Epistemological Nationalism and the Founding of European Sociology

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

Historical sociology · History of sociology · Islam · Modernity · Morality · Nationalism · Rationalisation · Sociology of knowledge · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · German Social Sciences and History · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory