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Journal of Classical Sociology
http://jcs.sagepub.com Durkheim's Treatment of Practice: Concrete Practice vs Representations as the Foundation of Reason
Anne Warfield Rawls Journal of Classical Sociology 2001; 1; 33 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/33
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Journal of Classical Sociology

Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 1(1): 3368 [1468795X(200105)1:1;3368;016581]
Durkheims Treatment of Practice

Concrete Practice vs Representations as the Foundation of Reason
ANNE WARFIELD RAWLS Wayne State University
ABSTRACT It is generally thought that Durkheim based his theory of knowledge
on a theory of representations. However, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915 [1912]) he places great emphasis on concrete and witnessable aspects of practice such as sounds and movements and downplays the importance of beliefs and representations. He argues that ritual sounds and movements, when collectively enacted, can create sentiments that give rise to the essential concepts that he refers to as the categories of the understanding. Representations are, in his view, secondary phenomena that arise only after participation in social practices. This article demonstrates through an analysis of Durkheims text that he carefully referred to ritual practices in concrete and not representational terms at strategic points in the argument. Furthermore, it is argued that the collective experience of concrete sounds and movements was, on Durkheims view, a prerequisite for the subsequent development of representations.
KEYWORDS beliefs, emotions, ethnomethodology, Garnkel, religion, rites
In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim takes a position toward social practices that treats them as concrete witnessable sounds and movements, recognizable within a shared context, and not as representations and beliefs. Furthermore, the experienced effects of sounds and movements he refers to as emotions and not as ideas or sensations. This position is foundational to the discipline of sociology as Durkheim envisioned it. Most treatments of practice, praxis or culture have not made a distinction between beliefs and narratives about practices, and practices as enacted witnessable and hearable social events. Nor do they distinguish between collective emotion and sensation. In making these distinctions, Durkheim meant to dene sociology as a unique approach to the
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empirical study of social phenomena that would avoid the problems of both positivism and idealism. Unfortunately, Durkheims argument was misinterpreted as focused on representations, when in actuality it was an argument that representations, or concepts, can only be shared when social actors, who are assembled together, enact sounds and movements that are recognizable to one another, and in so doing produce shared feelings, sentiments or emotions. Durkheim argued that representations, once they are shared by a group, live on in the language and narratives of that group and can be invoked on subsequent occasions by symbols that call up the sentiments that originally gave rise to those representations. But all collective representations,1 he argued, originate in practices, and even their subsequent ability to convey meaning through symbols has, for Durkheim, a continuing basis in the concrete enactment of practice. Confusing Durkheims focus on practices with a focus on representations and beliefs has left the discipline of sociology without benet of either his theory of practice or his epistemology (Rawls, 1996).2 For most of the past century, sociologists have taken the position that social practices consist of relationships between social actors and the constraining beliefs and values of the society in which they live. More recently, postmodern sociology has come to focus more heavily on the beliefs and values themselves, treating the actions of social actors as texts. A focus on description of concrete actions themselves is meaningless in the former case, as only in the aggregate are actions thought to reveal the constraining values to which they respond. From a postmodern perspective, on the other hand, a focus on concrete action, instead of concepts and beliefs, has come to be thought of as positivist. Only beliefs and values are real. As a result, contemporary sociology nds itself in a serious dilemma. I argue that this is the same dilemma that Durkheims theory of practice was intended to address. I dont mean to suggest that Durkheims argument, in just the form in which he made it, will solve the current dilemma. What I do mean to argue is that if the discipline is understood as having been founded on the idea of concrete practices, in the way that Durkheim lays that argument out, then the contemporary state of the discipline can be reevaluated. How has the sociological treatment of practice come to focus on beliefs and representations, rather than on concrete practices, if the latter was what Durkheim intended? In part, the focus on beliefs and values is, ironically, a result of having misinterpreted an earlier argument by Durkheim. In an article published in 1898 entitled Individual and Collective Representations (1974 [1898]), Durkheim criticized William James on the grounds that it was not possible to explain the phenomenon of shared concepts, or what Durkheim called collective representations, on the basis of individual action, even when considered in a group context. Durkheims criticisms of James in this paper were interpreted by several early critics (e.g. Dennes, 1924; Gehlke, 1915; see discussion in Rawls,
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1997) as representing Durkheims own theory of representations, rather than as a critique of James, even though Durkheim claried his criticisms of James at length in his lectures on pragmatism (1983 [191314]). What Durkheim actually does in this paper is to suggest that because, as he has shown, representations cannot be explained within a context of individualism, they must be given a collective, or social, explanation. He does not actually give such an explanation, however, until the publication of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915 [1912]). Nevertheless, when it came to the latter work, these same critics interpreted it in the light of their earlier misunderstanding of the argument with James. The result is that Durkheim appeared to be articulating an idealist theory based on representations that departed drastically from his earlier position, when in fact he was articulating a theory of the origin of representations, based on the concrete empirical study of witnessable and hearable social practices; a position consistent with his earlier arguments in The Rules of the Sociological Method (1982 [1895]). The organization of The Elementary Forms only served to further confuse things. The book is carefully divided into parts, or books. The rst book considers the general theoretical, in this case mostly philosophical and anthropological, context for the argument, and sets the general outline for Durkheims position. Then in book two, Durkheim considers the origin of what he calls beliefs. The prominence of this book, the fact that it comes before book three on rites and is longer than either books one or three, creates the impression that it is the heart of Durkheims argument. However, this is not the case. What book two does is to ask carefully, chapter by chapter, where a particular belief could have come from, and show case by case that the belief could not have the origin that is usually claimed for it. Durkheims point is that all prior explanations for the origin of concepts, or representations, fail. This leaves, he believes, only one possible explanation: that representations and beliefs are caused by the collective enactment of social practice. Thus, while Durkheim appears, from the organization of the text, to be privileging representations and beliefs over practices, in fact he does just the reverse. The key to Durkheims argument that an empirical sociology can explain the origin of collective representations and human reason lies in his theory of practice: his argument that representations stand in a particular sort of causal relationship to witnessably enacted social practices. An understanding of this argument shows that Durkheims later work remains consistent with his earlier emphasis on empirical research. It also offers a way of understanding empirical studies of practice that is not positivist, and yet maintains a focus on the mutually available social world, rather than retreating into idealism. While in contemporary sociology the focus on the conceptually mediated character of social action tends to come from the humanities and have an inherently individualist quality, the mediated character of social reality was a basic sociological premise from the rst. However, for Durkheim the mediation that creates social reality is not primarily conceptual. He also rejected individualism as
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a starting point. In confronting the issues of interpretation and epistemological validity, he argued that society and culture do not consist primarily of representations, concepts, beliefs and narratives Narratives, myths, representations, beliefs and concepts are all dependent on the enactment of concrete practices for their genesis and recognizability. Durkheims sociological mediation is not primarily conceptual: it is rst and foremost concrete. We have very shortsightedly come to interpret the concrete side of Durkheims argument as navely positivist. On the contrary, Durkheim was urging us to see that the social construction of reality was necessarily a concrete and not primarily a conceptual mediation. Because it is fundamentally a social construction, a social fact, although concrete, is not real in a positivist sense. The current belief that concepts construct the concrete world is, Durkheim would argue, the nave view. The concrete world, while it may give rise to concepts through social construction, must rst itself be socially constructed as a concrete witnessable world through concrete witnessable practices, before it can give rise to any feelings or concepts. If concrete practices themselves need to be socially constructed, then that social construction must be concrete. It cannot be merely conceptual and interpretive. Because the essential emotions, and the categories of the understanding they give rise to, form the basis of shared knowledge, communication and society itself, Durkheim argues, the practices that are required to produce these emotions, or categories of thought, in the mind and body of the individual participant are necessary and not a matter of individual choice, or cultural preference. They must produce real shared sentiments. This is a strong statement of something like a law of social organization: that there would not be any society at all without enacted practices capable of producing certain basic sentiments or emotional experiences that are also the experience of certain basic ideas. These practices, in turn, consist in their details. The practices could not produce simultaneous shared experiences unless they were concretely recognizable. That is, certain motions and sounds count, others dont. Beliefs about what one is doing will not make a practice recognizable if the sounds and movements are wrong. Enacted practices are not beliefs. They do not succeed by creating the appearance that they have succeeded. The enacted practices must really produce the requisite feelings or sentiments for the whole group, or they fail. The necessity for society to produce the categories as a basis for social cooperation is very different from the social obligation to manage the appearance of having shared beliefs, or socially required emotions, or the obligation to interpret emotions in appropriate social terms, which is posited by contemporary social constructionist theory. Durkheim is not talking about a managed chaos in which persons pretend to make sense, or make a pretense to sentiments, or emotions, that are not really felt. Durkheim argues that the basic concepts required for shared intelligibility are created by producing visibly and hearably recognizable practices that produce identical internal feelings in all participants simultaneously.
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Contemporary social theory, in interpreting Durkheims work in cultural or poststructural terms, has taken a position that is individualistic in the classical empiricist sense of William James or David Hume. Individual experience is treated as a primary reality and the social is posited as a level of social construction, or interpretation, that occurs after and on top of those individual experiences, and constrains and shapes the individual interpretation of them. According to Hume, such interpreted experiences cannot have empirical validity, because something needs to be added by the mind (or by the society) to individual experience (the primary reality) in the process of interpretation. For James there is only a good enough for practical purposes sort of validity that is similar to Humes notion of opinion as an adequate theoretical basis for practical action. This is essentially the poststructural approach to the problem. Durkheim intended his argument to remedy the empiricist dilemma by locating primary socially constructed reality in socially enacted practices that generate sentiments immediately shared by individual participants. The contrast between the individualist philosophical view and Durkheims sociological view can be highlighted by a contrast between the arguments of Durkheim and Hume concerning the relationship between knowledge and feelings.3 Durkheim shares with Hume a focus on social relations as the necessary origin of sentiments, or emotions, which would not come into being without those social relations. Yet, he differs with Hume over the way in which the social provides an origin for emotions. Differences between their views on the origins of emotion lead to differences in their assessment of the empirical validity of emotions as a form of knowledge, and ultimately to Durkheims insistence on the importance of concrete practices in producing emotions. Both argued that emotions can be immediately known because they are in the mind. However, for Hume, as for contemporary social constructionists, emotions are created by the mind in response to external social situations, as interpretations or beliefs regarding social relations. That is, for Hume emotions are still conceived as an individual response to a social relation that becomes emotion when interpreted in a social context. For Durkheim, on the other hand, certain feelings of moral force and group unity are directly created by participation in enacted social practice. These feelings are not created by the mind and are not interpretations or, in their immediate state, concepts or symbols. They are concretely felt and accurately reect the external social state of affairs that enacts them. Thus, they have both an external origin and empirical validity. They are felt not as constraint, but as ones own true feelings. Durkheims theory of practice speaks strongly to the contemporary tendency to treat social practices as belief or narrative instead of concrete witnessable practice. In making this argument, rst, it needs to be established that Durkheim treated practices as sounds and movements, not beliefs, and, second, that these sounds and movements give rise to sentiments, representations and beliefs, and not the reverse; then, third, the contrast between Durkheim and Hume over the
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importance of emotions for epistemology and their validity can be taken up as a vehicle for contrasting Durkheims position with philosophical individualism; and, nally, the implications of Durkheims argument for the balance between interpretation and concrete practices in contemporary sociology need to be considered. At the very least the analysis suggests that sociology, in most of its conventional faces, has not really been either socially or empirically centered in Durkheims sense.
The Practices and Their Sentiments

