Solidarity and Objectivity

Abstract

To undertake an ethnography of crime is to probe the relation between science and ethics at their mutual points of extremity: where law might kill on the basis of someone’s judgments or where private ethical reflection is most pressed against public claims of universal moral principle.1 For Durkheim, the “objective element” (Durkheim 1933:36–37) of sociology—the point of exactitude from which scientific argument exhorts its readers—originates in the minds of willing individuals. There, thinkable futures await their naming, occasioning (or not) a shift in the collective conscience. At that point of possibility—a possibility that takes the form of a communicative exchange—Durkheim locates the ground for his “sociological method.”