No one would deny Émile Durkheim an essential and inaugural place in the history of the social sciences. No reconstruction of classical sociology can overlook the relevance of his legacy for anthropology and sociology. At the same time, specialists acknowledge that Durkheim has long been diminished by a reception that underestimates the emancipatory relevance of his sociology, compromises its historical and critical contents, and misinterprets its political relevance. Not to mention a general forgetting that Durkheim led a group of researchers who aimed to systematically reorganize the division of intellectual labour in the field of social sciences and to rethink their relation to philosophy and critique. The patrimony and meaning of this collective enterprise has been forgotten because of the absence of institutional continuity and the intellectual dispersion that the Durkheim school experienced in the aftermath of the First World War. Later, the legacy of the French sociological and anthropological school found ‘protection’ and intellectual shelter under the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, which helped to silence its originality – especially its political and historical contents ‒ by integrating Durkheim's and Mauss's systematic theories into a de-historicized conception of human rationality. Add in the fact that Parsons made Durkheim one of the four pillars of the sociological canon, simplifying his complex thought in the process, and it is easy to see why so many have a stereotyped idea of Durkheim's sociology.

For some decades now, researchers have begun confronting and revising the traditional image of a sociologist who has a strong epistemological continuity with positivism, who is ideologically conservative and whose abstract functionalism often lacks a proper historical understanding of political institutions. Starting in the 1970s, the collective work of revision and rediscovery of a ‘new Durkheim’ has begun unveiling the richness of Durkheim's sociology, freeing his legacy from the limits of previous interpretations. This pars destruens of the older reception of Durkheim – or, better, this pars restitutens of its original value – has been fundamental in the rediscovery of the thematic pluralism and conceptual complexity of Durkheim's thinking.

Introduction

There is no doubt that Durkheim's sociological research programme plays a crucial role in sociological theory building at least since Parsons made it a pillar of the ‘sociological canon’ (Parsons 1949). Yet, Parsons's research perspective is also strongly biased towards his interpretation. He localizes Durkheim's central contribution to sociological theory in the interest for the issue of social integration in highly differentiated societies and underlines the alleged inadequacy of his answer to this question. According to Parsons, Durkheim's sociology has two starting points: a ‘positive’ and a ‘negative’ one (Parsons 1960). In a positive sense, Durkheim adopts Comte's concept of ‘consensus’ as the focus of social integration which shapes ‘mechanical solidarity’ in traditional societies (Orsello Montanari 1971). The negative point of reference in Durkheim's sociology consists, instead, in the ‘utilitarian conception’ of individual, interest-driven social action in modern societies, which he would borrow from Spencer's sociology. That is where the notion of ‘organic solidarity’ would come from as a mere network of contractual relationships. According to Parsons, Durkheim's sociology thus reveals a dichotomous arrangement of the sociological category-field based on the dialectic of consensus and contract in a fashion which is reminiscent of Tonnies's opposition between community and society (1887). In order to integrate Durkheim's contribution to the sociological theory of modern societies, for Parsons, it must thus be clarified how the concept of organic solidarity can be reconciled with the need for substantial social integration. This means for him to understand how in highly differentiated societies a ‘common normative orientation’ of social action is possible, despite all normative pluralism.

As a consequence, Parsons considers Durkheim's formulation of the relationship between collective normative orientation and organic solidarity to be inadequate. Parsons's analysis starts from the assumption that the structure of society consists in patterns of normative culture that are institutionalized in the social system and internalized in the personalities of the individuals.

Introduction

Today, it is still customary in the secondary literature to interpret Simmel's lifephilosophy as denouncing his sociology and to regard his mature cultural project as distinct from the sociological one. The challenge for the present chapter consists in assessing Simmel's mature work as an extension of his concerns and ideas from 1890 to 1908. The research that developed thanks to the impetus from the edition of Simmel's collected works (Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, hereafter GSG) already offered significant contributions to overcome the classical prejudices about the ‘development phases’ of Simmel's reflection (Frischeisen- Kohler 1919). What is lacking, however, is still a compact presentation of the relation of the reciprocal integration between Simmel's ‘early’ and ‘late’ work as successive contributions to sociological theory. The notion of ‘solid liquidity’ should capture and present the core of Simmel's thought on the dynamics of social life and social forms starting from his crucial contribution to the sociological theory of modernity, that is, the theory of money in the Philosophie des Geldes. In contrast to Bergson – or currently to Bauman – who claim ‘liquidity’ as the central category for the understanding of modernity and disregard solidity, Simmel founds his sociological theory of complex societies on the need to inquire into the open- ended dialectics between societal liquefaction and solidification. Complex societies cannot be regarded, as Parsons suggests, as ‘social buildings’, because social structure is produced as a living framework of relationships in an everyday process of establishing and dissolving the action- frames of reference. The solidity of the social fabric thereby draws on its liquidity. Sociology has to inquire into the tension- fraught relationship between social action and social structure to assess how the former grants the validity of the latter, that is, how social creativity develops, institutionalizes and destroys social forms. To show the steps Simmel takes to develop his theoretical construction, this chapter is divided in sections devoted to the following topics: 1. The concept of complex societies as ‘solid liquidity’. 2. The theoretical approach of life- sociology. 3. The ‘solid liquidity’ of social structure. 4. The ‘liquid solidity’ or creativity of social action. 5. The ‘culture conflict’ as the crucial integrating institution of complex societies.