Durkheim The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Ch. 3 and Ch. 5

 October 15th, 2026

Questions

1. (119): to demonstrate the utility….do not create it.” Is Durkheim dichotomizing origins from purpose? And, given pg. 124, so what is this new distinction between usefulness and origins? So which is the real Durkheim? Function/utility vs. origin/cause

2. (124): “If it lacks utility…return.” What would be some examples of social facts that have continued to have utility versus one that no longer has utility but has persisted?

3. For Durkheim what kind of explanatory work can function do? What would make utility genuinely explanatory of persistence rather than merely correlated with it?

4. (124-125): Seems as though survival overlaps with harmony. Is harmony something presupposed here? Is it a principle? Is it inferred? Esp. compared to a Darwinian account of evolution. 

5. (104): Durkheim analogizes the role of the statesman to the doctor. If we want to pursue the intersection of sociology and social philosophy, ought we emulate the doctor?

6. What is a collective sentiment?

7. (99): Individual v. common consciousness: What is common consciousness? Common goal? Are there things common amongst people? How does this common consciousness influence the individual?

8. Is “function” a normative concept or descriptive? Clarify relationship between descriptive and normative.

Discussion:

• Beginning with social theory question (#8), what is the standard reading of Durkheim?

• Must be descriptive, but doesn't the language of pathology imply a normative failing?

• May help to place Durkheim on a spectrum, where Parsons is more functionalist. Yes, D is interested in utility and function, but he doesn’t think everything is working as it “should” or functioning “correctly”

• Functional theory v. conflict theory

• Clearly, D doesn’t want to be teleological, but nevertheless there is a presumption of something harmonious. So, he is definitely in some sense interested in preservation of social life. 

• Related to the question of disciplinary boundaries, p.104.

• When D says he wants to maintain a sense of the norm as externally imposed (104), is D trying to get away from normativity?

• Seems that function has an evaluative connotation. So clearly functions are dynamic

• But Durkheim does seem to want to establish some objective normativity, especially in judging or deciding what to do given facts

• Example of crime. Given that D disagrees with Comte and Spencer, Durkheim is using crime or criminality to draw distinctions and rethink the place of punishment. 

• Society is not, for Durkheim, the sum of its individual parts (individualism or individual consciousnesses). Societal nature cannot be reduced to human nature (organism)

• Wonder if there is an analogy here, that when scientists or biologists explain organisms in terms of equilibrium, then sociology somehow needs to understand harmony/equilibrium as a principle of the social system. Further question: is equilibrium or social stability a minimum principle or presupposition or is it actually more complicated? I.e.: does society tend toward its function, equilibrium?

• Durkheim is still trying to address anomy and societal war or struggle. Has a commitment to understand why or how social forces create society to collapse

• Okay so what is an example of something whose function has been lost but its social fact does not exist.

• On 124, Durkheim seems to be making a strong claim, that if something is not useful, its actually harmful. Insofar as our appendices are not useful, they are harmful. What is a social version of this? 

• Definition of utility, something that contributes to social persistence, harmony. 

• If something disturbs the normal operation of social functions (90).

• Efficient cause is one thing, function is something else (123),

• Causation and function, keep these separate. But persistence and utility, these are the same, or persistence and origin.

• Durkheim is not explaining history, he’s explaining persistence (not origination). 

• Forward looking-backward looking question about method: page 135.

• Causality without origination? Causality of persistence vs Causality of origin?

Fall '26 Tentative Reading Plan

Listed by week number of term followed by reading:

 

3. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Ch. 3 and Ch. 5 selections [~23 pages below]
     - Ch. 3 pages: 97-104 (plus optional: 86-87, 94-97)
     - Ch. 5 pages: 119-125, 127-129, 134-138, 142-144
     - Recommended: Durkheim, "Two Laws of Penal Evolution" (1900) [~25 pages]

4. Marx, Capital, volume 1 (1867), pp. 781-794 (Section 3 of Ch. 25 on capital accumulation: surplus population and the reserve army of the unemployed)
    - Cohen (on Marx), Karl Marx's Theory of History, pp. 278-280, 293-296
    - Marx, Capital, other selections TBD

5. Nietzsche, GM (1887), II.12 (and other sections of GM to be announced)

 

6. No meeting this week [or else meet without CK]

Then, with some methodological questions in view, we start on Foucault:

7. Foucault, Punitive Society (1973), Lecture one (3 Jan) and Lecture thirteen (28 Mar)

8. Foucault, D&P (1975), I.1, plus other selections

9. No meeting due to holiday

10. Foucault, "SMBD" (1976), selections on civil war from Lectures 1-3 (or all three lectures in turn)

11 (tbd). Foucault, HSv1/WtK/VdS (1976), selections on method, read IV.1 (Objective) and IV. 2 (Method); focus will be on postulates on power (p. 94ff.) and methodological rules (p. 98ff.), plus remind me to distribute a table tracking Foucault's transforming conception of the power across writings in the 1970s.

