Emile Durkheim
With an introduction by Lewis Coser
Translated by W. D. Halls

Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society , his doctoral
dissertation and his first major work, was published in 1893.
Though a previous translation into English appeared in 1933, the
present volume is the first exact, adequate and satisfying translation
of this key work.
The Division of Labour is a highly original treatment of the subject,
yet it should be read within the context of earlier attempts to
come to grips with the complex division of labour that emerged with
the industrial revolution, first in England and then on the Continent.
What is novel in Durkheim’s thought can best be understood if
one refers, even if only sketchily, to previous attempts to define and
come to grips with the emergence of an unprecedented system of
production and the allocation of both productive and other societal
tasks in the late eighteenth century.
Some forms of the division of labour, be it only along sexual lines,
have characterised all known types of society from the ‘primitive’ to
the modern. In all of them, certain types of labour, but also of other
functions, were allocated to specific groups of people. Even in the
smallest known human societies there are some forms of human
differentiation in the allocation of tasks and roles.