Durkheim and Law: Divided Readings over Division of Labor

Recent scholarship on Durkheim draws attention to debates implicating his ideas about law, mainly in The Division of Labor in Society, but also in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Division is the better known work, and established readings—otherwise diverse—find in it a thesis about law as the expression of the collective conscience and functioning to maintain community norms. Durkheim's attention to the state in Civic Morals is often read as a continuation of that thesis on law, as if the state were the culmination of collective consciousness. This article reads these works differently, highlighting the discontinuity of states and collective consciousness as the opening for Durkheim's concerns with the moral legitimacy of public authority as well as his efforts to find a subject (literally and figuratively) for the emergent discipline of sociology. The article suggests that current events offer fresh terrain for sociolegal scholars to pursue the implications of Durkheim's insights on law and states, read otherwise.