Marx, Capital Ch. 10 “The Working Day” sections 5-6

Questions:

1. Given that Marx helps himself to interviews, reports, etc., (i.e. seems to use an archival/historical method)  how can we understand what he means by “abstraction?” 

2. (p377): M seems to conceptualize slave labor as capital, so is there a way to conceptualize slave labor as both labor and capital?

3. (p381): What is the referent of society here such that there can be a distinction between society and capital?

4. Why is this put in terms of the number of working hours instead of wage? Empirical question: were wages not paid hourly at the time, such that this would not have been thought about by Marx? Is this better read as an actual account or a historical exemplar of how surplus value is extracted; does analysis still hold for surplus extraction today?

5. (375, 390): What does Marx mean by “moral” and “morality” in these chapters?

6. On the self-valorization of capital/ attempt to extend the working day, yet attempt to keep the day as normal as possible to replenish the worker. Is Marx claiming, with this tension, that there is an irrationality to capitalism? 

7. Why is Marx going into this history of labor law? What does it add to his account?

Discussion: 

• [Q7] Also a question about Marx’s method. Could be moving, as Marx suggests elsewhere, a movement from the abstract to the concrete. 

• So, what do we make of the transition between the two, then? 

• The passing of laws surrounding working days perhaps points to the way in which struggle is necessary for the overcoming of capital.

• If this is supposed to be an account of conflict internal to capitalism, then, how do we move from this internal conflict to a disruption of the entire system?

• A difference in how we can read Marx: either as overcoming capitalism is inevitable, or reading him as not holding this as an inevitability (contingent on working class organization). 

• Still, Marx never seems to transcend this legal conflict in his analysis.

• Similar to how increased wages may improve something to an extent, but the logic remains intact.

• C.p. reformist projects

• And actually, increasing a wage can benefit capital through the increased replenishment of the working class. (p. 375 “foolishness!”)

• [Q6] On page 377, “It would seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day.”

• Marx points out that an excess population in reserve as slave labor, then there is less impetus to improve the life of a laborer. 

• Question emerges about the purpose of this section. Is Marx making a claim about class antagonism.

• Perhaps you cannot conceptualize surplus value without thinking the working day, and vice versa. 

• Is Marx, then, trying to highlight the inevitability of class antagonism under capitalism, or exploitation from which antagonism develops?

• By turning to the laws, it’s clear that legal protections aren’t generated out of the benevolence of legality, but are produced through class antagonisms. 

• Still unclear about what Marx is trying to establish…

• [Q4]: Moves us to the question about why the unit of measurement is the working day as opposed to the wage or salary?

• Can’t it be both? That Marx is equating these measures, or translating them such that the working day as measured in hours, labor power of the work, are all commensurate in the struggle between the wage earner and the capitalist, which stabilizes.

• Given that the technique of Marx’s analysis has changed, and the working day looks fundamentally different today, is Marx trying to ground his analysis of exploitation in the empirical and historical technique? Or is he trying to suggest that exploitation persists regardless of the technique? 

• As GEs, we’re not exactly coal miners. So what about Marx’s account could contemporary examples of labor fit into? Is it the account of class antagonism? What are the qualities of the “stuff” that is immutable? Technology is different, so are finances, so what allows us to see what the theoretical “core” is that discloses contemporary exploitation? 

• Immutable laws that Marx seems to be trying to explain are “class antagonism” and “extraction of surplus value”

• Is this capitalism or is this something worse? By what criterion would we suggest that this is still capitalism? 

• But what about situations where class antagonism persists, but there isn’t extraction of surplus value?

• Clearly, a lot of these conditions (blood of children) have been ameliorated, so on what does the critique rely on today?

• Okay, so if we still want to say that capitalism persists in its amoral mode, then there must be something that makes the present a capitalist one even if we don’t have the same empirical atrocities.

Marx, Capital Ch. 7 The Labour Process and the Valorization Process

 Questions 

1. Relationship between the worker, the process, and the object (p. 287)

2. Valorization [verwertet] - what work is this concept doing? (p. 303) 

3. Why is temporality the framing for labour? Is it historical? Why not explain in terms of compensation rather than length of the work day? 