Durkheim uses a variety of different terms for practices and sentiments or emotions in The Elementary Forms. In spite of the variety of terms used, however, practices are referred to consistently in concrete terms as sounds and movements, not as representations. Representations are clearly distinguished as beliefs or symbols that are made use of in the enactment of practices, but that do not of themselves constitute practices. Sentiments are consistently described as emotions that depend for their existence on the group enactment of practices and therefore could not precede or exist independently from enacted practice. Durkheim refers to the emotional response of participants to shared enacted practice variously as feelings, sentiments, sensations, mental agitation and impressions. Often he refers to these terms using the French word emotion.4 He also refers to specic emotions such as well-being, comfort, strength, dependence and respect, which he argues correspond to the ideas of moral unity and moral force. For example, he argues that what inspires religious sentiments . . . are the impressions of comfort and dependence which the action of society provokes in the mind (1915 [1912]: 364; emphases added). He calls these impressions emotions. Durkheims language with regard to practice consistently refers to movements and sounds and uses words that clearly refer to concrete actions: practices, common acts, movements, movements in unison, homogeneity of these movements, gestures, cries, the same action, stereotyped form [of] . . . movements, material intermediaries, awkward gestures and actions. Gathering the references together illustrates the concrete nature of his notion of practice. Concrete enacted practices, on Durkheims view, give rise to essential ideas that could not be generated except by enacted practices.
The Practices
Durkheim expressed the fear that his emphasis on concrete practices, particularly practices that have previously been interpreted as resulting from irrational primitive superstitions, might lead to criticism: It will be thought that this [is] attributing a very considerable historical importance to practices which, at rst view, give the effect of childish games (1915 [1912]: 432; emphasis added).
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Indeed, he was right. Not only was Durkheim criticized, but this most important aspect of his theory was almost completely ignored or misinterpreted and his argument construed almost entirely in terms of beliefs and representations. For Durkheim, totems as representations played an important role in the material enactment of the practice. Totems represented the sounds and movements that the rite was trying to enact. But without the actual enactment of the ritual practice, the totemic representations would have no efcacy. By themselves they could not produce the sentiments necessary for the development of human reason. Practices were, for Durkheim, the essential element in creating a shared understanding. Representations were only important insofar as they were an aid to, or a result of, the effective enactment of practices. According to Durkheim, religious beliefs and representations, such as totems and their corresponding myths, do not represent the true purpose of religious rites: Between a systematized hallucination and the rst impressions which gave it birth, the distance is often considerable. It is the same with religious thought (1915 [1912]: 19). By systematized hallucination Durkheim means beliefs, myths and representations. By rst impressions, he means the experience of emotion that generates empirically valid collective concepts. The original impressions are the sentiments created by enacting practices in assembled groups. The beliefs and representations come to represent those original sentiments. But, in so doing they also obscure those sentiments and the practices that enact them. Religious beliefs and representations are not practices in their own right. They serve an underlying purpose: they aid the enactment of practices in the form of sounds and movements. This deeper purpose, creating the moral unity of the group and in the process creating human reason, is open to empirical study only if we look beyond the beliefs to the underlying sounds and movements. While religious beliefs and myths, according to Durkheim, are secondorder phenomena with only an indirect empirical basis, he argued that the practices themselves have a solid empirical basis: the moral efcacy of the ceremony is real and is felt directly by all who participate in it (1915 [1912]: 404). Thus, we have the irony that the sounds and movements, which are most amenable to empirical study, are obscured by accepted sociological practice, while the beliefs and representations, which appear to be the most obvious underlying purpose of the ritual and which receive the most attention, are not its actual objective. Enacted practice requires a recognizability in the movements involved, as movements of a particular sort. As Durkheim says, a collective sentiment cannot express itself collectively except on the condition of observing a certain order permitting cooperation and movements in unison (1915 [1912]: 247; emphases added). Not just any sounds and movements will do. They must be expected by the other participants and produced in a form that is recognizable as what they expected. The material form of the practices is more important than beliefs in this regard.
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In describing imitative rites Durkheim says that: They consist of movements and cries whose object is to imitate the different attitudes and aspects of the animal whose reproduction is desired (1915 [1912]: 393; emphasis added). He emphasizes movements and cries that are produced by an assembled collective. The practices, according to Durkheim, are not enacted until the group is in movement. So when they assemble, their rst movement ought to be to show each other this quality which they attribute to themselves and by which they are dened [the quality of being emus or kangaroos]. The totem is their rallying sign; for this reason, as we have seen, they design it upon their bodies; but it is no less natural that they should seek to resemble it in their gestures, their cries, their attitude. Since they are emus or kangaroos, they comport themselves like the animals of the same name. By this means, they mutually show one another that they are all members of the same moral community and they become conscious of the kinship uniting them. The rite does not limit itself to expressing this kinship; it makes it or remakes it. For it exists only in so far as it is believed in, and the effect of all these collective demonstrations is to support the beliefs upon which they are founded. (1915 [1912]: 400; emphases added) The representation, in the form of the totem, is a rallying sign reminding the participants to assemble and perform the rite that unites them. The cries and gestures themselves are an indispensable part of this process. If they are not recognizably reproduced, then the beliefs in whose name they are performed cease to exist and the totem no longer works as a sign. It is not enough to have beliefs and representations. They serve as no more than aids to the performance of the practices upon which depend not only the maintenance of the beliefs and representations themselves, but also the development of human reason. While representations, like totems, often play a role in reminding a group to assemble, particularly in imitative rites, they are not a necessary part of practice. It is the sounds and movements comprising the material manifestation of the practice that ultimately produce the necessary sentiments. When Durkheim describes practices, he attends to the details of sounds and movements. The following is part of his description of an imitative rite: He is followed by all his companions who reproduce gestures whose evident object is to represent the insect as it leaves the chrysalis. Also, a hymn which is heard at just this moment and which is like an oral commentary on the rite, consists in a description of the movements made by the insect at this stage of its development. (1915 [1912]: 394; original emphases)
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The re-creation of the totem consists of reproducing sounds and movements. While these sounds and movements appear to be signicant only because they represent the totemic animal, Durkheim argues that their true signicance is in placing the group into simultaneous and homogeneous movement. If the requirements of recognizability are met, the same rite can be used (with only small variations) for very different alleged material purposes (communion, sacrices, purication, initiation, etc.) and yet create the same sentiment in each case. According to Durkheim, this demonstrates that the alleged material goals of the ritual, that is, what the beliefs say the purpose of the rite is, have nothing to do with its real purpose, which is to awaken within the worshippers a certain state of soul, composed of moral force and condence (1915 [1912]: 431). While the same form of rite can be used for very different alleged material purposes, different rites, and different divisions of labor within rites, correspond closely to specic sentiments, according to Durkheim. That is, not just any collection of sounds and movements will result in feelings of moral force just because they are customary and shared, homogeneous and simultaneous. Accordingly, Durkheim took some care to explain the conditions under which particular practices produce specic sentiments. In some rites, such as imitative rites, he argued, all members of the group produce the same movements. In other rites the roles are highly differentiated, and while each movement may be the same each time the rite is performed, the separate participants produce different routinized movements. According to Durkheim, these different moral divisions of labor allow rituals to produce different sorts of emotions, and consequently different categories of the understanding. For example, moral differentiation could produce the sentiments of sacred and profane, which in turn lead to the ideas of classication, moral time and moral space. On the other hand, identical movements produced in unison could produce, according to Durkheim, the sentiments of unity and creation and the category of causality.5 According to Durkheim, there are many forms that a rite, whose object is to produce a sentiment, like unity or causality, can take. The manner in which these sentiments are generated is therefore not xed. There are many ways of producing actual causal relations in the performance of a rite. Durkheim argues that in order to become conscious of itself [as a created unity], the group does not need to perform certain acts in preference to all others. The necessary thing is that it partakes of the same thought and the same action (1915 [1912]: 432, emphasis added). Thus, rites that produce the idea of causality have in common not that they always and everywhere consist of the very same movements or beliefs, but that they provide a situation in which all members of the group act in unison to create the group, and that the enacted creation can be simultaneously felt by all of the participants. In order to get the idea of causality, persons must, as Durkheim says, assemble and become conscious of their moral unity (1915 [1912]: 432). It is not enough to share a set of beliefs or representations about moral unity.
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There is only a contingent relationship between practices and any underlying beliefs, and the movements that compose the rite are not necessarily symbolic of any underlying beliefs. The making of movements in unison is in itself causally efcacious. Persons who do not share the beliefs of the group may nevertheless feel the resulting emotion and thereby experience the moral force of the group. Because of this, participation in practices often precedes religious conversion and is usually an important part of the conversion process. The routinized movements that comprise enacted ritual practices can be aided by the use of emblems that represent those movements and the emotions that they evoke, but only because the emblems have been used materially in the practices that produced those emotions in the rst place. According to Durkheim, When this homogeneity is once established and these movements have once taken a stereotyped form, they serve to symbolize the corresponding representations. But they symbolize them only because they have aided in forming them (1915 [1912]: 263; emphases added). The movements symbolize representations because they are an important cause of those representations. This is the reverse of the relationship usually posited between practices and representations. While a connection to beliefs and symbolic systems may aid the effectiveness of practices, it is not necessary for there to be such a connection. Beliefs and symbols presuppose that persons are already able to think and act in common terms. Thus, systems of belief cannot explain how intersubjective communication is possible in the rst place. It is only through enacted practices, Durkheim argued, that shared categories of the understanding can be generated, and the skeptical conclusions of empiricism and pragmatism avoided. He argued that this is why similar practices appear in all religions. The real purpose of religion is the generation of these essential ideas, not the pursuit of either material or spiritual ends. Durkheim argued that collective representations are only possible through material intermediaries, that is, enacted practices. According to Durkheim, collective representations . . . presuppose that minds act and react upon one another; they are the product of these actions and reactions which are themselves possible only through material intermediaries. These latter do not conne themselves to revealing the mental state with which they are associated; they aid in creating it. Individual minds cannot come in contact and communicate with each other except by coming out of themselves; but they cannot do this except by movements. So it is the homogeneity of these movements that gives the group consciousness of itself and consequently makes it exist. (1915 [1912]: 263; emphases added) It is the homogeneity of movements that gives the group consciousness of itself as a group, not shared beliefs. It is the homogeneity of movements that makes and remakes the group. Durkheim maintains that these nave and awkward
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gestures and these crude processes of representation translate and maintain a sentiment of pride, condence, and veneration (1915 [1912]: 432; emphasis added). The message is that the answer to the great philosophical and sociological questions lies in practices, nave and awkward gestures, not in complex systems of belief and interpretation. As persons and communities continue to interpret practices, their interpretations and beliefs get further away from the original purpose of enacted practices. When the original purpose of religious practices in generating categories of the understanding is confused with their stated material and spiritual objectives it creates the appearance that beliefs are directing actions. According to Durkheim, These imitative practices, which probably had only a moral end at rst, thus become subordinated to utilitarian and material ends (1915 [1912]: 433, emphasis added). The material ends, or beliefs, come to be seen as the purpose of the ritual. Through these interpretations collectives create a whole world of signs and symbols that form a secondary level of collective consciousness. Like the alleged material ends of the practices, this world of signs and symbols is generally mistaken for the primary collective consciousness, the original moral end, which for Durkheim can only be produced by homogeneous sounds and movements. The rites do not need to achieve any material end. According to Durkheim, their true importance lies in actualizing the group: Howsoever little importance the religious ceremonies may have, they put the group into action (1915 [1912]: 389; emphasis added). So, he argues, we have here a whole group of ceremonies whose sole purpose is to awaken certain ideas and sentiments (1915 [1912]: 423; emphasis added). Ceremonies do not have to have a representational sense or purpose. For Durkheim, all religious practices are only variations on one and the same theme; everywhere their basis [is] in [creating] the same state of mind (1915 [1912]: 433). He argues that: The only way of renewing the collective representations which relate to sacred beings is to retemper them in the very source of the religious life, that is to say, in the assembled groups. Now the emotions aroused by these periodical crises through which external things pass induce the men who witness them to assemble, to see what should be done about it. But by the very act of uniting, they are mutually comforted; they nd a remedy because they seek it together. (1915 [1912]: 387; emphases added) Assembled and activated, the group produces sentiments in its members that serve to cement not only their common social bond, but their intellectual bond as well. According to Durkheim, it is the mental states which these actions . . . accompany or reawaken (1915 [1912]:388; emphases added), mental states of moral force, assembly, mutuality, unity, creation, and so on, which constitute the true importance of enacted practice.
