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This essay undertakes an analysis of the underlying causes behind Kurtz's difficulties in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, primarily drawing upon the scholarly works of Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud regarding civilization and its discontents. Drawing from sociological and psychological concepts of the late nineteenth century and examining instances of alienation within industrialized society, the paper approaches Kurtz's issues of corruption through Durkheim's homo duplex and Freud's theory of psychological conflicts among the id, ego, and superego. Kurtz emerges as a construct and casualty of European society, burdened by its imposition of strict rules and regulations aimed at subduing primal desires and interests in favor of collective security, peace, and social order. Therefore, his liberation from the oppressive structures of European society in the Congo grants him the opportunity to expose his primal self, characterized by inclinations towards violence, debauchery, and transgressive behavior. The responsibility for transforming Mr. Kurtz into the ruler of the jungle cannot be placed solely on the natives, as the central culprit, as elucidated by Conrad's interventions in the text, is the European civilization that curtails and suppresses individual identities and desires. The essay portrays the prevalent discontentment and restlessness inherent in the early stages of industrial society through a combination of sociological and psychological elements and fictive characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Religion has found its way to the digital space. Digital religion, worship and piety are becoming more conspicuous than ever in Christianity in Nigeria. This reality has raised a great deal of questions concerning the compatibility of religion and the cyberspace. The moral and community aspects of religion have also been somewhat thwarted and the academic study of religion became even more complex. This study interrogates the digital religion, worship and piety phenomenon in the light of Emile Durkheim’s functional theory of religion and Jeremy Bentham’s ethical theory, utilitarianism. This descriptive study garners data from focus group discussions, participant observation, interviews, and published literature, and adopts the inductive approach to research and analyzes data thematically. Findings show that the 2020 COVID-19 restrictions on physical contact heightened digital religion in Nigeria. A sociological and ethical analysis of the phenomenon of digital religion is instructive and reveals that digital religion is laced with a great deal of social and moral gains, as well as pitfalls. Digital religion also complicates the academic study of religion in contemporary times. To counter all these, this paper recommends, among other things, that caution should be taken in order not to make a total transition to digital religion, but rather use a hybridized form. Again, the paper recommends the deployment of rule utilitarianism in order to clearly define acceptable rules for digital religion, worship and piety, and scholars of religion should use the already available knowledge of digital methodologies to be able to better analyze the evolution of religion in contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper sets out to establish that, besides the fundamental Schopenhauerian inspiration of the work, declared by the author himself and borne out exhaustively by academic research, the final chapters of the novel Una Vita (1892) converge with a series of studies and theoretical works brought out by doctors and sociologists at the end of the 19th century, from Enrico Morselli (1879) to Emile Durkheim (1897). What emerges clearly from the depiction of the suicidal instincts of the main character of the novel is an unconscious dynamic based on the fulfilment of a moral imperative, in which throughout is reflected and masked his self-destructive narcissism, a condition Freud was to elucidate in Mourning and Melancholia (1917). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context marked by an unprecedented crisis of the social sciences, the work of the sociologist Cyril Lemieux clearly stands out for his ambition to relaunch their project through a systematic reading of their history guided by a pragmatic redefinition, nourished by the philosophy of the second Wittgenstein, of the holistic perspective previously advanced by Emile Durkheim. The paper presents and discusses the theoretical core of this pragmatic Durkheimism, by clarifying the general notion of “grammar” and by elucidating the specific regime of “public grammar”. The latter turns out to occupy a strategic position, insofar as it enables defining the duty of the social sciences, which encapsulates the political task that sociology assigns to them: increasing the degree of reflexivity of practices, in order to work to their lucid transformation with a view to collective emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article comments on the essay "Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society," published in the March 1, 1994 issue of the journal "Sociological Forum." The author of the article feels that it has several dimensions. It begins by touching several dimensions like the quality of the translations, meta-theoretical aspects and contexts of the pioneering book and its meta-theoretical assumptions and one major research technique, empirical indicators. The paper opens with a rebuke to the translator. It takes no notice of the basic theoretical contributions of the work. It had a dismal quality of the translation. The graduate student evidently resonated to writer Emile Durkheim's early recognition of the importance of identifying indicators and devices indices of conceptualized social realities as a basic procedure in theory-based empirical enquiry. Two kinds of reductionist theories were rejected as both were categorized as undermined by facts.

