Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method

The problem with Durkheim is that he knows his ontology and doesn't really care to take a straightforward stance. Halfway through, he declares that he wants to take a course midway between the nominalism of the historians and the realism of the philosophers (read Comte), but the result is hardly a position of moderation. Instead, it is of alternating extremes: the "social fact" defined in the first chapter is a perfect example of realist faith in abstraction, to the point that the society becomes more forceful, more solid, more real than any actual human. But then in the very next chapter he takes up a Baconian empiricism, leading the fight against universalisms (in particular the human universal).

Now, this isnt in itself so unreasonable as it first seems. Just because one is prepared to believe in universals does not mean that one has to accept all universals as real. But the switch in perspective is jarring and uncontextualized--it is hard to tell if Durkheim is aware of any seeming contradiction.

Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

There is such a great difference between the way that Lukács is discussed (based upon his later Marxism, esp. History and Class Consciousness), and the reality of this book. It isn't hard to notice that he is in a Hegelian pre-Marx mode at this point—even if he hadn't said so in the 1962 preface. But the continuity with Romantic criticism is really striking—Hegel's art criticism, to be sure, but even more directly, Schiller's "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry"—the ideology of the critique is structured almost identically, even though the tragic fall from unity of world and work is moved into the novel, rather than poetry. It is as if the same theory has been rewritten for an early-twentieth century view back at the nineteenth. This isn't to take away anything from the interest (or lyricism!) of the critique, merely its originality.

One thing that the work does seem to do, though, is to act as a sort of hinge between the older version of Romantic criticism and Hegelian historicism, and the slightly-later works of the émigré philologists. The slight variations between the expression of loss in different national traditions of the novel is expressed by the separate chapters on Don Quixote, Sentimental Education, Wilhelm Meister, and Tolstoy—the matching of an exemplary work (or two) with the literary-historical state of a fixed moment of one united national culture really does seem to prefigure Mimesis at least. Perhaps an accidental feature, but that which is transmitted.

Question: what is the relation of the individual work's standing out as representative of the period to the social form of individual life in mass society? Seems a bit like an attempt to reinstate all that has been lost, in the guise of method rather than content. Is the work of criticism itself a sublimation?