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Durkheim argued that the real purpose of ritual practices is to ensure that certain essential collective ideas without which social cooperation and communication are not possible are generated within an assembled population. He argues that the essential thing is that men are assembled, that sentiments are felt in common and expressed in common acts (1915 [1912]: 431; emphases added). Sentiments can only be felt in common when practices that are designed to enact these sentiments, as a real creation by the ritual, are mutually enacted by members of a group. The enacted practices both express and constitute the sentiments. For example, causality is actualized in the ritual practice of the imitative rite, wherein the rite creates the unity of the totemic group, while at the same time expressing the creation of the totem. It is not that the practice represents or symbolizes the sentiment of causality, but that the practice actually causes the unity of the group and the participants feel this unity as an emotion, or sentiment. Not only is Durkheims treatment of practice thoroughly empirical and not idealist, or interpretive, but his analysis of the empirical basis of religious sentiments was as detailed as the data available at the time would allow. He certainly did not ignore the concrete enactment of solidarity in favor of a vague notion of society as external constraint, as many scholars have maintained. Nor did he base his argument on beliefs and representations. For instance, Durkheim argued that while the same rite could be used to produce different alleged material ends (i.e. pursue different beliefs), different kinds of rites really did produce different emotional results. He focused specically on the difference between imitative rites and rites of oblation, asceticism and communion. He argued that the differences in the relations between members of the group enacted by each of these practices correspond to the creation of different ideas. It is this attention to the empirical details of ritual enactment that explains the long descriptive chapters in The Elementary Forms. Durkheim argued on the basis of descriptions of actual religious rites that the form of the rite corresponds to the sentiments it produces in the minds of participants. Furthermore, he argued that beliefs and representations bore no necessary relation to this process and only served to obscure the true purpose of religious rites from the researcher.
The Sentiments
Durkheim argued that the true purpose of religious rites does not correspond to participants beliefs about their purpose and that rituals often appear to be in error because the object of the rite is mistakenly thought to be a material end based on a belief. He argued that the true justication of religious practice does not lie in the apparent ends which they pursue, but rather in the invisible action which they exercise over the mind and in the way in which they affect our mental status (1915 [1912]: 403).
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Obviously, persons in modern society do not believe that the material end of reproducing kangaroos, or making rain, by performing a rite can be achieved. But, while the rite may not have reproduced kangaroos, it really did reproduce the kangaroo clan as an enacted unity. Treating practices as actualizing representations and beliefs leads to the conclusion that members of religions we do not believe in are all deluded. Durkheim maintains that: If we are to see in the efcacy attributed to the rites anything more than the product of a chronic delirium with which humanity has abused itself, we must show that the effect of the cult really is to recreate periodically a moral being upon which we depend as it depends upon us. Now this being does exist: it is society. (1915 [1912]: 389) A turn toward sounds and movements, and away from beliefs and representations, returns us to the real function of ritual enacted practice: producing shared sentiments. This allows an escape from the innite regress of interpretation that characterizes both religious and scientic dogma. The purpose of collective enacted religious practices is, according to Durkheim, to create ideas essential to human intelligibility: to stimulate the mental dispositions, the excitation of which is its permanent function (1915 [1912]: 431; emphases added). For Durkheim, this generation of essential ideas is the primary function of all religious practice, in all religions in all societies, because these sentiments and their corresponding essential ideas form the necessary basis of mutual intelligibility and human reason. The body of The Elementary Forms, according to Durkheim, is an examination of the sentiments which the above rites put into practice and their relationship to the fundamental categories of thought (1915 [1912]: 400; emphasis added). Without shared sentiments there would be no shared categories of thought. Durkheim writes that participants feel within them the effects of the ritual (1915 [1912]: 400; emphasis added). These effects are real social effects, and as such are empirical and available for empirical study. But, they are felt internally. Durkheim allows that explaining practices in terms of systems of beliefs or a mental mechanism which gives them meaning and a moral signicance is an improvement on taking the rites literally and believing that with a few grains of sand thrown to the wind . . . it is possible to maintain the life of an animal species or of a god (1915 [1912]: 389; emphasis added). Taking the rites literally makes primitive peoples seem completely devoid of logic. Durkheim argues that the real explanation of the efcacy of the ritual is that it is able to produce feelings that make the participants feel that the rite has succeeded. Conceiving a mental mechanism of interpretation that gives meaning to the practices, he argues, gives no guarantee that this mechanism itself does not
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consist in a simple play of hallucinatory images (1915 [1912]: 389). On the other hand, the sentiments are no hallucination. Participants, he says, get from the ritual a feeling of strength and condence (1915 [1912]: 420; emphases added). They not only feel stronger, but as a group they are stronger. As a consequence, according to Durkheim, they feel the ceremony is good for them (1915 [1912]: 4012; emphasis added). During the assembly they have created, through enacted practice, social forces that they feel as external moral forces.6 The relationship between practices and emotions, as Durkheim articulates it, is quite specic. Different rites produce different emotions. For instance, according to Durkheim, imitative rites produce a feeling of creation. The unity of the group is created through these rites: He could not escape the feeling that outside of him [in society] there are active causes (1915 [1912]: 243; emphasis added). This feeling of creation and unity is the category of causality. According to Durkheim: They become conscious of the kinship uniting them (1915 [1912]: 400; emphases added). The creation of group unity in and through the enactment of the ritual produces, he says, a literal social state of creation or causality: A full conception of the causal relation is implied in the power thus attributed to the like to produce the like (1915 [1912]: 406). Imitative rites create something entirely new (1915 [1912]: 399). This creation can be felt by the participants. There is real production and creation in imitative rites (1915 [1912]: 399). The category of causality consists in this feeling of group unity being created: Through it, the group periodically renews the sentiment which it has of itself (1915 [1912]: 420; emphasis added). The efcacy of the rite is made evident to the participants through these feelings. Durkheim asks: How could this sort of well-being fail to give them a feeling that the rite has succeeded? (1915 [1912]: 4012; emphases added). Society does not act on us like natural external constraints that must be interpreted. Rather, according to Durkheim, via collective sentiments produced during the collective enactment of practice, society becomes identical with the essential categories of thought in each individual: For society, this unique source of all that is sacred, does not limit itself to moving us from without and affecting us for the moment; it establishes itself within us in a durable manner. It arouses within us a whole world of ideas and sentiments which express it but which, at the same time, form an integral and permanent part of ourselves. (1915 [1912]: 2978; emphases added) Durkheim is not talking here about social representations becoming a permanent part of consciousness. Rather, he indicates sentiments as the direct result of sounds and movements and refers to this as society becoming a permanent part of ourselves. Society moves us from without and creates sentiments within. Integral parts of human thought, which other thinkers have taken to be individual
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in origin, because all individuals seem to have them, are argued by Durkheim to have a social origin. All individuals have the same emotions and categories of thought, not because they are part of the individual organism, or a product of joint interpretive labor, or part of the cultural representational superstructure, but rather because all individuals must participate in enacted practices in order for society to be possible; and it is this social participation that creates shared emotions and their corresponding essential ideas, or categories of thought. The emotions and categories are generally the same everywhere, with minor variations, because unless the required basic set is produced through participation in social practices, mutual intelligibility, and hence society, cannot be sustained. For Durkheim, the categories of thought constituted by the emotions that are created in and through enacted practice frame human knowledge not just of society, but of the world of nature as well: It is a framework in which our empirical ascertainments arrange themselves (1915 [1912]: 411). Thus the perception of the physical world, according to Durkheim, is framed by an understanding that is essentially social or moral. Social or religious forces are perceived as moral powers because they are made up entirely of the impressions this moral being, the group, arouses in those other moral beings, its individual members (1915 [1912]: 254; emphasis added). Emotional or moral forces are not perceived in the same manner as physical or natural events. According to Durkheim, they do not translate the manner in which physical things affect our senses (1915 [1912]: 254). The perception of physical events requires interpretation and generalization from particular to general ideas. Emotional or moral forces are inherently general and are perceived directly as such. Perceptions of natural events come rst through the ve senses. Then the disconnected and particular perceptions of natural objects are processed through categories of thought that are not only social, but emotional in origin. Our ability to roughly apply concepts originating in social practice to the natural world is, according to Durkheim, where the positivist belief arises that persons can directly perceive relationships between physical events. It is the source of many philosophical problems because the categories have a moral/ empirical and not a natural/empirical origin, and therefore do not really correspond to natural relations. Our only valid ability is to perceive moral relations. Moral causality is not the same as physical causality. According to Durkheim, the moral force of society is an essential part of each person and organizes their thought processes: This force must also penetrate us and organize itself within us; it thus becomes an integral part of our being (1915 [1912]: 240). This moral force organizing our thought processes is something that is felt. Durkheim says that They feel it active and present within them, for it is this which raises them to a superior life (1915 [1912]: 253). The social life of the individual is superior to their pre-social existence. As members of society they develop reason and logic unavailable to pre-social beings. Feeling this emotion at work inside of themselves, he says, gives persons the idea that they are
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in communication with a sacred being: This is why men have believed that they contain within them a principle comparable to the one residing in the totem, and consequently, why they have attributed a sacred character to themselves (1915 [1912]: 253). Whereas many have argued that things are invested with a sacred character because of physical or natural attributes, Durkheim argues that it is the perception of a moral social force that leads persons to call things sacred. This sacred character has its source in the moral force of the group and not in either the individual being or the individual object. The individual comes to realize through the experience of sentiments produced by enacted practices that the force that transports him into the world of sacred things is not inherent in him, but comes to him from the outside (1915 [1912]: 253). Because moral force is inherently social, respect for moral force is respect for society. According to Durkheim, respect is an emotion that plays an important role in sustaining the moral force of society. Society, he says, is the object of venerable respect (1915 [1912]: 237; emphasis added). He argues that this emotion is generated by participation in enacted practice: respect is the emotion which we experience when we feel this interior and wholly spiritual pressure upon us (1915 [1912]: 237; emphases added). Respect is an emotion that persons would not feel unless they participated in practices that produced in them a feeling of moral force. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, Durkheim argues (1915 [1912]: 249; emphasis added), the individual develops a respect for the social and supernatural powers that they credit with this power. The feeling of this internal pressure is immediate: they perceive it at the very moment when it acts upon their wills (1915 [1912]: 407). All participants in the rite perceive this feeling simultaneously. Ritual practices do not arouse different sentiments in each individual participant; rather, according to Durkheim, they arouse a single affective state in the mind (1915 [1912]: 301; emphasis added). This single affective state is shared by all, he argues, when they all partake of the same idea and the same sentiment . . . in immediate relations with one another (1915 [1912]: 387; emphases added). When an assembled group enacts a ritual practice, each participant, he says, can be assured that as they feel the moral force of the ritual at the same time all [their] companions feel themselves transformed in the same way (1915 [1912]: 250; emphasis added). According to Durkheim, moral force has causal efcacy because of the emotions it arouses in participants to the rite: It gets its efcacy from the intensity of the mental state in which it is placed (1915 [1912]: 238; emphases added). Moral force is entirely a product of emotions, or what Durkheim calls psychical properties: It has an efcacy coming solely from its psychical properties, and it is by just this sign that moral authority is recognized (1915 [1912]: 238; emphasis
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added). We have no better source of knowledge about the efcacy of religious rites than the feelings we have when we participate in them. The purpose of the rites is to produce these feelings, and if we have these feelings, then we know that the rite has succeeded.
The Role of Representations

