Life and university career

Life and university career

The father of the French school of sociology, if not of sociology itself, was born in 1858 in Epinal in Lorraine, France. His father, himself the son and grandson of rabbis, was the Chief Rabbi of the Vosges and Haut Marne. Durkheim was destined for the rabbinate, but decided against this whilst still a schoolboy. He began his studies at the Ecole Normale in 1879, as part of a brilliant generation including Jean Jaurès (the future socialist leader and life-long close friend of Durkheim’s) and HENRI BERGSON. He passed his aggregation in 1882 and began his career as a philosophy teacher in the French lycée system. He began work on his principal doctoral thesis in 1883, which was destined to be his first book.

In 1885–6 he visited Germany on a scholarship from the French Government to study its latest scholarly and scientific work. He was impressed by the influence of Kantianism and the development of a science of morality—particularly in the work of Wilhelm Wundt; from the German school Durkheim claimed that he acquired his ‘sense of social reality, its organic complexity and development’. His articles on philosophy and social science attracted attention, and he was appointed to a course on social science and pedagogy specially created for him (under the influence of the Minister of Education, Louis Liard) at the University of Bordeaux. So began his academic career and his life- long struggle to establish the viability and intellectual credibility of the new, then as now hotly debated subject, sociology.

He was married in 1887 to Louise Dreyfus with whom he shared, together with their two children, a happy and contented family life. He taught at Bordeaux from 1887–1902, where he began his work on the concept of moral education, which became a life-long concern. Although he worked also on educational psychology, it was the beginning of his sociology of education that was significant at this time. He stressed the importance of education as a social reality, as intimately linked to each society’s social structure, and the cultural relativity of educational ideas. He also offered public lectures on the nature of social solidarity—understood as the ‘bonds which unite men one to another’— considerations that were to be the basis of his first book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893).

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 178 He gave a public lecture course on the subject of suicide in 1889–90. His book Suicide

was subsequently published in 1897, based on the research and statistical analysis he undertook with the help of his nephew, Marcel Mass. One of his most famous and contested works, this study was for Durkheim proof of both the reality of society and of the importance and significance of sociological explanation. These considerations he formulated into his treatise on sociological method, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895). Equally at Bordeaux he gave his first lecture course on religion in 1894–5, where

he began his life-long preoccupation with the role of religion in social life and the functional importance of religious institutions. And in 1895–6 he gave a series of lectures on the history of socialism—which applied the sociological and historical method to the study of the socialist idea; this was published posthumously in 1928 as Socialism, known in translation as Socialism and St Simon (1958).

In 1896 and in 1900 he gave a public course on morality and political questions, particularly the state, studied sociologically, which was published posthumously in 1950 and translated as Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (1957). Treated under the rubric of civic ethics, he analysed different types of state according to the degree of conscious awareness and communication between the government and the governed; the highest degree of this is found in the democratic state, which he took to be ‘normal’ for modern industrial society. In 1896 he decided to found the journal, so distinctive of the Durkheimian school, L’Année sociologique, where he was assisted by his nephew, Marcel Mass, together with (amongst others) Francis Simiand, Henri Hubert and Paul Fauconnet—the most well known now amongst that brilliant first group of Durkheimians.

When the Dreyfus affair occurred Durkheim was an instigator and supporter of the ‘Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’. This, together with the influence of Jaurès, was fundamental to the Dreyfusards, who were so influential in fighting the case of the falsely accused army captain. In his Individualism and the Intellectuals (1898) Durkhein turned the tables on the anti-Dreyfusard case formulated by Ferdinand Brunetière. This was anti- intellectual, pro-army and established social order and hierarchy. Durkheim argued it was they who were threatening the country with anarchy through first denying freedom of thought, central to intellectual life, and second denying individualism, which he held to

be the only system of beliefs that could henceforth ensure ‘the moral unity of the country’. Stephen Lukes rightly holds that this article conclusively refutes a widespread interpretation of Durkheim as an illiberal and anti-individualist right-wing nationalist, and a fore-runner of fascism (Lukes 1973:338).

By the time that Durkheim moved to Paris to teach at the Sorbonne in 1902 the themes and intellectual preoccupations of his life’s work were set. These were the overriding concern with morality and the sense of the moral crisis of modern society, which can only

be resolved through justice and equality; the study of solidarity through different social and historical forms; the social phenomenon of suicide; the reality of social facts and the possibility of a scientific study of them; the centrality of religion to human life and its importance as a social institution; the concern with education of the child; and with understanding of different social forms of punishment.

He took the chair of the Science of Education at the Sorbonne, unwillingly at first, since his interest at the time was limited to moral education. His Moral Education was published posthumously in 1925; here he stressed the importance of both autonomy and discipline in the education of the child. However, he went on to give an annual lecture

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course (from 1904–13) on ‘The History of Education in France’, where he stressed its historical and sociological aspects. This was published in 1938 by Maurice Halbwachs and translated as The Evolution of Educational Thought (1977). He continued his teaching on morality and the social institutions associated with it (the family); his book, Morality, remained unfinished at his death. He wrote The Determination of Moral Facts (1906) and Value Judgements and Judgements of Reality (1911). These, together with Individual and Collective Representations (1898), have been published as Sociology and Philosophy (1974). He taught a lecture course on Pragmatism during 1913–4. This was published posthumously as Pragmatism and Sociology (1955). Although there he argued that there was much to be admired in the Pragmatism of JAMES and DEWEY, he nevertheless criticizes Pragmatism’s attack on rationalism and the concept of truth, which Durkheim argued cannot be reduced to the useful. His crowning achievement, and possibly the book for which he is most famous, is The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).

The outbreak of war in 1914 found Durkheim as busy and engaged as ever, and he threw himself whole heartedly into the war effort. He wrote an analysis of the German mentality, shown in the writings of TREITSCHKE. Germany above All Else criticizes its militarism and views of the state, which he contrasts to a humanitarian morality and democratic state. He died in 1917 at the age of 59, it is said, heartbroken by the loss of his son André in the war, through which he also lost many of his colleagues and collaborators in the Année Sociologique.