Abstract

Watts Miller’s book on Durkheim joins a growing number of recent reassessments of Durkheim’s significance as a radical thinker rather than the naïvely positivistic sociologist he is sometimes taken for. The newer interpretations suggest that he can be read as a late-modern or even a postmodern thinker who imaginatively combined social science with a political and ethical vision. Watts Miller argues that Durkheim should be read as making a key contribution to liberal socialist ethics, to a “communitarian defence of individualism” within a significant continuation of the “enlightenment project.” The perspective followed is to separate Durkheim from Comte and the Comtean tradition, and to read Durkheim on ethics as engaged principally in a debate with Kant. Watts Miller argues that Durkheim is concerned with the “rational deliberation of ends,” and “not only to identify, clarify and rework ideals, but also to adjudicate on them”. Watts Miller proposes to look again at the fundamental problem of any engaged social science—how to argue both for individual autonomy of thought and action and for a science which adjudicates and legislates social values. In Watts Miller’s view, it is Durkheim who brings this off.