In contrast to the empiricist view that passions are a contingent product of the individual mind, Durkheim argues that when the emotions are the special ones that instantiate moral force, the feeling is the same for all participators in the rite, since it is the product of a collective experience (1915 [1912]: 410). This is not because of a mystical group force, but rather because the movements enacted by everyone during the rite serve to give members a feeling of creation or wellbeing. For instance, according to Durkheim, feelings of well-being, strength, creation and moral force are one of the results of totemic rituals that give rise to the all-important idea of causality, which empiricism could not explain. Totems and other religious symbols do not need to represent systems of beliefs, or have complex symbolic meanings within the ritual. They obviously come to have symbolic interpretations attached to them after the fact but, for Durkheim, this is only a secondary matter. In the rst instance, he says, they serve the purpose of providing a focus for the concrete movements involved in a practice, and reminding persons of the sentiments that a practice has invoked after the practice is over: So we must refrain from regarding these symbols as simple artices, as sorts of labels attached with representations already made, in order to make them more manageable: they are an integral part of them (1915 [1912]: 263). The totem helps to provide a single focus for those assembled to enact the ritual. This single focus is important because persons have difculty thinking clearly of the cause of these sentiments. That is, their beliefs get in the way and do not, by themselves, permit a single focus. Furthermore, beliefs are generally very far from comprehending the actual causal relations enacted by ritual practices. The feelings created by ritual are too intense and their cause, in enacted practices, eludes us. So we make a sign to represent the feelings generated by the ritual. Then, according to Durkheim, this sign can be used to evoke the emotions that are really associated with the moral force of enacted practice (1915 [1912]: 2501). The emblem serves to create this sentiment; it is, he says, one of its constituent elements (1915 [1912]: 262; emphasis added). Furthermore, because they remind participants of the concrete practices, the representations serve the function of making the sentiments produced by the movements more durable. According to Durkheim, if the movements by which these sentiments are expressed are connected with something that endures, the sentiments themselves become more durable (1915 [1912]: 263; emphasis added).
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The meaning of religious emblems is not purely conventional, however, and not a matter of belief but, rather, according to Durkheim, is constituted by the collective sentiments that those emblems play a part in producing: Even the fact that collective sentiments are thus attached to things completely foreign to them is not purely conventional: it illustrates under a conventional form a real characteristic of social facts, that is, their transcendence over individual minds (1915 [1912]: 263; emphasis added). Durkheims theory with regard to representations reverses the usual relation between them. He argues that symbols can only represent the sentiments because they were created by them: When this homogeneity is once established and these movements have once taken a stereotyped form, they serve to symbolize the corresponding representations. But they symbolize them only because they have aided in forming them (1915 [1912]: 263; emphases added). According to Durkheim, if the collective representations are an outgrowth of the emotional life, this does not make them less valid; rather it makes them more valid than philosophers had previously thought. He argues that these shared ideas are empirically valid even though they are emotions because they manifest a real state of affairs: Men are more condent because they feel themselves stronger; and they really are stronger, because forces which were languishing are now reawakened in the consciousness (1915 [1912]: 387; emphases added). The enactment of moral harmony leads to feelings of condence and courage that reproduce the moral unity of the group (1915 [1912]: 242). The participants in the rite may not be able to point with any accuracy to the causes and effects that they have produced but, Durkheim says, they have a feeling of what they have done, and they are not wrong about it: They take away with them a feeling of well-being whose causes they cannot clearly see, but which is well founded (1915 [1912]: 4012; emphasis added). These ideas that witnessably enacted practices give rise to are, according to Durkheim, ideas not previously part of a given set of cultural representations. They are ideas that could not have come from individual experience and could not be rendered mutually intelligible if they were only cultural representations. These enacted practices are the basic social facts upon which society and collective representations were built. They explain the possibility of shared meaning and human reason. Even after they have been initially created, through the enactment of practice, these social facts could not exist merely as representations. They must be constantly enacted, reenacted and experienced as sentiments by those who enact them. Durkheim argued that certain practices, understood as sounds and movements, could create the same sentiments in all participants in assembled groups.7 These sentiments in turn constitute a basic set of shared ideas without which, Durkheim argues, mutual intelligibility could not be achieved. The collective attempt to explain the sentiments created by the practices is what gives rise to representations and beliefs, which, in turn, may become social forces in their own
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right. However, representations and beliefs originate in concrete practices, not the reverse, and unless concrete practices continue to be enacted by assembled groups, Durkheim argues, society cannot be sustained. Durkheim did not believe that a consensus of ideas achieved by agreement was sufcient to explain social cooperation and communication. How would a consensus be achieved if there were no prior mutual intelligibility? He argued that there must be an underlying empirical validity for certain basic ideas, or categories, that are socially constructed through the group enactment of social practices. If the emotions generated by enacted practice and their corresponding categories were the result of interpretation, or depended for their meaning on other symbols or ideas, or the empirical experience of natural events, then empirical experience would remain individual, and the transition to the social would be only a symbolic construction superimposed on the individual level of experience. Social order in such a case would be a conceptual faade hiding underlying chaos, as it is for Baudrillard. Because he believed that enacted practices are necessary for intelligibility, Durkheim also treated them as a necessary moral good. Enacted practices are the social facts upon which Durkheim sought to build both general sociology and his sociology of morals. The argument is not positivist, because practices are inherently socially constructed facts. But neither is the argument idealist, because Durkheim does not consider practices to be representations or beliefs. The argument that socially constructed concrete practices are the basic foundation of society has broad implications for contemporary sociology. Replacing representations and beliefs with recognizable sounds and movements has the potential to eliminate the contingency that results from treating representations and beliefs as determining reality.
The Role of Practices in the Argument Against Empiricism

