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Durkheim on imitation

Bibliographic Data

ID20051746
AuthorsBjørn Schiermer (0000-0002-8643-543X, corresponding author)
Year2019
Pages54-72
Publication date2019-01-16
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueImitation, Contagion, Suggestion (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9781351034944-3
OpenAlexW2912605450
ISBN9781351034944
LanguageEN
Citations received4

The chapter demonstrates that the concept of imitation can be used as a prism to make visible a series of conceptual transformations separating the young Durkheim of The Rules of Sociological Method and Suicide from the older Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim wants to secure an exclusive object for the new science of sociology and this leads him to the idea of the social as sui generis and thus to his wish to distance himself from everything ‘psychological’ or ‘individual’. Durkheim insists on his methodological program: even in the crowd, the social is still to be conceptualized as a whole, as something of ‘a different order’, detached from and existing prior or externally to individual sentiment. Durkheim starts by distinguishing three different uses of the term ‘imitation’, two of which he then wants to show are spurious. Durkheim never systematically works out all his different but interrelated and partly overlapping uses of the concept of imitation

Imitation · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · Neuroscience · Philosophy · Psychology

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Unique citing works4
Citations per year0,67
Citation span2020 - 2026 (7)
Citation velocitycurrent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 4

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