This paper provides a theoretical discussion of Durkheim's predictions concerning religious evolution and their applicability to the new religious movements of the 1970s. Initially, the paper attempts to elicit from Durkheim's work on the past and future of religion a series of precise hypotheses concerning the causes, expressions, and functions of religion in complex societies. Then the paper examines the significance of these hypotheses as alternative explanations for some of the debated features of these movements: the middle class origins of their adherents, their system of ethics and their relationship to scientific and socio-scientific rationalism. Finally, the paper examines ethnographic data on two new religious movements to suggest that if Durkheim's predictions concerning the relationship of ritual, belief and social organization hold up in a variety of movements, they may form the basis of comparative work in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to throw a light upon various sociological methods which were used by great scholars. However, the main focus is on the use of sociological methods and what purpose do they serve in society. This paper also deals with the Durkheim's methodology, first section of this paper incorporates the views of Emile Durkheim on sociology. Further, this paper talks about the subject matter of sociology which, according to Durkheim is "social facts". In the laterhalf of this paper, sociological methods have also been discussed followed with the conclusion which basically talks about the limitations of sociological methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article provides a summary of all of the papers within the issue. The author ties together a common theme among the articles: ideas about "the other." Practical as well as theoretical aspects of "the other" are presented. The author mentions the philosophies of several philosophers including Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred Schutz, Emile Durkheim, Emmanuel Levinas, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel. Also mentioned is the development of ideas of the self in respect images of "the other."

Copyright of Politica y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Socioloski Pregled is the property of Srpsko Sociolosko Drustvo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Given the importance that generalized social trust plays in various theories of American society, recent evidence of its low levels among younger people portends ominous changes in American civic life. Using survey data collected from high school seniors over the last 20 years, this paper examines the origins of social trust among young people and the causes of change in beliefs about trust over time. Such changes could not be accounted for by the explanations for declining trust offered in other accounts of social capital. An alternative explanation, based on the theoretical accounts of Alexis de Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim, is that materialistic values may be undermining young people`s views about the trustworthiness of others. Both aggregate time series correlations and an individual-level model show that the rapid rise of materialistic value orientations that occurred among American youth in the 1970s and 1980s severely eroded levels of social trust. The paper concludes with some observations about the likely trajectory of American democracy, given the kinds of trends observed in the youth data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article locates and examines the micro-macro problem in sociology in the context of the larger problem of levels, the latter tending to include solutions to the former. Levels theory is meta-theoretical, for it is presuppositional to substantive or "sectors" theory. Levels theory constitutes the levels and therefore the "kinds" of social reality, while substantive theory looks for causal connections within and among the levels. The priority of levels over sectors theory, however, is only analytic. Historically the influence can be reversed, as levels shift in power relative to each other. The rise of sociologist Emile Durkheim's sacred self in the nineteenth century or social system in the twentieth are dramatic examples of these shifts. The article attempts to clarify the concept of levels, distinguishing several meanings of the term and choosing one to work with in the paper. The body of the article discusses the levels themselves, that is, what they are and how each is characterized. The article finally comments briefly on the connections among levels.

This paper reports a comparative cross-national test of Durkheim's theory of egoistic suicide, involving indicators of religious, family, and political integration. Linear and nonlinear multiple regression analysis showed that the relationships between religious integration and suicide and between political integration and suicide are inverse exponential functions of the form Y = aebX, while the relationship between family integration and suicide is linear. The relationships between the independent and dependent variables are strong and highly significant. Together, our indicators of religious, family, and political integration explain about 76 percent of the variation in international rates of suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the theory on suicide advanced by sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim attempted to derive a sociological explanation of variations in social suicide rates. He postulated identical relations between each of two independent variables -- integration and regulation -- and suicide. When either is high or low, the suicide rate is high; when either is moderate, the rate is low. Changes in rates are proportional to changes in the strength of these two variables. The low and high points of each are named -- egoism and altruism (integration), anomie and fatalism (regulation) -- and identified as the cases of suicide. The author of this article argues that Durkheim's attampt to establish a viable sociological distinction between integration and regulation are unsuccessful; indeed his book "Suicide" contains numerous indications that no such distinction exists. The paper then analyzes the theory of regulation as it fits into his book's explanatory structure and concludes by stating a theory of suicide devoid of any integration-regulation direction. Durkheim's initial attempts to distinguish between integration and regulation do little more than refer to societal attachment and attraction as integration, and societal control as regulation.

