Durkheim: A Critical Introduction - Softcover

Allen, Kieran; O'Boyle, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745337406 ISBN 13: 9780745337401

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Emile Durkheim, along with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is one of the three ‘founding fathers of sociology’. This is the first book to situate his sociology in the context of his republican politics, freeing his ideas from more conventional studies and allowing the reader to see his ideas afresh. This critical introduction argues that Durkheim’s defence of Republican France in the 1890s had a considerable influence on his sociology, which cannot be fully understood when removed from its historical and political context. His dismissal of economic factors in suicide rates, the influence of his anti-feminist position on his findings on marriage rates, and the idealism behind his claim that religion is the key determinant in shaping society are all discussed. Through analysing his writings, including The Division of Labour in Society, Suicide and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, this book provides a fascinating, critical counterpoint to the existing works on this key figure of sociology.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kieran Allen is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University College Dublin. His books include 1916: Ireland's Revolutionary Tradition (2016) and The Politics of James Connolly (2016).

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Durkheim

A Critical Introduction

By Kieran Allen, Brian O'Boyle

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2017 Kieran Allen and Brian O'Boyle
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3740-1

Contents

Preface, vi, 
1 Durkheim Declassified, 1, 
2 Durkheim's French Republicanism, 12, 
3 The Division of Labour, 32, 
4 Durkheim's Method of Scientific Inquiry, 57, 
5 Suicide, 80, 
6 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 106, 
7 Educating Republican Citizens, 132, 
8 Socialism and Saint-Simon, 148, 
9 The Limits to Durkheim's Republican Sociology, 160, 
Notes, 175, 
Bibliography, 193, 
Index, 201, 

CHAPTER 1

Durkheim Declassified

Emile Durkheim is regarded as one of the founding fathers of sociology. His writings form part of the canon of classical sociology and each year tens of thousands of undergraduate students are provided with short, textbook-style summaries of his four major books on The Division of Labour in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Throughout his career, Durkheim strove to improve the standard of sociological output. Assessing the work of his most important predecessors, he complained that much of their analysis remained at the level of empty speculation. In place of the empirical research that Durkheim advocated, thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer merely imposed abstract philosophical categories onto reality. This impoverished their analysis and invalidated their prescriptions.

The idea of detailed empirical investigation became a central theme in Durkheim's work. Whether he was investigating the division of labour or suicide rates, Durkheim sought to apply the scientific method in a way that moved his understanding beyond that of the common individual. Where others had built abstract conceptual systems, moreover, Durkheim would 'allow the facts to speak for themselves'. This helped to build the reputation of his sociology for a generation of French intellectuals, who, like Durkheim, aspired to make sociology more scientific.

In 1887, Durkheim was given the title of Professor of Social Science at the University of Bordeaux. This was the first such chair in the whole of France, signalling Durkheim's growing standing amongst his contemporaries. Fifteen years later, Durkheim took the Chair of Education at the Sorbonne, the pre-eminent university in France at the time. He became a full professor there in 1906, taking the Chair of Education and Sociology in 1913. Durkheim's academic career propelled him to the head of a distinct school of sociology, replete with its own journal – the L'Année Sociologique. The L'Année, first published in 1898, further cemented Durkheim's influence by drawing together the most important sociological literature emerging at the time. Inspired by Durkheim's sociological practice, the journal married detailed empirical work with the development of a corpus of sociological categories that were used to investigate social reality. Over time, the L'Année also became the home of a gifted group of young researchers, united in their devotion to empirically grounded and methodical research. Together with Durkheim, thinkers like Marcel Mauss worked tirelessly to establish sociology as an academic discipline with the standing of physics and chemistry.

In order to cultivate this academic legitimacy, Durkheim stood deliberately above the fray of contemporary controversies. Indeed, with the exception of the Dreyfus affair of 1894, he painstakingly cultivated the image of a serious scholar, detached from the cut and thrust of daily politics. This conscious projection of neutrality was to prove extremely successful. Both in his own day and in our own, it has led to a conception of Durkheim as the detached scientific observer par excellence. Craig Calhoun recently spoke for many within the profession when he argued that Durkheim is, above everyone, the founder of sociology as a serious academic discipline. This mantle has traditionally been shared with Karl Marx and Max Weber, but unlike the former's defence of workers' rights or the latter's overt German nationalism, Durkheim is generally seen as the defender of 'empirical research' over 'political polemics'.

His work has thereby become synonymous with objectivity and serious scholarship in a way that, we believe, completely misrepresents it. In stark contrast to many orthodox interpretations, this book aims to root Durkheim's sociological practice firmly within the political institutions of the French Third Republic. Durkheim's meteoric rise is one indication of his alignment with the values of French Republicanism, but his link to the French ruling classes went much deeper than mere academic patronage. Durkheim's republicanism was, rather, heartfelt and enduring. Throughout his life, he believed passionately in the republican precepts of reason, liberty and individual rights. Against the clericalism of the monarchist right and the utopianism of the revolutionary left, Durkheim posited these ideals as the rightful inheritors of the French Revolution. Modern defenders of the ancien régime were, therefore, completely anachronistic. A return to the clericalism of the eighteenth century would stifle the individual liberty and undermine the collective solidarity of the French Republic. From the other side of the political spectrum, revolutionary socialists sought to replace scientific reason with, what Durkheim considered to be, a dangerous utopia. Rather than uniting citizens in social partnership, socialism preached class hatred, endless struggle and social disorder. The solution to these twin evils was to revive the benign form of civic patriotism that Durkheim associated with the Third Republic. Every society has a morality that is shaped by and appropriate to those who produce it, but this needs to be properly brought out through scientific investigation. Instead of looking into the ancient past or striving for a utopian future, Durkheim promised to root his sociology in the nature of reality itself.

This meant investigating the nature of the contemporary moral order and then diffusing it through a republican education programme. If morality was the means by which people came into proper alignment with each other, then Durkheim's role was to make this clearer to the general population. This quest for a scientifically informed moral regeneration was evident in the questions that Durkheim posed, the concepts he created and the political positions that he – implicitly – advocated.

In order to defend this assertion, Chapter 2 highlights the extent to which Durkheim's sociology was, in fact, influenced by French Republicanism. This chapter works as the fulcrum for the entire book, as it sets the stage for the detailed textual investigations that run from Chapters 3 to 8. In Chapter 3, we take up Durkheim's assessment of the forms of solidarity underpinning French society, highlighting the extent to which his categories rely on a republican marshalling of the empirical evidence. In Chapter 4, we look at Durkheim's methodological pronouncements, critically appraising his attempt to differentiate between healthy (republican) and pathological (non-republican) social facts. In Chapter 5, we investigate Durkheim's work on suicide rates as proxies for the ways that individuals become detached from their own society. Durkheim famously claimed to investigate the social causes of individual self-destruction, but his republican politics...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745337406
• ISBN 13: 9780745337401
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland