45 pages • 1 hour read
Émile DurkheimThe Division of Labor in Society
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1893A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book II, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book II, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis: “The Progress of the Division of Labor and of Happiness”
After framing his basic theory in the previous section, Book II explores what caused the division of labor to progress over time. While most political economists believe that societies have been constituted to arrive at the point in history where labor can be divided up and specialized, Durkheim does not believe this to be a self-evident conclusion. He dedicates the chapter to exploring which of society or the division of labor was the catalyst for the other.
Durkheim first rules out the idea that the division of labor is due to deliberate human action since nobody has predicted nor is capable of predicting the actual effects it will have on society. One possible explanation for the development of the division of labor is humanity’s constant desire for happiness. When work is divided, it is done more efficiently and the resulting product is also of higher quality. This explains why the division of labor—and by extension social progress—happens at an increasingly rapid pace. However, Durkheim reasons, if this is truly the case, then human happiness should also have increased exponentially. Biologically, this is impossible, for pleasure is only ever felt in greater intensity when people are not constantly basking in it. There is a maximum limit to how much happiness can be felt, whereas the division of labor has yet to reach its peak.
Durkheim’s reasoning does not question the linearity of history: He sees social development as constant progress. Logically, however, the same cannot be said of human happiness. It is not evident that people in later times are happier than their ancestors in absolute terms. Therefore, it cannot be that the division of labor was caused solely by the human desire to generate happiness.
Having established that happiness is not simply the sum of a person’s total pleasure—a logical conclusion stemming both from the human biology and from philosophy—Durkheim argues that the division of labor has not made the modern society happier than its “primitive” counterparts. This is because the complexity of a species has no bearing on how happy it feels. The “primitive” people of the Americas, for example, have expressed contentment with their lifestyle whereas it is the European colonialists that left their home due to dissatisfaction. Similarly, suicide, defined as ending one’s life out of sadness, is a phenomenon endemic to “civilized” people. Durkheim believes that “primitive” societies rarely have cases of suicide, as self-sacrificial martyrdom does not count; taking one’s life is not done out of sadness but in the belief of a greater cause.
Statistically speaking, Durkheim notes that cities, the heart of “civilized” society, have the highest rates of suicide due to people living in poor sanitary conditions and sustaining an unfulfilling, unvarying lifestyle. If suicide rates are an indication of the average amount of happiness in a society, then an increasing suicide rate directly parallels a decrease in the average happiness felt in that society. Although this increase in suicide rate coincides with the intensification of the division of labor, Durkheim argues that one may not necessarily be the direct cause of the other without further scrutiny.
What causes the division of labor? In this chapter, Durkheim rules out the idea that the division of labor is solely the result of humans wanting change for the sake of maximizing or varying their source of pleasure. First, greater diversification is not guaranteed to increase happiness. Second, although the division of labor can efficiently generate wealth, this is counterbalanced by the fact that wealth also produces monotonous lifestyles that are not conducive to a pleasurable existence.
Book II, Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis: “The Causes”
Durkheim further explores the idea that a fundamental change in the way society is organized is what propelled the division of labor. This idea was first established in Book I, Chapter 6. Here, in this chapter, Durkheim argues that the division of labor resulted from the gradual disintegration of the segmentary structure of society: As individual members of society, who were previously held separate from one another due to established social and physical boundaries, begin to forge new connections, a new network of intra-social relationships emerges. Durkheim dubs this phenomenon the “dynamic” or “moral density” of society.
In other words, the division of labor progresses in proportion to an increase in the moral density of society, whereby more people begin to act upon one another due to an increase in both moral and physical proximity. Durkheim compares “modern” societies with “primitive” ones: The less “civilized” a group is, the less likely it is to build cities where life is concentrated, instead preferring to spread out across vast lands. This is in part caused by the inflated role agriculture plays in their livelihoods and in part due to a lack of fast communication methods. In contrast, the more “modern” a society becomes, the more numerous are its members, allowing for intra-social relationships to multiply and a more efficient division of tasks.
However, social volume is not the trigger that caused the division of labor; it merely propelled it forward once it had already begun. Durkheim supports this by noting that China and Russia have always had large populations yet did not grow as fast as “civilized” nations in Europe. Thus, external circumstances such as the density of a population might accelerate the division of labor once it has already begun, but does not trigger it in the first place.
Durkheim believes that when life becomes more strenuous, and people struggle to live, the division of labor is triggered. To substantiate this, Durkheim references Darwin’s theory on competition: When two similar organisms live in close proximity, they are more likely to come into conflict because they fight for the same resources. In contrast, organisms that are dissimilar do not substantiate life in the same way and thus are more capable of coexisting.
As social mass increases, societal functions that were proximate to one another are more likely to come into conflict. For example, a winemaker might become threatened if, due to an increase in population, a brewer started operating within the same territory. Due to their physical and functional proximity, they must fight and supplant one another to survive. In other words, as the external environment becomes more complex, society begins to search for new ways to survive and adapt. The division of labor is one solution to assuage increasing competition: By specializing, both the winemaker and brewer differentiate themselves from one another, thereby increasing diversity and decreasing tension.
Durkheim further argues that this only occurs within the same society: Competition between independent groups do not give rise to the division of labor because there is no tie that binds them to one another. Two groups can fight to annihilate one another or flee from each other without attempting to coexist, as they do not share a common consciousness and are inherently differentiated actors. Moreover, they are often sufficiently differentiated to have complementary properties that encourage mutualism and cooperation, rather than specialization.
In sum, Durkheim’s understanding of the division of labor fundamentally differs from that of economists. He sees the division of labor not as the cause of human desire for survival but as the consequence of it. Whereas economists believe the division of labor stems from a natural desire to generate greater wealth, Durkheim sees it as one of the many solutions humanity has devised to fight the increasingly complex conditions of existence. Durkheim concludes that collective life is not the result of individual life, but the other way around. The division of labor proves that individuality, diversification, and specialization are the necessary products of an increasingly complex collective life.