Durkheims argument that shared enacted practices generate sentiments, or emotions, that are experienced immediately as general ideas, is the key to his proposed solution to the empiricist dilemma: that general ideas cannot be valid because perceptions are presented to experience in the form of an unrelated string of particulars. From an empiricist perspective, something must be added to the particulars of experience by the mind, in order to formulate a general idea, because general ideas express relations between particulars and natural relations between particulars cannot be directly perceived. For the empiricist, general ideas representing natural relations must be constructed in the mind through an operation of logical thought. Therefore, the empiricists concluded that perceptions cannot provide an empirically valid basis for general ideas. Durkheim, on the other hand, argued that certain, very special, general ideas, which he refers to as categories of the understanding, enter the mind as
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emotions. These emotions have the advantage of being immediately feelings of the moral relations enacted between persons and things, and hence are never particular. Because these feelings are shared by all participants enacting a practice, they are not individual. For the most part, The Elementary Forms, generally interpreted as a sociology of religion, is actually an elaborate empirical description of how religious practices produce the emotions that constitute the categories of classication, time, space, force, totality and causality. Durkheims argument depends to a large extent on his claim that enacted practices create emotions that can be directly perceived by the mind, and therefore perfectly known, and at the same time have a valid external source in enacted practices shared by the members of a group. This idea that emotions constitute a special form of knowledge is not original to Durkheims argument. It is also an important part of Humes empiricism. Since Durkheim argues that the immediate knowledge of emotions is the solution to the empiricist dilemma, it is important to examine in some detail the difference between the treatment of emotion by Durkheim and Hume, and the relationship they posit between these emotions and social practice. Durkheims claim that emotions are directly available to experience closely resembles Humes empiricist argument concerning the passions in all but one respect. Hume shares with Durkheim the argument that passions can be perfectly known because they are in our minds. He also shares with Durkheim the argument that passions arise as a result of relations between persons and the social world and cannot be attributed to natural or biological processes and relations. But, for Durkheim, emotions are created by enacted practices and felt by individuals, whereas, for Hume, passions are individual interpretations of relations between individuals and social processes. Hume had himself made an important departure from prior philosophy, which had treated emotions as bodily manifestations that had to be overcome by reason (Rorty, 1994: 40). For Hume, on the contrary, passions, not reason, do and should direct human action (1978 [173940]: 415). In particular the passions of pride and humility are taken by Hume to motivate a large part of social action, which explains their importance to his moral philosophy. So, it might be said that Hume takes an important step in a sociological direction. However, for Hume, the individual is still the baseline. He argues that the emotional response generated by the individual in relation to social events is a contingent one that can only be roughly predicted and can vary in any individual case. In contrast, Durkheim argues that certain practices are designed to, and in fact can, produce the same8 emotions in the minds of all who assemble to participate in any given enacted practice simultaneously. Durkheims argument credits social forces, and the emotions they generate, with forming the human consciousness in ways that are consistent across populations who enact the same rituals. This position is sharply opposed to Humes argument that contingent relations between states of affairs and individuals produce purely individualized
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emotions. It is this point that sharply differentiates Durkheims argument for the possibility of valid general ideas from Humes claim that valid general ideas are not possible. Grounding the categories of the understanding on the direct apprehension of emotion in this way allowed Durkheim to avoid the particularities of perception inherent in classical empiricism. According to Durkheim, our senses only enable us to perceive phenomena which coexist or which follow one another . . . the internal process uniting these conditions escapes them (1915 [1912]: 4067). In contrast, the emotions generated by enacted practice do not consist of parts that need to be connected. For Durkheim, emotions are not felt with the ve senses separately, like natural objects. Rather, they are immediately perceptions of moral relations and, as such, are perceived whole. In fact, Durkheim argues, it is emotions that supply the connections persons use to connect the particulars of sensible experience.9 He maintains that feelings generated in and through the enactment of religious rites played a role of the highest utility in logic; they have served to bind together things which sensation leaves apart from one another (1915 [1912]: 365). In this way Durkheim was able to transform classical empiricism into sociology, grounding valid knowledge on the empirical details of social process, rather than on individual perceptions of natural events.10 In an important sense the distinction between sociology and philosophy rests on the contrast between Durkheim and Hume over this issue. Durkheim attempts to turn the philosophical question inside out, so to speak, and show that feelings, which for philosophy are not empirically valid phenomena, are in fact the bedrock of empirically valid categories of the understanding. The emotions have their source, for Durkheim, in social forces, as does the person (the social aspect of the individual being). This turns on its head the philosophical notion that the individual and their emotions come rst, and social cooperation follows. Durkheim makes the having of emotions in the rst place (in the special sense described) dependent on the cooperative enactment of social practices, which create social forces, which are then felt as emotions: In the midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, he says, we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces (1915 [1912]: 240). Furthermore, he argues, only society gives us the sensation of perpetual dependence (1915 [1912]: 237). Society is also the source of the emotion Durkheim calls respect (1915 [1912]: 237). The intensity of collective emotion serves to distinguish it from individual emotional phenomena: The representations which express them within each of us have an intensity which no purely private state of consciousness could ever attain (1915 [1912]: 238). Thus, social practices create the social forces that, when felt by participants in enacted practices, constitute the core of the intellectual and emotional life. The issue of whether emotions begin in individuals, managed or not, is a key question addressed by both Durkheim and Hume. Both posit social relations as essential to emotion. But for Durkheim social forces actually create certain
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emotions. With this argument Durkheim intended to place sociology on an entirely different epistemological footing from philosophy. Signicantly, he did not separate the cognitive from the emotional, as two independent faculties, in the way that current theories of emotion tend to do. He made the cognitive squarely dependent upon the emotional, as had Hume. Through their different approaches to emotion, Durkheims sociology and Humes philosophy work at the same problem from opposite ends.
Three Points of Comparison Between Durkheim and Hume

