Narrating Solidarity Through the Division of Belief: Durkheim and the History of Belief Systems

In this chapter, I focus on Durkheim’s navigation of languages of belief through his narration of ‘solidarity’ and his imagination of the sociological function within organic society, focusing on his 1893 work, The Division of Labour. I will first, however, commence with a prologue, in which I briefly reconstruct the context of Durkheim’s contemporary knowledge culture. This was a knowledge culture in which the question of whether ‘beliefs’ could be employed as an instrument of interpretation was highly contested. In order to gain an understanding of Durkheim’s engagement with the belief-category, I argue for a twofold reading against the grain: against the neo-Kantian approach of belief forwarded by the Durkheimian school and against the anti-positivist critiques of neo-Kantian belief. Through this double counter-reading, we can access a new understanding of some of Durkheim’s more famous conceptual schemes, such as his distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. While this distinction is often presented as representing the chronological demise of belief systems in society, I will instead argue that this constituted a conceptual distinction which functioned on multiple historical and meta-historical levels, through which Durkheim was able to imagine the transformation of belief in organic social life.