A Durkheimian Take On Dialog

As Durkheim might have put it, there are non-dialogical foundations of dialogue that contain moral directives in themselves.   If the spirit of dialogue gets cultivated, it may serve not only to overcome the epistemological fragmentation of our discipline but its growing division along particularistic lines. Perhaps it is time for sociology to recover the robustly ecumenical outlook it evinced when the discipline was being established a century ago and to model, for the world community, a way of resolving the cultural crisis of our time.

-Donald Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition (1995)