Response to Davis and Robinson: Remembering Durkheim

Abstract

. . . the opposing moral visions at the heart of the culture war and the rhetoric that sustains them acquire something of a life of their own. The culture war is . . . rooted in an on-going realignment of American public culture and has become institutionalized chiefly through special purpose organizations, denominations, political parties and even branches of government. The fundamental disagreements that characterized the culture war, we have also seen, have become even further aggravated by virtue of the technology of public discourse, the very means by which disagreements are voiced in public. In the end, however, the opposing moral visions become, as one would say in the tidy though ponderous jargon of social science, a reality sui generis a reality much larger than indeed, autonomous from the sum total of individuals and organizations that give expression to the conflict. It is these competing moral visions and the rhetoric that sustains them that become the defining forces of public life. (Culture Wars, 1991: 290-91).