Modernity and the Problem of Meaning: The Durkheimian Tradition

Abstract

The rise of modernity signified not only an unprecedented epoch of material progress but evoked a recurring sense of cultural crisis. With the discreditation of the Christian-Aristotelian cosmos, new meaning constellations were necessary to provide cognitive and moral frameworks of order, identity, and purposeful existence. Modern social theory crystallized as an effort to explain but also justify or shape the emerging cultural complex of modernity. In the nineteenth century the dominant perspective on modernity and meaning was the secularization thesis which found its most sophisticated sociological expression in Max Weber and in the Weberians in the twentieth century. I argue that Durkheim, reacting against nineteenth century representatives of the secularization thesis, articulated a contrasting view of modernity and meaning. Furthermore, that the writings of Bellah and Parsons on modernity and meaning fall squarely within this Durkheimian perspective. The great transformation of European societies issued forth problems of meaning as established cultural frameworks securing identity, moral order, and purposeful existence were disrupted. By problems of meaning, I refer, for example, to a pervasive uncertainty regarding ultimate beliefs and values, confusing images of self, society and nature, and the ceaseless conflict over the ends, rules, and norms in terms of which personal and collective life is organized and legitimated. Although these cultural dislocations and problems initially stem from institutional changes linked to the demise of the old order, their more direct and sustaining source lies in the disturbance of the modern cultural configuration accompanying incessant modernization and in the unique cultural logics and dynamics of modernity. In premodern societies the perception of being situated in a sociocultural order expressive of the natural or cosmic order legitimated culturally established patterns of meaning in such an authoritative manner that whatever stirrings of collective existential and moral doubt were felt, they were contained from erupting into a full-blown cultural crisis. If identity, moral coherence, and social integration were experienced as problems in premodern societies, it was either during times of crisis or confined to individuals on the social periphery. The problem of meaning was insinuated into the social center only with the rise of modern society. This is apparent, for example, in the shift in modern philosophical consciousness to the problem of knowledge as well as in the widespread search for secular grounds of belief and morality in the eighteenth century (cf. Crocker, 1959; Lidz, 1979). By the nineteenth century, the problem of meaning was not only expressed as a philosophical problem (grounds of knowledge, being, and morality) and a existential concern with personal meaning and moral coherence (e.g., in Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche) but, in addition, became a topic of sociological analysis. The sociological tradition emerged, in part, as an attempt to analyze the formation of meaning constellations in modern societies and, at least implicitly, as a form of moral inquiry offering arguments legitimating one or another form of social life (cf. Becker, 1966; Gouldner, 1970:486; Seidman, 1983a).