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

for sociology that did not fall within any existing and recognised social science. To further this goal, Durkheim developed a comprehensive sociological discipline and created terms of art that he hoped would amount to a scientific lexicon of sociology to enhance his subject as a science. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw an efflorescence of new discoveries in the natural and physical sciences. This was especially true in physics where the largely intuitive and linear world of Newtonian physics was being subjected to new theoretical models culminating in Planck’s quantum theory that appeared in 1901 and Einstein’s revolutionary ideas including the special theory of relativity which was published in 1905. Durkheim sincerely desired sociology to take its rightful place as a discipline no less serious than physics. He built many of his arguments around an analogy to the human body and argued that just as human beings cannot be fully understood as merely being collections of organs and tissues, similarly, society existed separate and apart from the individuals who were the constituent members of the social group. Durkheim is sometimes viewed as being somewhat conservative but this conservatism perhaps only confirms his insistence that sociology be treated as a serious science and that every argument be subjected to statistical or ethnographic proof.

Durkheim was singularly unimpressed with his predecessor Marx and concluded that Marx’s dogma of economic materialism was seriously deficient and reflected basic misunderstandings of social life. In further contrast to Marx, Durkheim had a relatively low opinion of politics and he believed that academics should avoid political involvement. ²³ In contrast to Marx, Durkheim believed that religion, as opposed to economics, was the most basic social phenomenon and that everything in society such as law, morality, politics, and science can be traced back to religion. Durkheim argued that economics was not the source of these societal traits but that economics was in fact a circumstance derived from religion.²⁴ This argument was developed by Max Weber and perhaps reaches its zenith in Weber’s text, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism published in 1905 and 1906. In this work, Weber argued that protestant