Caught in the Pincers of Value-Incommensurability and Moral Fundamentalism: A Durkheimian Rejoinder

Émile Durkheim -the foremost classical sociologist with a systematic focus on morality as a binding feature of societies- was also skeptical of its overuse. He cautioned against an excess of morality from which the first casualty is morality itself. In classical sociological theory, his work is the one that problematizes the role of collective values in society and how these are diffused under conditions of advanced division of labor. While analogous concerns can be reconstructed in the work of Marx (reading, as it were, his materialism as a value-project), Weber’s value-perspectivism salvages values only in the domain of the ethics of personal integrity. His value-polytheism retains its contemporary appeal in guises that invoke the incessant ‘social construction’ of identities. A pluriverse of perspectives is posited as unconditional, while at the same time each plural voice is confiscating the validity of (its own) values by reducing ‘irritability’ from adverse standpoints in line with Parsons’ deflationary appeal to value absolutism. Durkheim’s moral sociology has experienced in recent years a moderate revival: initially rehabilitated as a reliable interlocutor within Critical Theory’s emancipatory project (Habermas), Durkheimian axiology and its imprint on institutional arrangements (held to be transcendentally valid), animates in part Axel Honneth’s program of ‘freedom’s right’ and Frederick Neuhouser’s elective affinities across theories on social pathology. In this paper, I argue that social pathology can be discerned today as a value-problem where the value-constitution of reality takes an entrenched polarization between value incommensurability and value fundamentalism. The explanatory and practical stalemate goes beyond appeals to negative solidarity (Beck) or even to a persistent affirmation of human rights discourses, themselves subject to mediations by neo-liberal values. Rather, this impasse raises a pressing question for sociologists, which can be gleaned from Luhmann: what are the social mechanisms behind the amoral coordination of morally inflated standpoints?