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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite the prominence of Durkheim in social theory, various threads of work did continue around the processes of private people coming together to form publics that cut across social categories such as collective identity. (https://twitter.com/fstflofscholars/status/1589273618995109892) The observation about Twitter and what constitutes the social here is apt and seems to be what Musk is missing. On October 27, 2022, the world's wealthiest person walked into the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter Inc. carrying a kitchen sink. Back in the spring of 2022, Musk posted a tweet saying, "Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy" (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507777261654605828). [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Revista Mediacoes is the property of Universidade Estadual de Londrina and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Politica y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Politica y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Politica y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper considers the charge that--contrary to the current widespread assumption accompanying the near-universal neglect of his work--Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854-1923) cannot count as one of the founders of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge. In order to elucidate the matter, Jerusalem's 'sociology of cognition' is here reconstructed in the context of his own work in psychology and philosophy as well as in the context of the work of some predecessors and contemporaries. It is argued that while it shows clear discontinuities with the present-day understanding of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge, Jerusalem's sociology of cognition was not only distinctive in its own day but also anticipated in nuce a much-discussed theme in current history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rereads René Girard's intellectual biography as a process first of apparent dissociation, and then of not so very much apparent, though quite solid, recovery of historical thinking. A trained historian-archivist, the young Girard began to massively rearrange his intellectual outlook by adopting methods and perspectives drawn from both very modern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, and classical thinkers such as Émile Durkheim. In developing his signature theory of the scapegoat mechanism, however, Girard's intellectual biography eventually came full circle. Reluctantly, and sometimes probably even unconsciously, he began to work intellectually like a good historian. Historical methodology and mimetic theory have, therefore, very much in common. This usually overlooked close relationship would seem to offer a promising new perspective when it comes to further developing mimetic theory methodologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper seeks to read out important displacements regarding the understanding of the relation between the social and the individual in the course of Durkheim's oeuvre. First, I center on Durkheim's methodological program. I investigate how his insistence on the distinction between the individual and the social goes hand-in-hand with a repressive concept of the social centered on the concept of norms. I then, second, seek to contour an intermediary phase in Durkheim's work in which the coercive depiction of the social is complemented with a positive one; this phase then contains his ideas of "integration" and of a (positive) form of "attachment" to society. Third, I demonstrate how Durkheim in his late chief work, by opening up for forms of active collective participation, offers a corrective to the early holism and the idea of an overarching and decollectivized society. Fourth, to situate my interpretation of late Durkheim in a contemporary theoretical landscape, I compare my ideas to the approaches to late Durkheim found in, respectively, Randall Collins' work on Interaction Ritual Chains and in Jeffrey Alexander and collaborators' so-called Strong Program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing the convergence of renewed scholarly interest in the sacred, and debates about fiscal sacrifices in recent economic history, this rethinking of Durkheim develops a symptomatic reading of his theory of sacrifice in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The paper argues that Durkheim's suppression of political economic sensibilities in The Forms leads him to generate a fetishistic account of sacrifice as a moral activity that renews existing bases of rule. His analysis does so because it inadequately accounts for the role of structured inequalities in the production of the rite. A radical Durkheimian political economy of sacrifice is reclaimed by critically synthesizing it with the Foucauldian concept of dispositifs, one better able to account for the combined impact of knowledge control, inequality, and exclusion on moral life. The critical theoretical work is then applied to the axiological implications of neoliberal individualism, highlighting that it depends on and disavows sacrifice, specifically the sacrificing of people's capacity for altruism (or, the sacrifice of sacrifice). Finally, Durkheim's heterological sensibilities about the constitutive potential of the sacred in moments of collective effervescence are used to put the politics back in this political economy of sacrifice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at identifying and examining all the principles arisen from the issues of the state and politics in Durkheim's production during the period 1892-1893, signaled by the publication of his famous thesis on the cohesive role of the division of social labor. According to the in-depth analysis carried out in this article, the most important points of Durheim's politics are four. Firstly, the conception of the state as an organ that translates an automatic social solidarity because it is an entire entity preexisting any political relationships. Secondly, the distinction of despotism as a regime that implies the complete absorption of individuals by the political apparatus. Thirdly, the problem of the growing enlargement of the state interventions in the individuals' private life sphere. Finally, the incapacity of any political action to transform the society's morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Szociologiai Szemle is the property of Hungarian Sociological Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For decades Durkheim's theory of suicide has been tested and found wanting. Yet, rather than being consigned to the dust-bin of history, it lives on and is pointed to as an exemplar of the powers of sociological theory and research. If this rationalizing and/or dismissal of so many falsifications of the theory were an isolated phenomenon, it might be evidence of some lemming-like propensity for suicide or a disciplinary death-wish, among a few sociologists. But it appears to be a much more widespread and common occurrence. In this paper we explore some possible explanations of this 'falsification denial'-'The Social Misconstruction of Reality' (Hamilton ), 'When Prophecy Fails' (Festinger et al. ), 'Underdetermination' (Duhem ; Quine Journal of Philosophy 67:178-183, , Erkenntnis 9:313-328, ; Lakatos ), and 'Boundary