6.2 Mechanic and Organic Solidarity

durm is sometimes seen as a sociologist whose ideas are similar to The Core ideas of the conservative ideology for example his concepts of social cohesion social reg regulation social Consciousness the role of the church or the functions of marriage but Durk ham cannot be pigeon holded that easily in his first major study published in 1893 on the division of Social laboris a tit by the way that reminds us of M and of Adam Smith he presents an argument that is directed against the complaints of conservative and even romantic admirers of traditional societies duam says that

in the societies of the past everybody resembled everybody people were similar and the similarity was as it were the social cement think of a Medieval small City where everybody shares the same religion where people are not yet highly specialized they are not yet working in very different branches of the economic world because the division of labor is still in a very early stage in such societies he's says we see that you know they are glued together by mechanical solidarity the individuals that constitute such a society are pretty identical like the cogs in a large machine

now conservatives complain that in modern societies that kind of cement is crumbling to pieces and in a way durheim agrees but it doesn't alarm him because he says a new type of solidarity is now taking sh shape in front of our own eyes yes it's true people in modern socities are are not very similar anymore they believe in different gods they have jobs that are so different that one Craftsman doesn't have the slightest idea of what the other Craftsman does all of that is true but it shouldn't lead us to believe that those people show

a lower degree of solidarity on the contrary now they are bound together by a different kind of ties the more people differ from one another the more they need one another the more they are dependent upon one another the differentiation and the specialization between jobs for example profession social functions has reached such a high level that human beings and group of human being groups of human beings have become extremely interdependent now they need one another they cannot survive without each other this is clearly not the old type of interdependence through similarity it is more the

opposite it is interdependence through dissimilarity heterogeneity breeds interdependence and this is the social glue that durm calls organic solidarity in the great tradition of the organicist sociological thinkers like Herbert Spencer durm Compares here societies with biological entities with living bodies in primitive organisms the body parts may be very similar but in the higher organisms the organs have differentiated to such a degree that the body as a whole cannot survive unless those interdependent organs work together in a perfect fashion we cannot think we cannot have Consciousness you cannot understand this lecture without the oxygen that the

heart pumps through the stream of blood from the lungs into the brain the differentiation of the organs in the bodies of the higher organisms has created new possibilities but it also has created new vulnerabilities and that is the reason why the units within such a body are very interdependent it's the reason why those well integrated organisms cannot survive if one of the vital organs doesn't work the way it should and it is just the same with modern societies they cannot survive if you would take away well for example One Professional group let's say all the

school teachers or all the train drivers this organic interdependence is the new source of solidarity the conservative thinkers who believe that The Disappearance of solidarity through similarity is the reason Reon why modern societies will fall to pieces have completely overlooked this important new source of solidarity I have the impression that durm wants to attract the attention of his audience here by using his terms in a non-intuitive fashion conservative thinkers had a tendency to describe traditional societies as organic holes where every part was related to every other part in more or less natural way and to

describe modern societies as broken to bits and pieces by mechanical forces the forces that dominate in the Machine Age Now Duram turns this whole terminology upside down traditional societies he says are kept together by mechanical solidarity solidarity by similarity modern societies on the other hand by organic solidarity D guy must have been an excellent teacher someone who knew that when you use your terms in a way that goes against the expectations of your listeners or of your readers then you know they may be shocked out of their habitual ways of reasoning and then they may

pay attention to the unconventional Insight that you want to convey