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Puzzles over the nature of the individual mount, unanswered, in the course of the Rules and Suicide. The Baconian doctrine of idola supplies us with a picture of the nature of falsity in thinking about individual action, and of the inadequacies of intentional language. "Currents", impulses, and the rest are the 'scientific" terms Durkheim himself used in action explanations, and these suggest a picture of the individual. His comments in the preface to the second edition of the Rules on the analogies between the psychological laws governing the combination of and "the manner in which social representations adhere to and repel one another, how they fuse or separate from one another, etc." (1964, p. li; 1982, pp. 41–42; 1937, p. xix) and the laws of sociology governing collective representations are suggestive. But how do they fit together, and how do they fit into the logic of his argument and his practice? Other questions, of where the composition of causes occurs, and about the details of the causal mechanisms involved, of the relation between "impulses", individual predispositions, and various social facts, arise from Durkheim's own usages. His technical usages, particularly his statistical methods, also raise questions about his individual as a real, causal structure.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3461-5_8

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