David Inglis: Durkheim Meets Trump, Neo-Nazis and Brexiteers: Sacred and Profane Reflections on the Present Crises

What might Durkheimian thinking have to tell us about the current crop of calamities: Brexit, the Trump election, the rise once again of ethno-nationalism, economic protectionism, and the splitting of nations in multiple ways, and their concomitant resonances at the level of individual and group identities?

Almost exactly 100 years ago, in the midst of very bleak socio-political conditions, Durkheim not only held onto cosmopolitan beliefs and a kind of cosmopolitan sociology, he in fact adapted those to fit the new, bellicose situation that Europe found itself in. The advent of the war was therefore not a reason to drop cosmopolitanism but instead to rework it for new times, and to try to contribute something positive, politically and sociologically, to times characterised by upheaval and turmoil.

Taking inspiration from this, I consider what a sociology of Brexit, Trump et al, informed by Durkheim’s sociology in general and his cosmopolitan sociology in particular, would involve. Several key areas of analysis are identified: the ripping up of the patterns of socio-economic organic solidarity; the rise of de-cosmopolitizing political trajectories, the complex interplay of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and forms of re-cosmopolitizing resistance and pushback, of the sort that Durkheim may well have been pleased to note sociologically and to encourage politically.