4. Does enslaved labor produce value? Is the 'value' of enslaved labour the socially average necessary labour-time to produce an enslaved worker? (p. 303) 

5. Distinction between creating value and valorization (p. 302) 

6. What is Marx's relationship to humanism, i.e., the commitment to the distinctness of the human as "tool-making animal" (p. 286) or as the labouring animal (p. 283)? 

7. Marx writes: "Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature" (p. 283). What is the limit to the plasticity, malleability, perfectability, etc. of human nature? 

Discussion

• Two senses of instrument on (p. 285) - both hand instrument and the entire world as resource [Q6 and Q7] 
• Some animals minimally use instruments
• Franklin's conception of tool-making; Bergson later treats it as making tools to make tools and so on
• Bees and spiders act on instict rather than having concepts or ideas of tools
• When is labour present? - Reaching for the apple is labour; does the body become an instrument
• Bodily organs become instruments on p. 28
• Is breathing labouring? Do the lungs become instruments?
• They change nature into a resource
• "Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. H e sets i n motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and  in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature." (p. 283)
• Metabolism as biological
• But given bee/spider examples, it cannot be instinctual or involuntary (?)

• Biological underdetermination (from Soren Mau) - some biological elements but also socially malleable 
• Co-determination of instruments/technology and society/humanity
• But environment still becomes instruments or resources
• The difference between humans and bees is that humans are conscious of our use of tools/materials (p. 284) 
• The kick-back transforms our nature - therefore, still some tech determinism
• Or in communism, we have full control over kick-back, we would control the effects to purposefully transform ourselves 
• Intention in labour "Man's activity, via the instruments of labour, effects an alteration in the object of labour which was intended from the outset." (p. 287) 

• What about "unrest" in the worker affecting the object of labour? (p. 287) [Q1]
• "During the labour process, the worker's labour constantly un der  goes a transformation, from the form of unrest [Unruhe] into that  of being [Sein], from the form of motion [Bewegung] into that of objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit]." (p. 296) 
• Instrumentalism without technological determinism (?)
• Not some inexorable technological determinism which undermines agency
• But still some instrumentalism without being "straight-line instrumentalism" (see Ihde/Winner)
• Maybe not a coherent view - but less deterministic than the fragment on machines
• Technological change does not separate us from our true selves - no alienation from a species-being; now, our nature changes with technology
• Does the alienation critique hold? 
• Alienation from the products of labour in Capital 
• But less normative force than the EPM position that one experiences alienation from oneself or one's species-being

• Difference of value and valorization [Q2 & Q5]
• "Our capitalist has two objectives: in the first place, he wants to produce a use-value which has exchange-value, i.e. an article destined to be sold, a commodity; and secondly he wants to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it, namely the means of production and the labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value." (p. 293). 
• "The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as well have intended to make money without producing at all." (p. 299)
• Look back to p. 36 for a definition 
• "The formula ' capital value in search of additional value' is now understood as capital organizing a process of self-valorization ( Verwertung), a process of constant searching for increases in its own value through the unity of the, labour process and the process of production of in creased value."
• Constant process of investment and wealth-generation
• While pre-capitalist wealth was held - idle class versus capitalist class
• More than the extraction of surplus-value (?)
• Distinction of value versus valorization 
• "If we now compare the process of creating value with the process of valorization, we see that the latter is nothing but the con tinuation of the former beyond a definite point. If the process is not carried beyond the point where the value paid by the capitalist for the labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process of creating value ; but if it is continued beyond that point, it becomes a process of valorization." (p. 302)
• So is it profit/surplus value (?)
• Is valorization profit-making or reinvestment of profit?
• Difference between production process and capitalist produciton process (p. 304)
• Capitalism is different from making use-values, its about the value exceeding what it should be when you consider the average socially necessary labour time

• Temporality as part of Marx's theory or an artifact of 19th century philosophy [Q3]
• But it has to be temporal because it comes from the average socially necessary labour-time
• Wage is just an expression of the value as labour-time
• Marx has indexed value to come from labour-time. So, wages would be an expression of this value
• Labour power sold for a period or time - exchange of time for money

Marx, Capital Ch. 6 The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power

Questions 

1. Necessary requirements to satisfy the worker depends on the degree of civilization. Can we explain this (especially in relation to the picture in EPM)? (p. 275)

2. Relations of equality in the market and law (p. 271) and the critique of liberal equality (p. 280). Is equality the necessary condition of labor-capitalist relation or an ideological expression of the means of production?

