The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim
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Émile Durkheim was not merely an individual, but the head, simultaneously symbolic and real, of a social movement. Of all the “great sociologists” who make up the canon of founders of the discipline, Durkheim's work was most thoroughly a collective production. This is so in every sense recognized by present-day sociologists. We are inclined to see any individual as a product of social conditions who responds to problems set by his or her historical milieu with the tools then at hand; yet we often set sharp limits to such sociologizing in the case of our particular intellectual heroes. Our feeling of respect raises them to the status of uniquely creative individuals, a sacred realm from which we, in turn, receive a sense of participation in something more important than ourselves. It is an unfinished task to explain why we feel more elevated in worshipping a heroized individual than in showing respect for the accomplishments of a social movement: why the collective symbol is generally an individual even where we have the ability to recognize the collectivity itself. In the case of some putative sociological founders, such as Karl Marx, the name of the emblem swallows up even known co-authors, like Friedrich Engels, who were often as much animator and originator as collaborator (Carver 1983; Rigby 1992). The intellectual world, as much as politics or religion, needs a sociology of the construction of emblems.
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