those too poor to afford one, or a right to challenge the composition of a jury,
but not necessarily to exclude jurors on any particular ground. Most Western
legal systems have some equivalent to the idea of due process—in Britain it
would probably be called ‘natural justice’—but nowhere outside the USA has
it been so powerful a political challenge to authorities. However, developments
in Europe under the influence of the European Court of Human Rights
sometimes approach the US standard.
Durkheim
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), along withMarxandWeber, was one of the
great founding fathers of modern social science. He took as his main task the
explanation of the changes that overcame societies with the development of
the Industrial Revolution and the change from traditional or feudal society to
the sort of liberalcapitalismcurrent in most developed countries today. His
work covered an enormous range, encompassing sociological theory, research
methodology, and empirical observation. Apart from Marxists, it is probable
that the vast majority of modern sociologists would see at least something of
Durkheim in their own intellectual approach. Although he wrote little that was
directly and obviously about politics, most of what he has to say is suffused with
political importance. Methodologically his position was that individual moti-
vations and feelings were irrelevant to the social scientist, because society was
something with a real existence of its own, over and above the individual
members who were largely formed by the social structure. Thus social facts
were to be explained by other social facts, not by investigating individual
human experiences.
A good example of this was his classic study of suicide in which suicide rates
in various areas were explained by,inter alia,the rates of affiliation to different
religions. Thus a highly personal act, self-slaughter, was turned into social fact,
and explained in a structural manner. Perhaps his most important work, as far as
political implications go, was his study of the breakdown of social regulation
and normative order in modern capitalist societies characterized by a high
degree ofdivision of labour. This led both to his investigation ofanomie
(with important similarities to Marx’s idea ofalienation), and to the devel-
opment of a theory ofcorporatistpolitics which was taken over and misused
by laterfascistdictatorships. He is probably the most important precursor of
functionalistsocial theory, which enjoyed a great influence in post-war social
science, and he has stamped modern French social science deeply with his
views and methodology. There are probably few main line sociologists nowa-
days influenced by Durkheim rather than his rival Max Weber, but Durkheim’s
influence is felt increasingly strongly in cultural studies.
Durkheim