Until quite recently, accounts of the “early” Durkheim typically began with a discussion of his review essays of 1885. During the summer of 1995, however, a routine inventory of the papers of the French philosopher André Lalande (1867–1964), recently acquired by the Sorbonne, uncovered a detailed, meticulous set of notes covering eighty lectures (almost 600 pages in length), and bearing the inscription: “E. Durkheim – Cours de philosophie fait au Lycée de Sens en 1883–4.” The content of these lectures – almost all of them given in 1883 – reveals a Durkheim so dramatically different from the one with whom we are familiar that he might reasonably be described as the “earlier” Durkheim. Most important for our purposes, this earlier Durkheim was in no sense a social realist – in fact, he seems to have possessed no sociological sensibilities whatsoever – and thus provides us with a starting point from which to answer some of the questions just raised. But first, it will be useful to understand the larger context of the philosophy class itself, and its role in the development of the French intellect.

VICTOR COUSIN AND THE CLASSE DE PHILOSOPHIE

The mark by which one could recognise a Frenchman, Theodore Zeldin once observed, was not his appearance or his language, but “something much deeper and much subtler: the way he used language, the way he thought, the way he argued” (1977: 205).