Both Hume and Durkheim argue that persons have immediate knowledge of their passions or emotions. They also both argue that social relations generate key emotions. However, for Hume even socially responsive passions originate in the individual mind and therefore do not provide a basis for valid empirical knowledge of an external reality. For Durkheim, emotions arise in response to enacted social practice. However, they arise not as individual responses, but more on the order of individual emotional perceptions of real cooperatively enacted social forces. That is, the group together cooperatively create a state of social being, or moral force, that is then felt by the participants. This state of moral force is felt not through the ve senses, but rather as a sentiment or emotion. It is necessary to distinguish drives and desires from emotions in order to make this comparison. Neither Hume nor Durkheim is arguing that the drive to eat, or the desire for sex, originates in social relations, although socially derived emotions can certainly affect how these drives or needs are fullled. They both single out a small class of socially dependent emotions that they distinguish from drives. For Hume, these are sympathy, pride, respect, allegiance, and so on. For Durkheim, the emotional perception of social force explains an even smaller number of emotions than it does for Hume. However, what Durkheim means by emotion, or sentiment, is very like what Hume means by passion: that is, feelings of regularity, belonging, unity and causality engendered by social participation.
Perfect Knowledge of Emotions as Internal States

The empiricist dilemma goes as follows. Knowledge of relations between objects in nature is indirect and, as Hume demonstrated, highly problematic. The impressions of the external world that enter our minds through the ve senses are hopelessly separated into disconnected particulars. In translating them into thought we impose on these impressions an internal order lacking in the original perceptions. Knowledge of external objects and events, and the relations therein, can therefore have no empirical validity. Additionally, all concepts, being necessarily general, must be the product of mental operations, as no sense impressions
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are in themselves general. Consequently, categories of thought, like force and causality, and emotions like pride and respect cannot in any empirically valid way be derived from perceptions of external affairs. On the other hand as Durkheim and Hume both argue, passions and sentiments are immediately available to knowledge because they are in our minds. Thus, placing more emphasis on emotions solves some of the problems of empiricism even for Hume. Hume followed this policy in building a moral philosophy on his theory of passions. According to Hume, . . . the essence and composition of external bodies are so obscure, that we must necessarily, in our reasonings, or rather conjectures concerning them, involve ourselves in contradictions and absurdities. But as perceptions of the mind are perfectly known, and I have usd all imaginable caution in forming conclusions concerning them, I have always hoped to keep clear of these contradictions, which have attended every other system. (1978 [173940]: 366; emphasis added) According to Hume, the organs of the mind are arranged in such a way that the mind can add emotions to its impressions: nature has given to the organs of the human mind, a certain disposition tted to produce a peculiar impression or emotion, which we call pride (1978 [173940]: 287). However, social relations are required in order to stimulate the emotion of pride. He will say the same for the other emotions. Hume argues that the organs are so disposd as to produce the passion; and the passion, after its production, naturally produces a certain idea (1978 [173940]: 287). Because the passion precedes the idea, however, these ideas have no empirical validity, that is, they do not correspond to any empirical reality, according to Hume (1978 [173940]: 320). It is emotions that direct the will, not the faculty of reason: reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other ofce than to serve and obey them (1978 [173940]: 415). This should be the case for Hume, because reason not only has no empirical validity, but also has no truth. While emotion has no external empirical validity, it is nevertheless superior to reason in being true and immediately known to the individual. Thus, for Hume, the study of human action, or moral philosophy, must be based on emotion. For Durkheim, as for Hume, the knowledge persons have of their own sentiments is immediate and direct. Durkheim writes that this constraining and necessitating action, which escapes us when coming from an external object, is readily perceptible here because everything is inside us (1915 [1912]: 409). However, while agreeing with the general premise that persons can have perfect knowledge of their emotions, Durkheim disagrees with Hume over the origin of these emotions, substituting collective creation for individual response. Thus, Durkheim is able to conclude, in contrast to Hume, that passions are empirically
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valid because they correspond to an external socially enacted reality, and, therefore, that a study of human society and moral philosophy based on emotion can have empirical validity in addition to truth. According to Durkheim, the idea of force can come only from our internal experience; the only forces which we can directly learn about are necessarily moral forces (1915 [1912]: 404). The emotion of force is an internal experience of a real external moral force. According to Durkheim, the sentiments generated by the assembled group are directly experienced in the mind of the participating individual: Social forces: they are a part of our internal life (1915 [1912]: 408). But, while they are internal they must also be impersonal. Durkheim acknowledges that purely personal and individual feelings are incommunicable (1915 [1912]: 408). The emotions or feelings generated by enacted practice do not have an individual origin, however, and we do not need a private language to speak of them. Durkheim makes the strong claim that if reason is only a form of individual experience, it no longer exists (1915 [1912]: 28). He argues that the feelings of moral force and well-being generated by totemic rituals constitute a general perception of social forces shared by members of the group. For Hume, the passions cannot be empirically valid, even though they are true, because they have no corresponding impressions. They are ideas generated by the mind in response to relationships between persons and social considerations of various sorts. Connections between objects or persons must be made in the mind because, for Hume, relationships have no empirical reality that can be perceived through the ve senses. Only objects and passing states of affairs can be perceived. Hence, for Hume, passions are always rst ideas and then only secondarily impressions (1978 [173940]: 369). Hume argues: . . . in sympathy there is an evident conversion of an idea into an impression. This conversion arises from the relation of objects to ourself. Ourself is always intimately present to us. Let us compare all these circumstances, and we shall nd, that sympathy is exactly correspondent to the operations of our understanding. (1978 [173940]: 320) Durkheim would agree that sympathy corresponds exactly to the operation of our understanding. But while, for Hume, this means that the operations of the understanding create the affection of sympathy, Durkheim would argue that joining together in sympathetic union with others to enact practices that create the emotion of sympathy creates the faculty of human understanding.
Emotions Result From Social Relations

For both Hume and Durkheim, social relations play a special role in generating or exciting the passions or sentiments, which compose the will or reason respectively.
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However, the relationships between emotions and society posited by the two thinkers are exactly the reverse of one another. For Durkheim, the practices come rst and generate the sentiments and ideas, which in turn constitute the faculty of the understanding. For Hume, the ideas are generated in the individual mind in response to social situations, after which the mind generates pseudo-impressions to correspond to those ideas, which must consequently be illusions (ideas are only valid, for Hume, when they correspond to prior sense impressions). Thus, for Durkheim, the faculty of the understanding corresponds to the world of social facts, because it has been made by it, whereas, for Hume, it bears an entirely contingent relation to reality. According to Durkheim, social practices provide a powerful experience of moral force, which is the origin of our idea that there are powers greater than ourselves that constrain our actions: Thus the environment in which we live seems to us to be peopled with forces that are at once imperious and helpful, august and gracious, and with which we have relations. Since they exert over us a pressure of which we are conscious, we are forced to localize them outside ourselves, just as we do for the objective causes of our sensations. But the sentiments which they inspire in us differ in nature from those which we have for simple visible objects . . . we entertain for them [objects] no feeling which resembles respect, and they contain within them nothing that is able to raise us outside ourselves. (1915 [1912]: 243; emphases added) According to Durkheim, perceptions of natural and social forces are very different in character. He writes that the two form two distinct and separate mental states in our consciousness, just as do the two forms of life to which they correspond (1915 [1912]: 243). The special ideas enacted by social forces have an emotional character. According to Durkheim, they are only collective forces hypostatized, that is to say, moral forces, they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not of sensations coming from the physical world (1915 [1912]: 362). For Hume, the passions are the basis for all action. Something happens; we have a feeling about it; that feeling impels us to action. Durkheim would not, perhaps, deny that something like that which Hume describes is a part of the natural equipment of the individual as an animal. He allows that natural individuals have faculties of mind much as Hume describes them,11 and although I am not aware that he discusses the subject, it seems probable that he would allow natural persons also to have the desires and drives for pleasure and pain that Hume attributes to them. However, for Durkheim, in addition to these individual feelings there are certain general feelings, or emotions, which are shared with others that have their origins in shared enacted practice and without which
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organized social life and complex communication would not be possible. These, he says, are the result of social action. While Hume claims a contingent relation between individual emotion and social context, several of his examples employ emotions in a fashion that looks similar to Durkheim: 1. 2. 3. Hume describes a man under sentence of death who feels the necessity of his execution (1978 [173940]: 406). He describes a man in a military unit for whom a feeling of group allegiance becomes an overwhelming force (1978 [173940]: 4201). He also describes situations in which others positive evaluation of the self creates a feeling of pride (1978 [173940]: 27790).
However, the resemblance to Durkheim is only supercial. For Hume, the feelings of necessity, allegiance and pride that accompany these social relations are described as a product of material relations, such as the bars on the door of the prison, the invincible strength of the enemy for the military man, and the comparison of property and achievement in the case of pride. For Durkheim, on the other hand, the regularity and predictability of these events are functions of their status as social practices that enact moral force, not their material characteristics. It is the pronouncement of the death sentence that carries moral force for Durkheim, not the physical certainty of the execution or the bars on the door. In a traditional society the pronouncement of death ends ones life as a social being absolutely. Escape would mean living in isolation because, without a clan, no person is allowed to live in a group. Even in a modern society it would necessitate the development of a new identity. The social being would cease to exist in its prior state. From Durkheims perspective the empiricist theory of emotion is awed because it assumes the existence of social relations that it does not take into account. Durkheim criticizes the empiricist theory of emotion in the following terms: Some have tried to explain it with the well-known laws of the association of ideas. The sentiments inspired in us by a person or a thing spread out contagiously from the idea of this thing or person to the representations associated with it, and thence to the objects which these representations express. (1915 [1912]: 361) This criticism applies particularly to Humes explanations of pride and allegiance. The original sentiment, according to Hume, is a response of the individual mind to a social situation. It then comes to attach itself to similar situations and motivate action accordingly. There are two problems with this explanation from Durkheims perspective. First, the empiricist explanation of the generation of sentiments depends
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on the prior existence of social relations. For Durkheim, the sort of complex social relationships the evaluation of which leads to feelings of pride and allegiance could not exist unless the sentiments, or categories, of class, cause, moral force and unity (totality) already existed. These sentiments, in turn, require the enactment of concrete practices. Thus, from Durkheims perspective, Humes argument is circular; and, second, it treats the sentiments as purely individual contingent creations that have no empirical basis. Thus, empiricists have little respect for the knowledge these sentiments provide for (although in Humes case, since he thinks that empirically valid knowledge is not possible in any case, he thinks that contingent passions are an adequate foundation for argument). Durkheim comments ironically on the empiricists of his own day: . . . of course a cultivated man is not deceived by these associations; he knows that these derived emotions are due to mere plays of the images and to entirely mental combinations, so he does not give way to the superstitions which these illusions tend to bring about. (1915 [1912]: 361) Durkheim not only criticizes the tendency to disregard such practices and ideas as superstition and illusion, but also criticizes the tendency to attribute them only to primitive people: . . . moreover, it is quite arbitrarily that they attribute to the primitive this tendency to objectify blindly all his emotions. In his ordinary life, and in the details of his lay occupations, he does not impute the properties of one thing to its neighbor, or vice versa. (1915 [1912]: 362) According to Durkheim, the same sorts of beliefs characterize the modern religions that empiricists often defend; an argument that was not well received. Since modern social practices have accumulated a heavy overlay of belief that obscures the fundamental relationship between practices and emotion, Durkheim believes that the original source of the validity and efcacy of enacted practices can be accounted for better if, instead of considering the notion of religious forces as it is when completely formulated, we go back to the mental processes from which it results (1915 [1912]: 363). The study of aboriginal religion allows a closer look at the generation of those emotions that are prerequisites for the existence of sociability and intelligibility through the enactment of shared practices.
The External Validity of Passions

