BiblioVault - Books about Durkheim

Durkheim and the Jews of France

Ivan Strenski

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Ivan Strenski debunks the common notion that there is anything "essentially" Jewish in Durkheim's work. Seeking the Durkheim inside the real world of Jews in France rather than the imagined Jewishness inside Durkheim himself, Strenski adopts a Durkheimian approach to understanding Durkheim's thought. In so doing he shows for the first time that Durkheim's sociology (especially his sociology of religion) took form in relation to the Jewish intellectual life of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France.

Strenski begins each chapter by weighing particular claims (some anti-Semitic, some not) for the Jewishness of Durkheim's work. In each case Strenski overturns the claim while showing that it can nonetheless open up a fruitful inquiry into the relation of Durkheim to French Jewry. For example, Strenski shows that Durkheim's celebration of ritual had no innately Jewish source but derived crucially from work on Hinduism by the Jewish Indologist Sylvain Lévi, whose influence on Durkheim and his followers has never before been acknowledged.

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Durkheim

Morality and Milieu

Ernest Wallwork

Harvard University Press, 1972

Durkheim's Philosophy of Science and the Sociology of Knowledge

Creating an Intellectual Niche

Warren Schmaus

University of Chicago Press, 1994

In this demonstration of the link between philosophy of science and scientific practice, Warren Schmaus argues that Durkheim's philosophy is crucial to his sociology. Through a reinterpretation of the relation between Durkheim's major philosophical and sociological works, Schmaus argues that Durkheim's sociology is more than a collection of general observations about society—it reflects a richly constructed theory of the meanings and causes of social life.

Schmaus shows how Durkheim sought to make sociology more rigorous by introducing scientific methods of analysis and explanation into the study of society. Durkheim tried to reveal how implicit, commonly held beliefs actually govern people's lives. Through an original interpretation of Durkheim's landmark writings, Schmaus argues that Durkheim, in his empirical studies, refined both the methods of sociology and a theory about society's shared knowledge and practices.

This book opens a new window on the development of Durkheim's thought and demonstrates how a philosophy of science can inspire the rise of a new science.

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Sacred Revolutions

Durkheim And The College De Sociologie

Michele H. Richman

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Explores the role of the sacred in the response of French intellectuals to the rise of fascism during the 1930s. How is it that the most radical cultural iconoclasts of the interwar years-Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiris-could have responded to the rise of fascism by taking refuge in a "sacred sociology"? This is the question that MichÃ¨le H. Richman poses in a work that examines this seemingly paradoxical development. Her book traces the overall implications for French social thought of the "ethnographic detour" that began with Durkheim's interest in Australian aboriginal religion-implications that reach back to the Revolution of 1789 and forward to the student protests of May 1968. Richman argues that by revising a phenomenon at once as familiar and as exotic as the sacred, these intellectuals forged a point of view relevant to politics, art, and eroticism in the modern period. Assimilating sociology to this revised notion of the sacred, they revitalized a critical discourse based on anthropological thinking dating back to Montaigne and culminating in Rousseau. Her work thus supplies an important chapter in the history of the human sciences while demonstrating the formation of an innovative critical discourse that straddles literary theory, social thought, and religious and cultural studies. MichÃ¨le H. Richman is associate professor of French studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

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