Emile Durkheim Contributions  

Emile Durkheim is the philosopher who can best help us to understand why capitalism makes us richer and yet frequently more miserable. He was born in 1858 in the little French town of near the German border. Before he was 40, Durkheim was appointed to a powerful and prestigious position as a professor at Paris. He lived through the immense rapid transformation of France, from a largely traditional agricultural society to an urban industrial economy. He could see that his country was getting richer, that capitalism was extraordinarily productive and in certain ways that it was also liberating. But what particularly struck him, and became the focus of his entire scholarly career was that, the economic system was doing something very peculiar to people's minds it was quite literally driving them to suicide in ever-increasing numbers. This was the immense insight unveiled in Durkheim's most important work “suicide”, published in 1897. The book chronicled a remarkable and tragic discovery that suicide rates seemed to shoot up once a nation has become industrialized and consumer capitalism takes hold. Durkheim observed that the suicide rate in the Britain of his day was double that of Italy but in even richer and more advanced Denmark, it was four times higher than in the UK.

Durkheim's focus on suicide was intended to shed light on a more general level of unhappiness and despair in society. Suicide was the horrific tip of the iceberg of mental distress created by modern capitalism. Across his career, Durkheim tried to explain why people had become so unhappy in modern societies and he isolated five crucial factors.

1-Individualism:

In traditional societies, people's identities are closely tied to belonging to a clan or a class. Few choices are involved; a person might be a baker a Lutheran or married to their second cousin without ever having made any self-conscious decisions for themselves.

They can just step into a place created for them by their family and the existing fabric of society but under modern capitalism, it's the individual that now begins to choose everything. What job to take, what religion to follow, who to marry and where to belong. If things go well, the individual takes all the credit but if things go badly, the individual is in a crueler place than ever before, for its seemingly means that there is no one else to blame but they themselves. Failure becomes a terrible judgment upon the individual. This is the particular burden of life in modern capitalism.

2-Excessive Hope

Capitalism raises hopes. Everyone with effort can become the boss. Advertising Stokes ambition by showing us limitless luxury, that we could if we play our cards right.

The opportunities are said to be enormous but so too are the possibilities for disappointment in modern capitalism.  It's easy to become deeply dissatisfied with one's lot.

3- We have too Much Freedom

One of the complaints against traditional societies strongly voiced in romantic literature is that people need more freedom. Rebellious types used to complain that there were far too many social norms. Norms telling you what to wear, what you're supposed to do on Sunday afternoons, what parts of an arm it's respectable for a woman to reveal?

Capitalism has undermined social norms. Countries have become more complex, more anonymous and more diverse. People don't have so much in common with one another anymore. The phrase whatever works for you, which sounds friendly but it also means that society doesn't much care what you do.

4- Atheism

Durkheim was himself an atheist but he worried that religion had become incredible.  Its communal side would have been most useful to repair the distressing social fabric. Durkheim appreciated religion, he knew that the sense of community and relief that religion offer are highly important to people. Capitalism has as yet offered nothing to replace this with. Science certainly doesn't offer the same opportunities for powerful shared experiences. Science can't draw a society together.

5-Weakening of the Nation and the Family:

In the 19th century, it had looked at certain moments as if the idea of the nation might grow so powerful and intense that it could take up the sense of belonging and shared devotion that had once been supplied by religion. Admittedly there were some heroic moments, but they generally didn't work out very well. Family too, seemed for a time to offer the experience of belonging that people seemed to need but today although we do indeed invest hugely in our families, they're not as stable as we might hope.

 By adulthood, children are hardly tied to their parents anymore.  They don't expect to work alongside them. They don't expect their social circles to overlap and they don't feel that their parents honor is in their hands.

Today neither family nor the nation a well placed to take up the task of giving us a larger sense of belonging of giving us the feeling that were part of something more valuable than ourselves.