Durkheims Nightmare

So hither is Paris today ... thousands of anonymous strangers on Boulevard Saint-Germain at v pm, no feel of mutual bond or shared ide...

So hither is Paris today ... thousands of anonymous strangers on Boulevard Saint-Germain at v pm, no feel of mutual bond or shared identity, a void of powerful values, lives of bleak consumerism. Anomie writ large. No friends, no community, no ceremony, no shared rituals. No oculus contact on the street, no presumption of mutual cause. H5N1 Tom Waits world. It is Durkheim's nightmare virtually modernity.

Or is it? It is a city, to live on sure, dissimilar a village. So the anonymity quotient is real high. But is it actually a house of rampant anomie as well as hermetic private dissatisfaction? Or is it instead a location for many thousands of micro-communities--religious, civic, ethnic, occupational? Is it a house alongside dense networks of friends, associates, as well as family, to a greater extent than intimately connected past times prison theater cellular telephone phones than the hamlet e'er was through conduct a opportunity meetings at the marketplace or the church? Is it inward fact a powerful surroundings for human flourishing as well as social deepening?

In fact, it appears that the latter is the illustration for a large let on of Parisians.

This may seem similar a indicate that Durkheim anticipated through his distinction betwixt mechanical as well as organic solidarity. But Durkheim's emphasis alongside the latter concept was on economical interdependency -- the partitioning of project -- rather than a recognition of the possibility of manifold micro-social relationships constituting a patchwork social world.

We mightiness nation that rather than anomie, the commutation shortcoming of modern cities similar Paris -- or New York, Chicago, or London -- is social inequality as well as dramatically reduced opportunities for the bottom one-half of the income ladder. The people captured inward the photograph inward a higher house receive got something inward mutual beyond their prison theater cellular telephone phones -- they are by as well as large employed as well as affluent. But that profile of affluence is representative merely of a fraction of the city's residents -- every bit documented past times the splendid Observatoire des inégalités (http://www.inegalites.fr/). Just accept the RER or Metro to the banlieue that surround the urban inwardness to regard the abrupt separation of social worlds that Paris encompasses (http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/paris-banlieue-peripheries-inequity/).

So it seems that the excogitation of the modern urban inwardness implicit inward Durkheim's idea is seriously wrong. The urban inwardness is a different form of locus for social interaction as well as private life than the traditional town or village. But it is non inherently toxic for that reason. What is toxic is rather the dimension brought out past times Marx -- the style of modern capitalist gild to sharpen the separation betwixt have's as well as have-nots.

It is non solely an accident that I'm brought to intend of Durkheim, since he spent much of his career less than a kilometer upwardly Boule St.-Germain from this intersection. Ironically, Marx was hither besides inward 1843.