At this point, my argument – that Durkheim was cobbling together a social realist vocabulary to replace the problematic legacy of Cartesian rationalism – seems to face an obstacle. For while De la division du travail social follows logically from his German visit, Durkheim also wrote a Latin thesis, Quid Secundatus Politicae Scientiae Instituendae Contulerit (1892), on Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois (1748). Why, one might ask, would Durkheim make Montesquieu – the “greatest exponent of the Cartesian interpretation of history” (Thompson 1942: 61–2; Peyre 1960: xiii) – the focus of this thesis? If Durkheim's goal was to replace the language of Cartesian rationalism, including its emphasis on clear and distinct ideas deduced from first principles, with this quite different vocabulary emphasizing induction carried out through the careful observation and collection of concrete things, why would he have been so preoccupied with the place of Montesquieu in the development of modern social science? If Durkheim's attachment for the Enlightenment was as ambivalent as L'Evolution pédagogique and L'Education morale suggest, and his early sources as German and romantic as his 1887 essays indicate, why would the Latin thesis begin with the assertion that it was Montesquieu who had “laid down the principles of the new discipline”?

AMBIVALENT CARTESIANS

To answer these questions, one must first appreciate the extremely ambiguous position Montesquieu occupied within the context of the French Enlightenment, as well as the ambivalent nature of his own commitment to Cartesian rationalism.