Abstract
Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method does not begin with a dialogue with fashionable peers, nor, indeed, are Durkheim’s philosophical peers seriously addressed in the text. He signals his aims by the striking assertion that methodology has been neglected in sociology. His audience might have thought of Spencer’s The Study of Sociology, by then itself two decades old, as a methodology book. Durkheim pointed out, properly, that it was not, and suggested that to find a methodological work of importance one must go back to Mill and Comte. In 1895, when the Rules appeared, almost thirty years had passed since the end of Mill’s productive scholarship, forty since the end of Comte’s and Quetelet’s.
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Notes
The concepts of constraint and generality seem quite different. But ‘generality’ is explained, a few pages earlier, by the remark that “a phenomenon is ... general because it is collective (that is, more or less obligatory), and certainly not collective because general. It is a group condition repeated in the individual because imposed on him. It is to be found in each part because it exists in the whole, rather than in the whole because it exists in the parts”(1964, p. 9; 1982, p. 56; 1937, p. 10).
The fate of the term ‘morphology’ is usefully discussed by Strikwerda(1982, p. 155–79).
The astonishing regularity is not Queteletian; the use of the argument suggests an affinity to Whewell, a similarity that points in a direction other than that described in Schmaus (1985).
It should be noted that ‘cette harmonie’ in the original text refers to a previously mentioned harmony between the internal and external milieu, itself a concept originating in French antiteleological biology. Durkheim himself noted that his critics might “point to these words, ‘external conditions’ and ‘milieu’, as an accusation that our method seeks the sources of life outside the living being”(1964, p. 121; 1982, p. 141; 1937, p. 119).
The presence of such principles is perhaps a better-defining criterion of teleology. In contrast to Durkheim, functionalist writers such as Luhmann and Parsons have appealed to such principles.
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© 1986 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Turner, S.P. (1986). Realism, Teleology, and Action. In: The Search for a Methodology of Social Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3461-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3461-5_6
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