The Division of Labor in Society Quotes

“we should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends the common consciousness”
― Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society

“Methodological rules are for science what rules of law and custom are for conduct.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society

“While the science of ethics does not make us indifferent or resigned spectators of reality, at the same time it does teach us to treat it with extreme prudence, imparting to us a conservative attitude. There has been good reason to upbraid certain theories which are thought to be scientific for being destructive and revolutionary; but they are scientific in name only. They construct, but they do not observe. They see in ethics, not a collection of facts to study, but a sort of revocable law-making which each thinker establishes for himself. Ethics as practiced is then considered only as a collection of habits, prejudices valuable only if they conform to the doctrine proposed; and as this doctrine is not induced from observation of the moral facts, but borrowed from outside sciences, it inevitably contradicts the existing moral order on more than one point. But we are less exposed to that danger, for ethics is for us a system of realized facts, bound up in the total world-system. Now, legerdemain does not change a fact, even when this is desirable.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society

“As all the other beliefs and practices assume less and less religious a character, the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion. We carry on the worship of the dignity of the human person, which, like all strong acts of worship, has already acquired its superstitions.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society