Durkheimian Studies

This article attempts to clarify the essence of Durkheim's rationalism, especially in his interpretation of morality. The author distinguishes between two aspects, or meanings, of Durkheim's rationalism: 1) epistemological one and 2) ontological one. In the first, epistemological sense, Durkheim was a convinced rationalist, defending rationalistic means of cognition of social phenomena. In the second, ontological sense, Durkheim was only partially a rationalist. He argued that the social reality is subject to the laws and regularities of nature; but, at the same time, it is the sphere of domination of ‘irrational’ factors (collective emotions, passions, beliefs, etc). According to Durkheim, science could not be a direct substitute for religion. He predicted a phenomenon that could be called the ‘rationalization and moralization of the sacred’.

The relationship between the pioneers in sociology as a university discipline Ferdinand Tönnies and Emile Durkheim has been presented by juxtaposing their stands on the ‘social fact’ versus ‘social will’, methodology, specific topics such as religion or suicide, the importance of statistics for the field, and the contrast between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘organic’ (Aldous 1972; Marcucci 2017; Mesure 2013). Here we look at these thinkers’ first works, Tönnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft of 1887 and Durkheim's De la division du travail social of 1893, and their mutual appraisal with a view to their differing values, understandings of morality and diagnoses of the historical development of society, and conclude on a recent discussion of the ‘internationalism and national traditions’ in sociology. While Tönnies presents the cost of rationalisation in his philosophy of history, Durkheim equates modernity with the benefits of functional differentiation.

This article focuses on Maurice Halbwachs's long collaboration with the journal Annales and with the two historians who were its founders and managers: Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. This collaboration is worth investigating because although Halbwachs satisfied the demands of his sponsors, by producing many book reviews, principally of economic works, and provided some articles illustrating his skilled use of statistics, he always retained a very distant attitude toward the discipline of history, of which he challenged the academic nature. The journal Annales thus also served as a platform for Halbwachs, which was based on disagreements with Bloch and Febvre, and more broadly fits within the debates that energized the social sciences in interwar France.

This article reinterprets Durkheim's concept of anomie and recovers pluralism – not merely pluralism of corporations – as his instrument against moral deregulation. After identifying chronic anomie as the economic circumstances of the French Third Republic and tracing the genealogy of this term (via Guyau) from ethics to the economy, I reconstruct Durkheim's corporate pluralism as a programme of intermediary associations. I then contrast his concept with Berlin's axiological pluralism, Ehrlich's state-anchored pluralism and Rawls's reasonable pluralism. The comparison reveals an internal tension: Durkheim's remedy proves narrowly institutional and tacitly monistic, universalising a single corporatist settlement rather than fully accommodating enduring, reasonable diversity.

Drawing on a radical Durkheimian framework, this article analyses neoliberal morals, myths and the politics of ageing, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada, in which an inordinate number of elderly persons in long-term care died. Examining prevalent collective representations, we contend that older persons are differentially valued through two opposing yet structurally related sacral logics: the heroic and the abject. These logics express how neoliberal societies assign value to older populations through myths about moral purity and impurity, abjection, and sacredness. The heroic older person embodies neoliberal ideals of autonomy and self-management, while the abject form, defined by dependency, becomes disposable. During the pandemic, these subjective forms were mediated by a moral dynamic that we call fatalistic altruism, in which older persons accept their devaluation while feeling obligated to self-sacrifice. These dynamics reveal a deeper, pathological politics surrounding ‘the cult of humanity’.

We first specify an epistemological characteristic of Durkheim's general sociology: it was a realism commented on in these terms around him. After the Second World War, this epistemological primacy was underestimated on the occasion of various reuses in sociology of sciences. Although distinct, these readings were merged during the decades 1980–1990 and placed under a same banner of ‘the social study of sciences’, ignoring in this process the Durkheimian realist foundation and the geneses of these different revivals. The aim here is to retrace this route and to propose an interpretation of such a secular drift.

This short piece is the first full English translation of the biographical notice that Durkheim wrote on the occasion of the death of his best school friend, Victor Hommay, in 1886. The text has been previously discussed and translated in part by Lukes (1973) and in Macey's translation of Fournier's 2007 work (Fournier 2013). The translator argues that access to these kinds of biographical details serves to shed light on shared experiences between the author and the reader, which can be especially beneficial in teaching Durkheim to undergraduate students.

Matthieu Béra, Durkheim : fondateur de la sociologie, Paris, PUF, 2024, 128 p. (coll. ‘Que sais-je ?’)

Rich Durkheim: Comments on The Oxford Handbook of Émile Durkheim

Matt Dawson

Émile Durkheim, Sociologie Politique ; Une anthologie. Textes choisis par Florence Hulak en collaboration avec Yves Sintomer, édités et introduits par Florence Hulak. Postface d'Yves Sintomer, Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2020, 479p.

Compte rendu par Dimitris Foufoulas