The ideal of the person: Recovering the novelty of Durkheim’s sociology. Part II: Modern society, the cult of the person, and the sociological project

Abstract

The aim of this article is to clarify the difference between the anthropological category of the person, as analyzed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), and the modern ideal of a free autonomous person, which had been at the center of Durkheim’s sociological project since The Division of Social Labor (1893). After explaining the need to return to a sociological perspective, the article considers Durkheim’s examination of the transformations implied by the modern cult of the person in the practical and intellectual organization of social practices. The modern ideal constitutes morality as a social fact, requiring a new form of moral education, as a first step toward a wider political transformation, based on social aspirations to justice that it is the task of sociology to explain, understand, and help realize. This practical commitment opens the way to an understanding of sociology’s original place in the modern epistemological discussion and, consequently, to an appreciation of the novelty Durkheim achieved in founding the French School of Sociology.