Durkheim’s Failed Darwinian Encounter: Missed Opportunities on the Path to a Post-exemptionalist Environmental Sociology

Abstract

The philosophical underpinnings of Durkheim’s failed Darwinian encounter have been neglected by environmental and mainstream sociologists. Although he claimed to employ Darwinian insights, Durkheim wrote during the eclipse of population thinking by an essentialist revival in biology. His inability to grasp the former and embrace of a specific variety of the latter explain the limitations and contradictions in his incipient environmental sociology and challenge the broader disciplinary myth that Durkheim discovered a new approach to theorizing society. Even his repudiation of Lamarckian analogies relied upon and reinforced his more fundamental commitment to essentialism. That commitment has contributed to the persistence of developmentalism within sociology and delayed a second Darwinian revolution. Seizing the opportunity that Durkheim missed by confronting the deeper lessons of the first Darwinian revolution offers the best hope for constructing a post-exemptionalist theory of societal-environmental interactions and addressing enduring disciplinary concerns with structural diversity and human agency.