Emile Durkheim. (1893) 1964. The Division of Labor in Society. New York, NY: Free Press,
pp. 262, 396-402, 432-435.
Whereas for Marx the division of labor represented a simplification of tasks that leaves all
workers unskilled and thus expendable and easily exploited, for Durkheim it represented a
functional interrelatedness among people. With increasing population density, people’s
happiness and well-being become more efficiently satisfied when each specializes in tasks that
contribute only in part to their society’s functioning. As a society’s social type evolves
historically from one in which everyone performs the same tasks into one with extensive division
of labor, there is a corresponding change in its normal rules of conduct (i.e., in the moral
language appropriate to it)—essentially, from one of sameness to one of cooperation. The
sociologist’s function is to serve as a physician for society, by diagnosing how abnormally its
morality corresponds to its social type and by suggesting moral prescriptions more befitting (i.e.,
more functional for) this type.