3. What are the historical and especially the moral elements in the valuation of the worker as a commodity? (p. 275)

4. Is the mode of production a synonym for an economic formation of society? Are there different modes of production in succession or is there a co-existence of modes of production? (p. 273)

5. Why does natural history play no role in historical development of capitalist mode of production? (p. 273)

6. In relation to the "second essential condition," how is the compulsion to sell one's labour-power an essential condition for the existence of the market? (p. 272)

Discussion 

• Difference between "equality" as a legitimate condition or as obfuscation (Q2)
• It is first presented as a necessary condition to the capitalist mode of production: 
• "He and the owner of money meet in the market, and enter into relations with each other on a footing of equality as owners of commodities, with the sole difference that one is a buyer, the other a seller ; both are therefore equal in the eyes of the law." (p. 271)
• But the reference to equality later appears sarcastically: 
• "It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equaiity, Property and Bentham. Freedom, be cause both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage." (p. 280)
• Is the original formulation an assumption? Is there actually a condition of legal equality in Marx? 
• Some might criticize him for dispensing with legal/moral equality
• Operative illusion; it is actually producing something 
• But then legal equality is not a necessary condition? 
• BUT worker is not a slave; so they do freely sell their labor power 
• The worker has a right to take an employer to court for failure to provide wages
• The worker is seen as a partner in an exchange and can freely sell labour for the highest price/wage (Freedom)
• "He must constantly treat his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and he can do this only by placing it at the disposal of the buyer, i .e . handing it over to the buyer for him to consume, for a definite period of time, temporarily." (p. 271)
• Is it actually inequality or is it demonstrating a limitation to the legitimate concept of equality?
• Separate sphere of circulation from sphere of production (p. 271)
• Marx separates circulation (the market) from production such that he is not being ironic
• So, there actually is legal equality in the sphere of circulation but that excludes the underlying inequality in production

• Is the compulsion to sell labour-power an essential condition for the market? (Q6)
• Assumption that if you are a worker, you only have your labour-power to sell 
• Are the categories too neat? 
• Is there really a sharp distinction between those who sell their own labour-power and those who do not? 
• What about lumpenproletariat? 
• Marx agrees with the notion that markets exist before capitalism
• The wage form as a distinct component of the market
• The rise of the middle-class complicates this need to sell labour-power. Does the worker need to sell their labour-power? Or is it the fact of selling? 
• Why do this middle-class people still sell their labour-power? 
• More like "middle-income proletariat" 
• BUT what about the changing necessary requirements for the worker (p. 275/Q1)

• Moral element in the valuation of the worker (Q3) + Changing necessary requirement (Q1)
• So, middle-class works because there is this additional moral element at play 
• Social coercion 
• But is this what the moral element is on p. 275
• Only labour-power as a commodity has a historical and moral element; not the existence of other commodities
• If value is the social average necessary labour-time; labour-power demands more than just mere subsistence 
• Moral element is tied to habits/custom - drinking, eating, leisure, etc. 
• Description of the ethical (leniency in habit/custom)
• Historical (time) and moral (space/culture) differences in valuation 
• Ex. Air conditioning in Florida homes; not in Alaska

• But it can't just be subsistence for the criticism to work (?) 
• It can't just be about coercion; it's about extraction 
• The fundamental logic is not about coercion 
• Is labour part of our species-being? - if so, that explains why the middle-class continues to work
• Greater freedom in ability to sell labour; more contingency than the critic thinks
• Is "alienation" the same concept as in the EPM of 1844?

• What about the lack of the role of natural history in historical development? (Q5)
• "One thing, however, is cl ear : nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whol e series of older formations of social production" (p. 273)
• More Darwinian and less Hegelian (?) 
• Not an unfolding of biological necessity, but more anthropological 
• Maybe history goes all the way down 
• But maybe the Darwinian framework is better than dialectics
• More in-line with English political economy than German idealism
• Place of naturalism in Marx's philosophy