While passions or sentiments played a signicant role in the arguments of both Durkheim and Hume, they have very different views concerning the origin and
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hence the validity of emotions, and consequently of the knowledge based on them. In an important sense, even though Hume argues that passions have no empirical validity, he believes that they have the special quality of being true because they do not represent anything other than themselves. A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modication of existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modication. When I am angry I am actually possessed with the passion, and in that emotion have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than ve foot high. Tis impossible, therefore, that this passion can be opposd by, or be contradictory to truth and reason; since this contradiction consists in the disagreement of ideas, considerd as copies, with those ideas, which they represent. (1978 [173940]: 415) For Hume, passions cannot be false, since they are equivalent to themselves and cannot be compared to anything else. However, according to him, they also cannot be empirically valid since they originate in us and are not representations, valid or otherwise, of any external empirical matter. For Durkheim, on the other hand, the sentiments are actual features of social practices. They do not represent, or symbolize, those practices. They are the purpose and essence of those practices, and they are what participants feel when they enact those practices. These feelings have a greater empirical validity for Durkheim than even simple ideas of external objects, because we have perfect knowledge of what is in our minds and feelings are in our minds. However, in spite of being perfectly known because they are felt in our minds (and bodies), a part of the argument that Durkheim shares with Hume, he also argues that they are at the same time real features of enacted practice and can be felt by all who participate. Durkheim writes that since they are elaborated in common, the vigor with which they have been thought of by each particular mind is retained in all the other minds, and reciprocally (1915 [1912]: 238). For Durkheim the feeling is an experience of the efcacy of the ritual. It is not a contingent construction of the individual mind. It should be treated as an experience of external events, not as a passion generated by the mind. Because they are experiences of external, social, states of affairs, the emotions corresponding to the categories do have empirical validity. Because they are feelings, they can be immediately known, and because they are feelings of real socially constructed causality, force, and so on, they are immediately perceptions of general ideas.12 For both Hume and Durkheim, the idea of cause and effect bears a special relationship to emotion. For Hume, a constant conjunction of ideas produces a habit of thinking of them as connected. This habit leads the mind to form the idea of cause and effect, which therefore has its origin in the mind and not in
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experience. Hume argues that a prisoner condemned to be executed on the rack feels the necessity of his execution (1978 [173940]: 406). He argues that there is no less certainty in his feeling of this than with . . . a train of causes cemented together by what we are pleasd to call a physical necessity. The same eperienced union has the same effect on the mind, whether the united objects be motives, volitions and actions; or gure and motion. (1978 [173940]: 4067) In saying that causality is the same thing with regard to emotions as it is with regard to physical necessity, Hume means that the regularity and predictability of these events share the same sense of necessity, based on habit, as the belief in physical necessity. According to Hume, all ideas of cause and effect are only feelings: From this constant union it [the mind] forms the idea of cause and effect, and by its inuence feels the necessity (1978 [173940]: 4067; original emphases). The feeling of necessity does not have empirical validity. The absolute sense of a pronouncement carrying moral force is missing from Humes account.13 For Durkheim, cause and effect are also experienced as emotions. But he considers the necessity that gives rise to that feeling to be a real feature of enacted practices not added by the mind. It is a necessity enacted in social practices that natural forces do not possess. We may not know for certain whether the sun will rise tomorrow. But if the chief of a tribe pronounces a death sentence on a person, that person is from that point necessarily under sentence of death until, and unless, the same social forces absolve him or her. This is not an empirical matter, but rather a matter of the necessity of moral force. The person is socially dead. It is what the social act means. While, for Durkheim, the idea of causality that is produced by collective practice is superior to that which originates in perceptions of natural events, it is only empirically valid when applied to social relations. Its extension into the realm of physical necessity is what makes the empirical validity of the concept appear to be a problem. The concept of causality generated in enacted practice is not perfectly valid with regard to natural events, only with regard to moral forces. However, as social forces are in an important sense natural, Durkheim argues that there may be some validity in the application of concepts developed from social forces to natural events. But this validity is not direct. The person who assembles with a group to enact practices shares with other participants the sentiments that they collectively produce. In so doing the individual is transformed into an essentially social being. According to Durkheim, the passionate energies he arouses re-echo within him and quicken his vital tone. It is no longer a simple individual who speaks; it is a group incarnate and personied (1915 [1912]: 241). In order to reproduce these sentiments, the
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group must reassemble and reenact the concrete practices that correspond to the sentiments continually. Durkheim was concerned about modern society in this regard because he felt that the practices that have developed to produce these shared emotions are those generally identied as religious practices. Since formal religious ritual seems to be on the decline in modern industrial society, Durkheim wondered if secular collective practices could replace religious rites. He believed that something needed to develop, since on his view, the collective generation of the categories of the understanding through enacted practice was a necessary prerequisite to having and maintaining a society and social beings.
Conclusion
The substitution of beliefs for practices is one of the primary characteristics of contemporary sociology. In fact, a focus on beliefs and representations, instead of practices, characterized most of 20th-century sociology. I refer to this reaction to Alfred North Whiteheads fallacy of misplaced concreteness as the fallacy of misplaced abstraction. Whiteheads observation that perception is mediated by concepts, and therefore that the positivist vision of empirically accurate ideas was a fallacy, marked an important step forward in the early part of the century. However, it is equally a fallacy to treat all phenomena as conceptually mediated. At a basic level, sounds and movements must be rendered recognizable in concrete terms before they have conceptual signicance. In other words, while concepts may dene the boundaries of what can be understood, the recognizability of sounds and movements denes the boundaries of what can be rendered in conceptual terms. The fallacy of misplaced abstraction has led to an almost exclusive focus on ideas over practices among sociologists. Even the dominant quantitative macro schools of sociology, not usually associated with idealism, generally measure tendencies toward norms, which are measures of the compliance of individuals with societal values, rather than studying the witnessable details of practices. In fact, in dealing with statistics as artifacts of social organization, quantitative methods usually never come into contact with witnessable practices at all, but, rather, deal exclusively in social representations symbolized numerically. The recent turn toward cultural studies has so far been another turn toward beliefs and ideas. Ironically, it results historically from a rejection of quantitative methods and structural functionalism. But the core remains unchanged as both center on beliefs and ideas; albeit symbolized numerically in the one case and culturally or textually in the other. It has become popular to argue that only beliefs and symbols are real, and that changing the way persons talk about things will change the underlying reality. To some extent of course this is true, and in individual cases refusing to accept social boundaries can lead to success, although it can just as easily lead to failure and punitive sanction. But
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changing the way some people talk about things like poverty and oppression does not change the reality of poverty and oppression. In order to effect social change we need to understand how, just how, in any particular situation, oppression, racism, sexism and other social phenomena are being produced. If these phenomena are not just concepts or representations, if they are enacted and experienced concretely by real people in real time and in real places, then they must be evident in the details of reproducible practices. Racism, sexism, classism, and so on,. should manifest themselves in the witnessable details of interactional practice (Rawls, 2000). If they do, then changing the way we talk about them may only create the pretense that they have gone away and further penalize those who experience them by making it taboo to talk about them. If beliefs are posited as the foundation of social order and meaning, then beliefs must be capable of providing the basic framework within which witnessable practices come to have meaning. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Presuppositional theories of meaning cannot account for many aspects of mutual intelligibility. Positing sets of beliefs as the only context for meaning leads to the inevitable conclusion that there is no escape from the relativism of competing sets of beliefs, and competing sets of meanings, each of which denes a competing reality. There can be no independent criteria for resolving disputes between different sets of beliefs if beliefs themselves provide the only context for meaning. If one focuses on enacted practices and their effects, however, instead of on beliefs, then the relativism of beliefs recedes into the background. Beliefs are on this view secondary phenomena constructed against a foundation of already meaningful and orderly enacted practice. Belief is an elusive thing and has posed many problems for those who propose its study as the necessary foundation for sociology. It is hard, for instance, to reconcile empirical studies with the theoretical position that all meaning and order start with belief. This not only poses the obvious problem for the poststructuralist eldworker (If concepts are the only reality, what is the status of empirical data?), but also renders anything less than very large aggregates of data uninteresting from a quantitative standpoint (only general tendencies toward norms or operationalized concepts count as data). Practices, on the other hand, are concrete and witnessable. They present themselves in all of their detail for examination. Even though the reigning theories of practice inevitably treat practices as though they were beliefs, there is more to practice than belief and more than interpretation. For Durkheim, practices lay the foundation for beliefs. A sociology founded on the study of concrete witnessable practice promises to avoid the problems of relativism that threaten a sociology of interpretation and belief. The emphasis on beliefs has obscured the original point that unless witnessable practices can provide a basic context for intelligibility, then communication, truth and reason are not possible. Modern theories of intelligibility
