470 1 English for Psychologists and Sociologists

Man's social nature, created through education (standards, values, ideals) was contradicted by his biological nature (capabilities, biological functions, impulses, and passions). That made for incessant inner disquiet, and a sense of tension and alarm. Only society's controlling activity restrained man's biological nature and his passions and appetites, and put them into a cer­tain context. When society relaxed its control over the individual, rose a state of the disintegration of society and the individual. In that social state there was no firm moral control of individual behaviour, and a kind of moral vacuum was created in which the old standards and values no longer played their role, and new ones had not yet been confirmed. This state opposed the moral order, regulation, and control that characterised the normal, «healthy» state of society.

In his The Division of Labor Durkheim considered anomy from the aspect of social structure, explaining it by lack of co-ordination of social functions from the growth and development of society. In Suicide he treated anomy as a moral crisis in which the system of normative control of individual needs and passions was disrupted through social upheavals, which led to loss of personal balance, and the feeling of belonging to a group, and to loss of discipline and social solidarity. Deviant behaviour was also a consequence of that.

Durkheim believed, in Utopian fashion, that individual and social needs could be consciously regulated, and kept within the context of limitations dictated by the real social possibilities, while preserving capitalist social relations. That would prevent the rise of tension, spiritual crisis, feelings of disappointment and distress, and consequently of deviant behaviour.

In developing the problem of the social essence of morality, Durkheim expressed many true ideas. His recognition of social conditions as decisive for the genesis

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lof morality was positive; so, too, was his analysis of the functional consequences of moral rules for society, and his recognition of their socio-cultural inconstancy, on the one hand, and universality, on the other.

The sociological interpretation of morality was very fruitful in principle, but Durkheim's conception was too abstract and one-sided. His arguments for society as the sole worthy moral goal were unsubstantiated and weak. One can hardly deny, for example, the moral value of the personality and of its harmonious development. And although Durkheim recognised and actively defended the rights and dignity of the individual, his theory did not allow him to examine the interaction of the individual and society dialectically in concrete historical conditions. The principle of the unconditional superiority of society over the individual was unsound. Abstract unhistorical collectivism was just as unjustified as the abstract

Individualism that he constantly criticised. The relation of the individual and society, considered from the moral aspect, cannot be reduced to a relation of subordination. The relation between them is one of dialectical interaction.

IX. Translate the text in writing:

THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF RELIGION

The conception of religion crowned the development bf Durkheim's idea of collective consciousness as «the liighest form of the psychic life» or «the consciousness pf the consciousnesses». The attitude to religion fcraditional for positivism, as the supreme social Institution that ensured the integration of society, ■cquired the form, with Durkheim, of quests for ways Jnd means of a sociological explanation of religion under fche influence of English and American anthropologists,