Durkheim's war for civilization

Bibliographic Data

ID2405113
AuthorsThomas Kemple (0000-0002-4164-1918, Université de Bourgogne)
Year2024
Volume24
Issue4
Pages330-346
Publication date2024-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Classical Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-795X • E-ISSN: 1741-2897
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1468795x241280708
OpenAlexW4404426469
LanguageEN
References cited14

Émile Durkheim's collaborations with other French intellectuals during the war in various committees and polemical pamphlets, editorials, and scholarly essays are treated here as both a continuation of and a challenge to ideas he had developed earlier concerning social solidarity, the science of sociology, socialism, the modern state, and, ultimately, the moral foundations of civilization itself. Writing on behalf of the French war effort and against German 'barbarism,' he tacitly or explicitly developed insights from his books On the Division of Social Labour, Suicide, The Rules of Sociological Method, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and he elaborated on themes from his lecture courses on socialism, professional ethics and civic morals, and education. Although his wartime writings were largely commissioned, written, and published as propaganda, they also provided him with an opportunity to test, refine, and in some instances revise sociological arguments he had been working on throughout his career. Rather than bringing Durkheim's scholarly production to an abrupt halt or signaling a gradual decline in his intellectual capacities, the war provoked him to rethink some of his key sociological ideas and inspired him to take his research program in new directions

Archaeology · Civilization · Epistemology · Sociology · Critical Realism in Sociology · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · History · Philosophy · Social Representations and Identity

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