The Sociological Citizen: Recognizing Relational Interdependence in Law and Organizations

Durkheim famously observed that in societies with a complex division of labor administrative, commercial and procedural law would predominate, serving to reconstitute ruptured interdependencies and helping to sustain the organic solidarity characteristic of industrialized societies. Nowhere did he suggest, however, that relational interdependence or the compensatory and reparative functions of law would be intended by or manifest to the society’s actors. Indeed, he was adamantly opposed to the notion that the basic mechanisms of social solidarity and coordination would be components of popular consciousness. Although Durkheim remained committed to the notion of social life as a “system of representations and mental states,” his analyses depended on a sharp distinction between the mental life of the individual and collective representations “subject to their own laws which individual psychology could not forsee” (1982, 253). He insisted that “not a single word of mine must be understood” to suggest “that social facts can be understood immediately by states of individual consciousness” (1982, 253).