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2. Sociology’s Case for a Well- Tempered Modernity
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2 Sociology’s Case for a Well-Tempered Modernity Individualism, Capitalism, and the Antisemitic Challenge MARCEL STOETZLER In this chapter I begin by arguing that in the very text that constitutes one of the finest moments of classical sociology’s commitment and struggle for progressive, liberal society, Durkheim’s 1898 intervention in the Dreyfus affair, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” ambivalences are operative that undermine this commitment and point instead to contradictions at the heart of modernity itself. Then I turn to another canonical text and argue that Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a pro-capitalist challenge to German nationalist denunciations of the capitalist, or the American spirit, as mere utilitarianism , while maintaining intact the rejection of utilitarianism that Weber himself inherited from such nationalism. I suggest that Weber’s specific argument on capitalism and (national) culture and its strategic aim of delegitimizing reactionary (typically also antisemitic) nationalism also underpins his conception of “the Jews” in The Protestant Ethic. Durkheim’s and Weber’s rejections of egotistic, economistic utilitarianism contain elements of the reactionary and antisemitic discourses that these two founding fathers of the discipline of sociology aimed to oppose. In the concluding section I argue that these ambivalences can be understood only by reference to the larger sociopolitical framework that classical sociology inherited from nineteenth-century liberalism. Durkheim: Defending Nonegotistical Individualism against Spencer and the Economists Perhaps Durkheim’s most famous essay is “Individualism and the Intellectuals ,” his 1898 intervention into the Dreyfus affair.1 This short but Well-Tempered Modernity 67 iconic text marked the end of the decade in which he had published three of his major works, Division of Labour in Society (1893), Rules of Sociological Method (1895), and Suicide (1897), and it stood at the beginning of the period that would result in his fourth major work, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). That year also marked the turning point in the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906): in January 1898 Emile Zola had published his crucial text “J’accuse,” emerging therewith as a key defender of the captain’s case, and in March the leading anti-Dreyfusard, Ferdinand Bruneti ère, a literary historian and member of the Académie Française, had published his widely read reply, “Après le Procès.” It is as a response to Brunetière that Durkheim wrote “Individualism and the Intellectuals.” Brunetière had formulated his reply to Zola and other high-profile defenders of Captain Dreyfus as a general attack on intellectuals and the beliefs they, in his point of view, typically held. Chief among these intellectual beliefs was Herbert Spencer’s individualism. Spencer, wrote Brunetière, “argued that the military profession was an anachronistic survival of barbarism in the age of industry and commerce,” an element of classic bourgeois enlightenment critique (such as in Adam Ferguson) that survived in Spencer’s writings. Individualism was for Brunetière “the great sickness of the present time.” The “self-infatuation” of intellectuals who arrogantly “rise above” laws and the statements of army generals in order to judge them by their scientific methods and logic, which is indeed what those who defended Dreyfus against his detractors in state and army (quite rightly) did, are “truly anti-social.”2 Brunetière’s concern was that the cohesion of a society under attack from corrosion by individualism needed to be defended, and this in turn required the defense of the authority of state and army. This conservative (i.e., compared to his full-blown racialist colleagues, relatively moderate) anti-Dreyfusard represents thus a significant aspect of the zeitgeist of the period against which Durkheim posited the new discourse of sociology. It is of course one of the fundamental questions of the discipline of sociology whether modern society produces its cohesion spontaneously through the division of labor, the invisible hand of the market (Adam Smith), or “the law of differentiation and integration” (Spencer), or whether it needs robust moral, cultural, religious framing by intentionally created institutions and consensus. Comte for example, “had no confidence whatever in the possibility that the cross-national and even intranational social ties [18.206.12.31] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:27 GMT) 68 Stoetzler necessary to cement the highly differentiated and specialized activity of industrial society would spontaneously emerge.” Even when “industrial society” will have been “properly reorganized,” the “social humanity” or “voluntary cooperation” will have to be “reproduced at every moment . . . because it rests on an (unnatural) preponderance of ‘sociability over...