Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labour in Society

Durkheim, Emile. De la division du travail social (doctoral thesis 1893). Paris: F. Alcan, 1902. The Division of Labour in Society. Trans. W. D. Halls. Introd. Lewis A. Coser. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1984. New York: Free Press, 1984.

Along with ED's Le Suicide (1897), suggests that important "[…] ethical and social structures were being endangered by the advent of technology and mechanization. The division of labour rendered workmen both more alien to one another and more dependent upon one another, since none of them built the whole product by himself" (quoting Henri M. Peyre, "Durkheim, Emile," Encyclopaedia Britannica 1974: 5.1094). See below, this Category, entry for K. Marx. In Bowling Alone, R. D. Putnam notes US "communitarian Progressives'" distress and at how "The impersonal and attenuated ties of the market replaced" in their world "the sturdier bonds of family, friendship, and small-town solidarity," comparing this view with those of contemporary "social theorists from Europe," and placing ED's "mechanical versus organic solidarity" in a series of parallels with "Sir Henry Maine's status versus contract, Ferdinand Tönnie's Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft […], and Georg Simmel's comparison of town and metropolis, all expounded between 1860 and 1902" (380)—see below, this Category.