studies of society by their knowledge of biology, they tied to
    >>infer the laws of the first from the laws of the second. Such inference
    >>is worthless. If the laws governing natural life are found also in
    >>society, they are found in different forms and with specific
    >>characteristics which do not permit conjecture by analogy and can only be
    >>understood by direct observation.'
    >>
    >>So much for those who think that Durkheim's work can be connected to
    >>memetics. Memetics is hostile to all forms of sociology, both the good
    >>and the bad.
    >>
    >>Steven Thiele
    >>University of New England
    >>Armidale, NSW, Australia
    >A good many ideas of Durkheim's can be applied without having to agree
    >with them all (e.g., his individualism). I personally think that the
    >functionalist sociology he proposed is explicable as the interaction
    >between cultural and social institutional (i.e., memetic) evolution and
    >biology (sociobiology or ev psych). Durkheim's blindness here is perhaps
    >understandable given the rampant might is rightism of Spencer and his
    >followers at the time. We don't need to perpetuate such stark oppositions.
    >
    >--
    >John S Wilkins
    >Head, Communication Services
    >The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
    >Parkville, Victoria, Australia
    >
    >
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