Freedom of Speech and Society: A Social Approach to Freedom of Ex ...

Durkheim did not see law as an evil or coercive force used to repress but rather did not harbour any unfriendly beliefs toward laws in general. In fact, especially in his earlier writings, Durkheim frequently addressed legal topics and even suggested that laws constituted essentially verifiable, hard data that could be used to test and measure aspects of society that eluded measurement. At one extreme and perhaps somewhat naively, he even suggested that the sheer volume of laws could be measured as a device to solve sociological questions. Durkheim believed that laws constituted the institutionalisation of societal norms and consequently reflected the values of society.¹⁸ Durkheim recognised that there could be situations where the law was not keeping up with changing societal values, but he believed that ultimately this situation would be rectified or societal cohesion would be adversely affected. He presented, as a key element of his theory for the evolution of society, the belief that laws were sufficiently representative of societal values that laws could be used to measure otherwise ephemeral or ambiguous changes in community values. Simply put, Durkheim comfortably equates law with social control that is derived from society itself; and although he wrote more than a century ago, he remains a standard authority or point of reference for the connection between law and sociology.¹⁹ Ultimately, Durkheim is recognised as the founder of modern sociology²⁰ because he “gave the science of sociology its status as a legitimate, autonomous and respected university discipline.”²¹

The World According to Durkheim

At the time Durkheim first published The Division of Labor in Society in 1893, it was still unclear whether sociology was indeed a separate discipline from psychology.²² One of Durkheim’s major contributions and perhaps his most controversial argument and primary divergence from Weber was that society could not be understood by studying the individuals comprising the group but rather that society was, in effect, a distinct living organism, that in turn, defined the characteristics of its members. Through this argument, he attempted to carve out an intellectual niche