Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the new Durkheim
- Part I: Life, context, and ideas
- 2 Durkheim’s life and context: something new about Durkheim?
- 3 Durkheim’s squares: types of social pathology and types of suicide
- 4 Practices and presuppositions: some questions about Durkheim and Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse
- 5 The Durkheimian movement in France and in world sociology
- 6 The inner development of Durkheim’s sociological theory: from early writings to maturity
- 7 What difference does translation make: Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse in French and English
- Part II: Symbols, rituals, and bodies
- Part III: Solidarity, difference, and morality
- Further reading
- Index
2 - Durkheim’s life and context: something new about Durkheim?
from Part I: - Life, context, and ideas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2008
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the new Durkheim
- Part I: Life, context, and ideas
- 2 Durkheim’s life and context: something new about Durkheim?
- 3 Durkheim’s squares: types of social pathology and types of suicide
- 4 Practices and presuppositions: some questions about Durkheim and Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse
- 5 The Durkheimian movement in France and in world sociology
- 6 The inner development of Durkheim’s sociological theory: from early writings to maturity
- 7 What difference does translation make: Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse in French and English
- Part II: Symbols, rituals, and bodies
- Part III: Solidarity, difference, and morality
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Representation and periodization of Durkheim’s life and work
Durkheim (Émile). French Sociologist (Épinal 1858; Paris 1917). Professor of science, education, and social science at Bordeaux (1887) and at La Sorbonne (1902, a position which became the Sociology chair in 1913) and founder of the journal L'Année sociologique (1896). He organized the French School of Sociology (with C. Bouglé, M. Halbwachs, L. Levy-Bruhl, and M. Mauss), in an attempt to find a “moral science” in the study of societies and the laws which govern them.
Émile Durkheim's life and work is presented in 22 lines in the Petit Robert (dictionary of proper names). It contains a summary of his sociological approach (including positivism, the specificity of social facts, a sociology with a naturalist and mechanist character, and the study of “collective representation”), and a list of his books with very short comments (e.g. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), a text that reveals his interest in ethnography). This type of information is significant for those studying Durkheim; particularly those descriptions that place the sociologist and his work in France, where he has become - in many ways - a cult object. On one tablet in Bordeaux, where Durkheim taught for many years, it has been written: “Émile Durkheim, Founder of Sociology.” No more, no less.
A well-known classical sociologist in the English academic world, Émile Durkheim has become the object of a number of commentaries and theoretical interpretations. For instance, 6.3 percent of the 8,353 articles published in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review between 1895 and 1992 quote his texts. This is as many as Weber, the most influential sociologist of the era who was quoted in 6.5 percent of the articles during the same period. As Paul Vogt summarized, “[t]he knowledge of Durkheim and of his books is a full part of the definition of what a sociologist is in America” (1993: 227).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim , pp. 41 - 69Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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