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tend to focus on beliefs and presuppositions and not practices as the basis for intelligibility. Davidson (1980, 1984), for instance, argues that because beliefs frame what we can recognizably say about reality, there needs to be more agreement over beliefs than disagreement in order for communication to be intelligible. But persons can disagree about all of their beliefs and still communicate if they can recognizably use the same practices. Searles speech act theory, already resting on a substantial foundation of presupposition, has moved even further in that direction since the original publication of Speech Acts in 1969 (Searle, 1979; Turner, 1994). Yet sociological research on language as witnessable practice suggests that a persons beliefs and the content of what he or she says play a very limited role in achieving the intelligibility of conversations (Sacks, 1992; Sacks et al., 1974). All sorts of words may be used, and persons can have different beliefs about almost everything, yet, if they are able recognizably to achieve the same practice, they will be able to communicate. Conversely, they can have the same beliefs, but if their practices differ and are not recognizable to one another, they will be unable to communicate. The notion that practices, and not representations or beliefs, actually provide the form that intelligibility has to take transforms the argument signicantly. One is no longer trying to explain the relationship between voluntaristic actors and an external constraint system (and the possibility of knowledge in a system where experience is individual while concepts are cultural). The result is something more on the model of a game of chess (only without the rules). In order to be playing the game one must make recognizable moves. Thus, on this version of the practice model, order is actual and not approximate. If there is order, in the form of the recognizable reproduction of practices, then there is intelligibility. If there is no order, or recognizable practice, then there is no intelligibility. Failing to realize this has left contemporary sociology, having rejected the institutional rules version of society, with interpretive myths and beliefs as the representational context for meaning. This is highly problematic and, in either its macro or its micro form, is individualistic. It posits sets of beliefs carried around with persons from place to place that are used to evaluate the commitments by others to these beliefs. Persons allegedly use their memories of other encounters to evaluate the degree of loyalty of persons to the group they align themselves with. Whether it is chains of such individual face-to-face interactions (Collins, 1984, 1989), or cultural sets of beliefs constraining action and thought (Davidson, 1984), it is a vision of persons getting their brains and actions shaped by representations and beliefs, not by participation in concrete witnessably enacted practices. Practices are occasions for doing particular things in particular ways, where the form of the practice has more to do with the result than the accompanying representations or beliefs. As Sacks et al. (1974) have shown in their work on conversation, form is at least as important as content. In order for practices to be
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intelligible, to produce any shared intelligible result, they have to take a mutually recognizable form. Much of Garnkels later work has been taken up in exploring the boundaries of recognizability. His writings on the phenomenal eld properties of order in Garnkels Hybrid Studies of Work and studies in Instructed Action suggest what the signicance of Durkheims approach to practices could be if treated with sufcient empirical detail (Garnkel, 2001). Similarly, Dorothy Smith (1996) has argued that a focus on the details of practice offers a solution to the postmodern dilemma. If practices cannot be specied by rules, as Wittgenstein (1945) argued, there must be some latitude in their boundaries. Yet it appears that the latitude is severely circumscribed. There is a latitude only within severe limits. Practices are often difcult to accomplish. For persons with handicaps they can be impossible. Persons participating in practices together can be relatively unforgiving of inabilities to produce practices in expected and recognizable ways. Persons who cant produce practices that are recognizable in their details are often treated as if they have committed gross moral transgressions. They have not indicated a difference of opinion over beliefs, but only not been able to maintain their place in the press about the coffee machine, a failure of sound and movement, not of belief or representation, and so persons turn to them and speak rudely, accusing them of pushing (Garnkel, 1996, 2001).
Notes
1. Individual representations, on the other hand, because they are not shared, have no such origin. The continued emphasis in contemporary methods on the clarication of concepts is one result of this oversight. According to Durkheim, the objective reality of concretely enacted social facts should be the measure of concepts and not the reverse. This is not a positivist position if the concreteness of action is treated in terms of the recognizability of an embodied social construction and not as an artifact of the sensible apprehension of natural objects. James is the more contemporary version of empiricism. However, I choose Hume here because of the contrast with his section on passions. Le respect est lemotion que nous eprouvons quand nous sentons cette pression interieure et toute spirituelle se produire en nous (Durkheim, 1912: 296). Kemper (1984) introduces the notion that there are differentiating and integrating emotions. This is similar to what Durkheim meant by distinguishing between emotions that produced solidarity and emotions that produced classications, including those of time and space. It is interesting that Kemper appears to do little with the distinction, however, while it was the keystone of Durkheims argument. Durkheims focus on moral force, or moral constraint, has often been mistakenly interpreted by Durkheim scholars as a focus on external constraint. Moral constraint is in fact an emotional constraint that works entirely internally. But it is produced by the group and as such is a real external moral force as well. The idea that all participants would get the same idea needs to be explored. For instance, would men and women get the same idea? If both men and women enact the same ritual together and
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
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the ritual creates the unity of the group, then both would experience that as causality in the same way. On the other hand, if only men participate in one ritual and only women in another, then the moral boundaries between men and women may be strengthened by the ritual. However, if the rituals both enact causality, the resulting ideas should be the same. Participation in enacted ritual would make men and women have different ideas only if the rituals themselves were enacting fundamentally different forms of association. If women, for instance, take part in more rituals of solidarity while men take part in more rituals of differentiation, then their fundamental ideas may end up being different. But if they experience some of each form of practice, they would all have the same ideas. It would only be a matter of a different balance between fundamental ideas. 8. The notion of same can be a tricky one. This might seem to be an impossible claim unless one thinks carefully about what it means. If participants get a feeling of creation or unity, then how much variation could there in fact be in these ideas? The feeling that something has been created is not at all like the feeling of happiness, which obviously admits of an innite variation. The question is how much variation can there be in the feeling of creation? It seems to me that one might say that creation is creation and unity is unity. The same might be said for classication, force and totality. Either they are or they arent the ideas of classication, force and totality. It seems impossible to think of varied meanings of these ideas. Given the special nature of these four ideas, Durkheims claim that all participants get the same feelings of them may not be as difcult to support as it rst appears. Durkheim deals with time and space differently and allows for obvious variations within these concepts. With regard to time and space, it is the concept of moral necessity with regard to the divisions of time and space that does not vary, not the ideas of time and space themselves. I suspect it will be necessary to make a distinction between the capacity for emotion, which makes up the faculty or sense that is capable of perceiving feelings, and the feelings that can be perceived. However, Durkheim does not seem to have made this distinction. This, of course, means that Durkheim could not have been a positivist. Positivism requires the nave assumption of a correspondence between ideas and physical reality, as perceived through the ve senses. Durkheims discussion of The Dualism of Human Nature (1960 [1914]) has led to the mistaken interpretation of his position as Cartesian dualism. But in reality Durkheims dualism intends a distinction between the individual physical or biological aspects and the social aspects of the person. It is not a distinction between body and mind. My use of the term general here requires explanation. Durkheim argues, following Hume, that all general ideas are invalid. However, when he speaks of the categories of the understanding he needs a term like general to describe them. Durkheim often substituted the term collective for general in this regard. I do not think that this solved the problem. It certainly raised further misunderstandings with regard to various interpretations of collective. When I use the term general here I do not mean it in the empiricist sense of an idea that represents an averaging of particulars. I mean it, rather, in Durkheims sense of ideas that express real relations of causality, force, and so on, which can be perceived and do not need to be abstracted by a process of mind. Another sort of pronouncement that carries moral force is a speech act, as in I do constituting an act of marriage (Searle, 1969). In speech acts, cause and effect are the same. Speaking the words commits the act. Although speech acts are apparently ordinary situations, they conform to Durkheims requirement that the movements that make up the rite be stereotyped and homogenized. So, one might say that anyone who participates in a marriage feels the moral force of the occasion. Certainly, common cultural lore about marriage would suggest this.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
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References
Collins, Randall (1984) Emotion as a Micro Basis of Macro-Sociology, in Klaus Scherer and Paul Ekman (eds) Approaches to Emotion. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Collins, Randall (1989) Toward a Neo-Meadian Sociology of Mind, Symbolic Interaction 12(1): 133. Davidson, Donald (1980) Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davidson, Donald (1984) Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dennes, W.R. (1924) The Methods and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, University of California Publications in Philosophy 6(1): 182. e Durkheim, Emile (1912) Les Formes El mentaires de la Vie Religieuse. Paris: Librairie F lix Alcan. e Durkheim, Emile (1915 [1912]) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Chicago, IL: Free Press. Durkheim, Emile (1960 [1914]) The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions, in Emile Durkheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff. Colombus: Ohio State University Press. Durkheim, Emile (1974 [1898]) Individual and Collective Representations, in Sociology and Philosophy. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, Emile (1982 [1895]) The Rules of the Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, Emile (1983 [191314]) Pragmatism and Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garnkel, Harold (1996) Ethnomethodologys Program, Social Psychology Quarterly 59(1): 521. Garnkel, Harold (2001) Ethnomethodologys Program: Working Out Durkheims Aphorism. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littleeld. Gehlke, Charles Elmer (1915) Emile Durkheims Contribution to Sociological Theory, Columbia University Studies in Economics, History, and Public Law I(LXIII): 7187. Hume, David (1978 [173940]) A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kemper, Theodore D. (1984) Power, Status, and Emotions: A Sociological Contribution to a Psychophysiological Domain, in Klaus Scherer and Paul Ekman (eds) Approaches to Emotion. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Rawls, Anne Wareld (1996) Durkheims Epistemology: The Neglected Argument, American Journal of Sociology 102(2): 43082. Rawls, Anne Wareld (1997) Durkheims Epistemology: The Initial Critique, Sociological Quarterly 38(1): 11145. Rawls, Anne Wareld (2000) Race as an Interaction Order Phenomenon: W.E.B. Du Boiss Double Consciousness Thesis Revisited, Sociological Theory 18(2): 24174.
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Rorty, Amelie (1994) The Coordination of the Self and the Passions, in Roger T. Ames (ed.) Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice. New York: State University of New York Press. Sacks, Harvey (1992) Lectures in Conversation, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (1974) A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Conversation, Language 50: 696735. Searle, John (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John (1979) Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Dorothy (1996) Telling the Truth After Postmodernism, Symbolic Interaction 19(3): 171202. Turner, Stephen (1994) The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1945) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Anne Wareld Rawls is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University. Her background is in both sociology and philosophy and her research interests include issues of social justice in both classical and contemporary sociology. Professor Rawls has published articles on Goffman, Durkheim, Garnkel and Du Bois. She is currently engaged in research on Marianne Weber, completing a manuscript on Durkheim (for Cambridge University Press), completing a manuscript on inter-racial interaction (for Rowman and Littleeld) and editing Garnkels later work (for Rowman and Littleeld). Address: Department of Sociology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 48202, USA. [email: aa0846@wayne.edu]
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Journal of Classical Sociology

Journal of Classical Sociology

Durkheims Treatment of Practice

ANNE WARFIELD RAWLS Wayne State University

ABSTRACT It is generally thought that Durkheim based his theory of knowledge

The Practices and Their Sentiments

The Role of Representations

The Role of Practices in the Argument Against Empiricism

Three Points of Comparison Between Durkheim and Hume

Perfect Knowledge of Emotions as Internal States

Emotions Result From Social Relations

The External Validity of Passions

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