• Commodity production before capitalist mode of production (Q4)
• "The production and circulation of commodities can still take place even though the great mass of the objects produced are intended for the immediate requirements of their producers, and are not turned into commodities, so that the process of social production is as yet by no means dominated in its length and breadth by exchange-value." (p. 273)
• So is there overlap between modes of production? 
• Some commodities within an otherwise non-capitalist society; capitalism overtakes other kinds of relations - feudal/serf relations remade into capitalist relations
• Ex. Sharecroppers or chattel slavery's relation to capitalism
• Ex. Prison labour
• World-systems critique: Capitalist systems require non-capitalist periphery
• "The appearance of products as commodities requires a level of development of the division of labour within society such that the separation of use-value from exchange;. value, a separation which first begins with barter, has already been completed. But such a degree of development is common to many economic formations of society with the most diverse historical characteristics." (p. 273)

Marx, Capital Intro. and Ch. 1, Sections 1 and 2

 Discussion Questions

1. What is the power of abstraction? What work is Marx's 'cell-form' metaphor doing?

2. Why begin with the commodity as the matter of concern?

3. Breakdown of Marx's critique of Hegel's dialectical method? (M/E, pp. 301-302)

4. What is the relationship between scarcity and labor time? E.g., the diamond example (C1, p. 130)

5. What is the relationship between utility, value, and labor? (C1, p. 131)

6. Does Marx distinguish between use-values and usefulness (useful things)? (C1, p. 126)

(Concerning #1) Well, this metaphor is helpful for thinking about what he means by 'laws.' He uses a lot of organic metaphors: society as an organism. Perhaps his conception of economic laws (i.e., laws of capitalist production) are akin to biological laws. The commodity is a cell, not an atom. 

Marx's seems to also rely on an appearance/reality distinction. We need to uncover or disclose something and not limit ourselves to the analysis of surface practices and institutions. 

What is the cell relative to the body? What is this metaphor tracking? Well, atomistic metaphor implies something like bundles, whereas organic biological metaphors elicit a sense of systematicity, circularity, etc. More plasticity. 

Marx also uses physical metaphors to talk about constructing an ideal model of capitalist laws. England as the model of capitalism which other countries are approaching. 

(Concerning #2) I was thinking of Foucault's archaeological method of stripping away everything we hold constant in history. So, for Marx, why does he start with the commodity? If we follow the phenomenological reading, the commodity is the first 'appearance' of capitalism. But this seems analogous to Heidegger's starting point of Being/beings?

Well, the commodity seems like the universal category of the capitalist mode of production; it's present in any capitalist society. Well, I took the commodity as criterial for capitalism, so it's not so much a 'starting point,' and more as an analytic observation. Not just the commodity, but the 'immense' collection of commodities is criterial. 

What does Marx mean by 'appearance' for Marx mean? Kantian? Hegelian? Proto-Heideggerian?

(Concerning #5). Use-values are a necessary condition for the commodities. What does Marx mean by use-values presuppose 'definite quantities.' Maybe in the sense of the amount of useful things you want or possess?

It's interesting that Marx treats use-value as both a potentiality and an actuality. Use-values are, in some sense, transhistorical because as humans we always appropriate nature for our own uses. For Marx, labor in the abstract sense is a nature-imposed necessity, independent of all social forms (see p. 133). Marx has two senses of labor: abstract labor (capitalism) vs. concrete labor (human nature). 

Exchange-value is the commensurable value between two use-values. Two exchange-values are made equal by virtue of a 'third thing'? The socially average necessary labor-time it takes to produce a commodity assuming all things hold equal. 

(Concerning #4). Something that is useless cannot be commodity, but we can derive usefulness from things that are not commodity. Scarcity would be factored in the sense that it typically takes more socially average labor time to extract rare minerals like diamonds, whereas the same amount of time can extract more common minerals, like coal. 

Selections from Marx's Gründrisse

 Questions

1. What is the difference between fixed and circulating capital? (280). Can we provide an example of what is new (or is being introduced) by fixed capital?

2. Can we unpack the following claim: "In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital" (Marx-Engels Reader, 279).

3. "The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite" (279). Does this entail technological determinism? Is there any autonomy or agency left for the worker?

4. Can we discuss the distinction between machine/machinery and instrument? (279)

5. "In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself" (280) & "Thus the quantitative extent and the effectiveness (intensity) to which capital is developed as fixed capital indicate the general degree to which capital is developed as capital, as power over living labour, and to which it has conquered the production process as such" (281). What is the power-relation of machine and labor? In Foucauldian terms is this a sovereign, a disciplinary, or other modality of power relation? Does this imply a zero-sum struggle?

6. "While machinery is the most appropriate form of the use value of fixed capital, it does not at all follow that therefore subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery" (281). What does this mean? Does this open the door to techno-communism? What valence does this have: pessimism, optimism? Is it deterministic?

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