Contractual thought and Durkheim’s theory of the social: A reappraisal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emile Durkheim developed his sociology in part by pointing to the insufficiency of contractual explanations of society. This article examines several iterations of ‘the contract’ in light of the rediscovery of Durkheim’s (2011 [1894–1895]) lectures on Hobbes’ De Cive. By viewing these recovered lectures alongside his canonical texts, we find three ways in which Durkheim distinguished his sociology from political and economic understandings of the social, in contrast with the contractarianism of Hobbes, the contractualism of Rousseau and the ‘contractual solidarity’ of Spencer. In his accounts of these thinkers, Durkheim explicates both his philosophical anthropology and his ontology of the social. Whereas contractual explanations of society treat the social as artificial and/or a mere aggregate formation, the social for Durkheim arises spontaneously and exists as a sui generis formation. Through the clarification of these conceptual coordinates, the nature of the social and its relationship with the political for each of these four thinkers come more fully into view. The article concludes with a consideration of the problem of the dissolution of society, pointing to a limit point or horizon for what is thinkable within Durkheimian sociology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".