Durkheim's Self-Regulating "Constitutive" Practices: an Unexplored Critical Relevance to Racial Justice, Consensus Thinking, and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Durkheim had an ambitious plan to found a new sociology of modernity that would focus on how the conditions for making social facts had changed as societies diversified and modernized. This argument has an unexplored critical relevance for current issues of racial justice that are being exacerbated by a strong residual commitment to older consensus-based ways of making social facts. This paper contrasts two ways of making social facts-culture-in the US, tracing both back to Durkheim's argument. One makes extensive use of "Dog-whistles" that rely on and maintain a consensus that resists change. The other is grounded in diversity, justice, and equality and promotes change. Because of the degree of reciprocity and cooperation the latter, which Durkheim called self-regulating constitutive practices require, justice and equality-what Garfinkel called "Trust Conditions"-are necessary prerequisites for their successful use. The crisis and division in the US in 2020 involving both anti-science and opposition to racial equality provides empirical evidence supporting Durkheim's warning that if modern society does not guarantee the justice self-regulating practices required then it will fail.