Dissertation
Secularizing Moral Motivation: The Forgotten Project of the Durkheimian School
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2015. Supervisor: Bruce Lincoln. Readers: Marcel Fournier, Kathryn Tanner.
The Durkheimian school — the circle of French sociologists around Émile Durkheim at the turn of the twentieth century — set out to build a science of society on secular foundations, free from theological premises and religious authority. This dissertation traces a largely forgotten problem at the center of that project: how to account for moral motivation. Durkheim could explain why society obligates us — through constraint, externality, the coercive force of the social fact. What he could not explain, for most of his career, was how morality actually moves people: what makes us want to do the right thing rather than simply fear the consequences of not doing it.
The dissertation follows both Durkheim's attempts to solve this problem and his nephew Marcel Mauss' parallel attempts to find an alternative solution — and shows that both paths lead back, counterintuitively, to the theological frameworks they claimed to have superseded.
This research is continuous with my current work on how AI discourse borrows its authority from the theological frameworks it claims to have superseded — and on the political consequences of that borrowing.
Chapter by chapter
The argument in detail
Durkheim's Ethics after the Rules
Charts the development of Durkheim's ethics after Rules of Sociological Method — showing that his account of moral obligation, modeled on the coercive social fact, leaves him with no account of how morality motivates. The problem he identifies with Kant — failing to connect the moral to individual psychology — reappears in his own work.
Sacrifice and Automatic Efficacy
Rereads Hubert and Mauss' Sacrifice (1899) not primarily as a response to the Dreyfus Affair, as it is usually understood, but as an intervention in debates about the origins of morality. Mauss and Hubert look for something in religious ritual that might generate obligation without divine authority — forces with "automatic efficacy" that produce moral effects without requiring anyone to command them.
Magic and Moral Motivation
Examines Magic (1904), in which Mauss and Hubert extend this search beyond religion, looking for a way that society can motivate action without coercion. Traces their deployment of Kantian epistemology in service of a distinctly non-Kantian project: moral motivation without authority.
The Sacred as Solution
Shows how Durkheim's account of religion evolves in tandem with his ethics. By the time of Elementary Forms, the sacred has become the solution to the motivation problem: it generates the force that moral obligation requires. But this solution comes at a cost — Durkheim is now depending on a mechanism that works precisely because people don't recognize it for what it is.
Durkheim and Mauss in Conflict
Focuses on a revealing moment of conflict between Durkheim and Mauss over the preface to Mélanges d'histoire des religions (1909), which can be read as a covert critique of Durkheim's new account of religion. Uses Durkheim's stern response to illuminate the stakes of the disagreement between the two thinkers.
Emblematization and the Limits of Enlightenment
Reads Elementary Forms (1912) closely, focusing on Durkheim's account of "emblematization" — the process by which collective energy gets attached to a symbol and experienced as moral authority. A careful reading of Durkheim's treatment of the French Revolution reveals what this account finally concedes: authority works precisely because it is opaque to reason. The Enlightenment project of rendering moral authority transparent has quietly been abandoned.
The Gift and Roman Law
Follows Mauss' final attempt to solve the problem — gift exchange as an alternative to authority-based obligation — in The Gift (1925). Shows that Mauss' account centers not on the famous hau (as Lévi-Strauss' influential introduction led readers to believe) but on Roman law, and specifically on the institution of nexum, whereby a person pledges themselves as security for a debt.
Sin, Expiation, and the Compulsion to Reciprocate
Reveals, through a reading of The Gift alongside Hertz's unfinished Sin and Expiation, that Mauss' account of the compulsion to reciprocate borrows from an Augustinian structure of sin and debt — the very theological inheritance it claims to have moved beyond. The book that was supposed to find a secular foundation for obligation turns out to be a companion piece to a text about sin.