#durkheim

I finally have them all

For the potential sociology nerds it's:

- Discipline & Punish - The Birth of the Prison (Focault)

- Economy and Society

- Prison Notebooks (Gramsci)

- Capital - A Critique of Political Economy (Marx)

- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman)

- Modernity and Self-Identity (Giddens)

- The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim) (I need it for ritualism as a concept, not the actual religion part in case anyone was side eyeing this choice)

- The Society of Spectacle (Debord)

- Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard)

- Leviathan - the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (Hobbes)

- Second Treatise of Government (Locke)

- The Social Contract (Rousseau)

- Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu)

- Governing the Soul - The Shaping of the Private Self (Rose)

- On Violence (Arendt)

- Frames of War - When is Life Grievable? (Butler)

This is what I am working with as of right now, I am still sorting sources and ideas into sections and trying to see what I do and don't have room for so some of these might be taken off the list eventually. Some of these I have read, some of these I am intimately familiar with (my masters thesis is about ritualism in fandom culture so there's that), some I haven't read, but know the theory so I know what I need, some of these I heard of and have never done a deep dive on so I'll have to sit and read them carefully first and see if I can find what I need

The Modern Transformation from Traditionalism to Capitalism

In the pantheon of social thought, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim are rarely seated together. Tocqueville was a French aristocrat and political traveller, Weber a German scholar of law, economics and religion, Durkheim a French secular republican and founder of academic sociology. Yet across their works, written in the turbulent century between the fall of Napoleon and the First World War, a single, urgent question runs like a thread: what holds human beings together once the old certainties dissolve, and what happens to the individual when the bonds of tradition finally snap? Each answered in his own vocabulary, and together they gave us an indispensable grammar for understanding modern life—one we still use whenever we speak of community lost and found, of meaning drained from the world, or of freedom curdling into a new kind of cage.

Tocqueville, writing after his journey through Jacksonian America, saw the future in democracy. He was not haunted by the ghost of revolution but by a quieter spectre: equality. In a society where ranks are levelled, individuals become the sovereign unit, yet they also become strangely powerless. “Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost a stranger to the destiny of all the others,” he wrote. For Tocqueville, the democratic soul tends toward a mild but relentless individualism that, left unchecked, invites a novel tyranny—not the brute force of a despot, but the soft embrace of a tutelary state that manages every detail of life while citizens, engrossed in petty pleasures, forget they are free. His antidote was famously local: the “art of associating together,” the habit of forming civic groups, town meetings, newspapers and voluntary societies that teach citizens they depend on one another. In Tocqueville’s vision, liberty survives not through abstract rights but through the dense, daily practice of collective self-government.

Weber approached the same terrain from a different angle. What Tocqueville described as democratic atomisation, Weber theorised as part of a much larger process: the rationalisation of the world. In his account, modernity means the systematic application of calculative reason to every sphere—law, economy, music, even the soul. The result is the disenchantment of the world, the retreat of mystery and magic before the cold light of technique. Nowhere was this more concretely felt than in the spread of bureaucracy, that “iron cage” of rules and hierarchies which Weber saw becoming inescapable, whether under capitalism or socialism. And yet, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he traced the motor of this transformation to a deeply moral impulse: the Calvinist’s anxious need to prove salvation through methodical worldly work. Meaning had once motored the machine; now the machine runs on, but the meaning has fled. Weber feared a future of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart”—a nullity that would dress itself as progress.

Durkheim, the most systematic of the three, made the moral texture of modern society his life’s project. He too saw the great transition from traditional, tightly integrated communities (mechanical solidarity, bound by sameness) to a complex division of labour (organic solidarity, dependent on difference). When this transition falters, the result is anomie—a state of normative deregulation where old rules no longer hold and new ones have not yet crystallised. His study of suicide showed that even the most private act is shaped by the strength or weakness of collective ties; too little integration and we fall into egoistic despair, too much regulation and fatalism awaits. Far from celebrating the unencumbered individual, Durkheim insisted that freedom itself requires a framework of moral solidarity. His surprising remedy for the pathologies of industrial society was the professional guild, a revived intermediary body that could provide warmth, discipline and belonging between the individual and the distant state. And in religion—not its doctrine but its ritual—he discovered the enduring human capacity for “collective effervescence,” moments when shared emotion remakes the group and renews its ideals.

Read side by side, these three thinkers reveal a shared diagnosis. Modernity liberates the individual from ascriptive ties but simultaneously threatens to leave them isolated, adrift in a society that is vast, impersonal and governed by abstract systems. Tocqueville’s soft despotism, Weber’s iron cage and Durkheim’s anomie are not identical concepts, but they rhyme. Each points to a world in which material comfort and formal freedom coexist with a hollowing out of civic vitality, moral purpose and genuine connectedness. The marvellous engine of self-interest runs hot, but the soul grows cold.

Their solutions, too, overlap in instructive ways. All three looked not to the sovereign individual alone, nor to the state, but to the rich intermediate tissue of social life. Tocqueville championed voluntary associations; Durkheim placed his faith in occupational groups and a revived moral education; Weber, more pessimistic, nevertheless held out the frail hope that charismatic individuals and value-rational action might momentarily break the bureaucratic shell. Underneath their divergent politics—Tocqueville’s aristocratic liberalism, Durkheim’s solidaristic republicanism, Weber’s tragic nationalism—lay a conviction that a free society cannot be sustained by markets and legal procedures alone. It must be woven from meaning, ritual, participation and mutual obligation.

That conviction is their lasting legacy. The vocabulary they coined has become inescapable. When Robert Putnam warned of Americans “bowling alone,” he was restaging Tocqueville’s lament about the decline of the art of association. When we speak of the disenchantment of nature or the meaninglessness of bureaucratic routine, we are borrowing Weber’s spectacles. Every time a public crisis—from the opioid epidemic to the rise of loneliness as a policy issue—is framed as a symptom of frayed social fabric, Durkheim’s concept of anomie is, knowingly or not, being summoned. More recently, scholars of digital life have drawn on all three: the Tocquevillian worry about online pseudo-association, the Weberian description of algorithmic rationalisation, the Durkheimian analysis of platforms as sites of collective ritual and its pathologies.

Note: this does NOT have to be the sociologist/writer you AGREE with the most — obviously this is the #marxism website — but the one you personally found the most interesting or enjoyed writing about the most.

I was always the odd one out in my sociology classes because I ADORED the constructivism lens I just thought it was a really fun way to analyze different writings and films (I ended up in a lot of sociology classes that liked to assign like. Film reports? That’s how I learned I hate film-based classes having to watch a film for a grade is so much worse than reading a book for a grade)

Yet most of my professors and other classmates treated Durkheim as the “hard” intro writer and the constructivism lens as the “hard” lens to write for even though I always found it the easiest to universally apply (because it’s just like. Social symbolism? A thing present in all forms of media related even tangentially to culture or human experiences? How is this not the easiest lens to use for every sociological “use 1-X lenses to analyze this story/article” assignment ever?)