Chapter 4. Society and Modern Life
4.3. Living in Contemporary Society
The reason why Durkheim, Marx and Weber are still read by sociologists is that they provided key insights into the formation of modern society that remain relevant today. Nevertheless, life in modern society is subject to constant change. How can Durkheim’s, Marx’s, and Weber’s analyses be updated to describe the key features of 21st century life?
Updating Durkheim: Postmodern Society and Neo-Tribalism
Durkheim predicted that there would be periods of anomie — normlessness, or a lack of common norms — as the small, isolated societies of mechanical solidarity were replaced by modern mass societies of organic solidarity. In the absence of a collective conscience and shared rituals, the complex division of labour in society would lead it to become increasingly divergent, heterogeneous and atomized. However, this anomie would be short-lived and temporary as the complex division of labour of organic societies stabilized. Eventually societies would emerge as cohesive, self-regulating systems of interdependent components and a new basis of social solidarity and social equilibrium would be established.
In the late 20th century, Jean Francois Lyotard (1924–1998), observing that the model of a unified, functionally cohesive society no longer described the way people actually connected with each other, suggested that Durkheim was right about anomie and the fragmentation of society but wrong about the nature of the social bond that was emerging (Lyotard, 1980). Rather than society operating as a cohesive interdependent whole, societies were discontinuous and institutions operated “in patches.” He described this tendency as postmodern. Postmodern society had to be conceived as social heterogeneity without social solidarity.
New forms of social bond emerge in this context. While the division of labour into occupational specializations produces interdependence, such as the complex chains of social relationship in global supply chains, there is a parallel division of identities which produces fragmentation. In line with Durkheim’s analysis of premodern tribal affiliations, Maffesoli (1996) describes the formation of contemporary neo-tribes, groups of people bound together in communities of feeling who gather at particular times and places for specific reasons and then disband. These are communities of feeling in the sense that, instead of being based on ideologies or traditional sources of identity like class, locality, religion, occupation, education, or ethnicity, etc., otherwise geographically or socially disperse people come together in a bounded, usually public, space for a discrete time period to express emotional energies. They create a temporary haven based on shared feeling, ambience, sensibility, taste, or atmosphere. However, rather than forming a new, permanent basis of social solidarity, neo-tribal gatherings — “huge rallies, crowds of all kinds, collective trances, fusion throug