Durkheim’s Failed Darwinian Encounter: Missed Opportunities on the Path to a Post-exemptionalist Environmental Sociology

IF 2.2 3区社会学 Q2 SOCIOLOGY

Sociological Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-09-02 DOI:10.1177/07311214221121164

Paul Joseph McLaughlin

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Abstract

The philosophical underpinnings of Durkheim’s failed Darwinian encounter have been neglected by environmental and mainstream sociologists. Although he claimed to employ Darwinian insights, Durkheim wrote during the eclipse of population thinking by an essentialist revival in biology. His inability to grasp the former and embrace of a specific variety of the latter explain the limitations and contradictions in his incipient environmental sociology and challenge the broader disciplinary myth that Durkheim discovered a new approach to theorizing society. Even his repudiation of Lamarckian analogies relied upon and reinforced his more fundamental commitment to essentialism. That commitment has contributed to the persistence of developmentalism within sociology and delayed a second Darwinian revolution. Seizing the opportunity that Durkheim missed by confronting the deeper lessons of the first Darwinian revolution offers the best hope for constructing a post-exemptionalist theory of societal-environmental interactions and addressing enduring disciplinary concerns with structural diversity and human agency.

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涂尔干失败的达尔文主义相遇:后豁免主义环境社会学道路上的错失机会

涂尔干失败的达尔文主义遭遇的哲学基础被环境学家和主流社会学家所忽视。尽管迪尔凯姆声称自己采用了达尔文的见解，但他的写作正值生物学本质主义复兴，人口思想黯然失色之际。他对前者的无法把握和对后者的特定多样性的接受，解释了他早期环境社会学中的局限性和矛盾，并挑战了涂尔干发现社会理论化新方法的更广泛的学科神话。甚至他对拉马克类比的否定也依赖并强化了他对本质主义的更基本的承诺。这种承诺促成了社会学中发展主义的持续存在，并推迟了第二次达尔文革命。抓住迪尔凯姆错过的机会，直面第一次达尔文革命的更深刻的教训，为构建社会-环境相互作用的后例外主义理论，解决结构多样性和人类能动性等持久的学科问题，提供了最大的希望。

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来源期刊

Sociological Perspectives SOCIOLOGY-

CiteScore

4.70

自引率

4.20%

发文量

期刊介绍： Established in 1957 and heralded as "always intriguing" by one critic, Sociological Perspectives is well edited and intensely peer-reviewed. Each issue of Sociological Perspectives offers 170 pages of pertinent and up-to-the-minute articles within the field of sociology. Articles typically address the ever-expanding body of knowledge about social processes and are related to economic, political, anthropological and historical issues.