Maintenance' (Erikson ), and we outline some of the more important and pernicious consequences of this falsification denial for the discipline and future of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers effervescence as a central category in Émile Durkheim's sociology, identifying its uses and functions in relation to collective representations. The aim of the paper is: 1) to contextualize the concept in the field of crowd psychology in 19th century France; 2) to trace the semantics of the concept in the different uses developed by the author; 3) to analyze the distinctive feature of effervescence in relation to nonconceptual collective representations; and 4) to characterize the opposite concept: vie sérieuse. This approach allows us: a) to consider the function of social effervescence without focusing its comprehension solely on the effects that it generates; b) to identify how collective representations work in integrating and regulating social processes, and c) to focus the understanding of collective representations in relation to communication processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-Katrina recovery of the city of New Orleans presents many unprecedented challenges for public policy and planning experts. The purpose of this paper to evaluate the differential social impacts of Katrina on minority populations in the city using the work of three classical social theorists, Ferdinand Toennies, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Social theory is discussed and applied to the subject of the displacement of the city's minority population to asses the nature of the loss of social ties in these communities. It is also suggested that these social impacts need to be addressed by the planning efforts for the recovery. This paper attempts to outline social costs in terms of the qualitative social ties which were devastated by Katrina, and the subsequent massive flooding and displacement of minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some forms of sociology, "culture" has come to replace "society" as the central object of study. This has encouraged an epistemological relativism that overrides a proper engagement with human ontology, while it has also allowed for the development of forms of reductionism where culture turns out to be determined by something deemed more fundamental, such as technology. Some influential contemporary accounts of the "information age" exhibit both these characteristics. The argument of this paper is that these do not offer a productive route forward for sociology in general, or for sociologists of religion in particular. It is argued that Durkheim's social realism not only helps to illuminate the inadequacy of those theories that ignore the human and religious dimensions of contemporary life in their intoxication with machine-mediated flows of information, but can also point towards a more productive way forward for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, we study the social context of adolescent delinquency in order to examine Durkheim's theory of social order. We use survey data on urban adolescents in Iceland that allow us to examine key theoretical constructs on both the community and the individual levels of analysis. Our findings lend substantial support to the multi-level nature of Durkheim's concept of social integration. Using hierarchical linear regression, we show that both community and individual level social integration indicators have negative effects on adolescent delinquency, and that the experience of anomie mediates a substantial part of these effects. Furthermore, the multi-level context of social integration and anomie moderates the effect of imitation (peer delinquency) on delinquent behaviour. The findings highlight important sociological themes that have been neglected historically in scholarly traditions that have elaborated upon and extended Durkheim's theory of social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie is the property of Presses Universitaires de France and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Over the last twenty years the organization of business activity appears to have shifted from an emphasis on bureaucratic organizations toward an emphasis on market structures. Economic self-interest has acquired a new social legitimacy, and the force of traditional moral authorities has waned. In these circumstances the work of Emile Durkheim on the problematics of business ethics and the impact of a culture of self-interest on the stability of society, work that has hitherto been neglected by the business ethics community, acquires a new relevance. In this paper we review Durkheim's problematization of business ethics, establish its relevance for the contemporary world, and use it to develop an empirical research agenda for the contemporary sociology of business ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologija/Sociology: Journal of Sociology, Social Psychology & Social Anthropology is the property of MOD International and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Suicide has been a focus for sociology and sociological debate since sociologist E. Durkheim's innovative theoretical and methodological work on that topic. This paper is not about suicide. It is however situated in the methodological and epistemological debate which stemmed from Durkheim's work and has made that topic of suicide the contingent centre of more than one significant shift in the development of sociology. The author takes up the dialogue at that point where it has been shaped by the work of sociologists H. Garfinkel, J.D. Douglas and J.D. Atkinson, who have moved away from a concern with the social determinants of suicide and rates of suicide to the problem of the social meanings of suicide and the socially organized forms of knowledge which constitute it as such. Suicide has been a focus of just such work, as Atkinson shows in his account of debates around the indeterminacy of the phenomenon and the ways in which sociologists have sought to give it determination. In the context of the textual discourse of the social sciences, sociologists make use of such categories to denote the phenomena of which they would speak in the context of the textual discourse, the choice between "she committed suicide," and "she killed herself" becomes merely stylistic or conventional. Both refer to the same "event," assumed to exist prior to or independently of, the process of inquiry.

This paper directs critical attention to Emile Durkheim's considerations about the crucial role of non-transferable, human talent resources within any coherent theory of social justice. It is argued that Durkheim's appreciation of this question anticipated all modern formulations of the issue, and has been insufficiently acknowledged in the contemporary literature. It is contended that Durkheim developed a theory of 'equal treatment' through a rigorous repudiation of Mill's theory of self-ownership, but tempered the sociological force of this idea by developing a parallel 'equal opportunity' theory, which established the basis of a coherent defence of the idea of equality of opportunity through the principle of proportionality. It is concluded that the ethical and sociological compromise for which Durkheim argued between these two egalitarian theories of social justice remains philosophically coherent and sociologically plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we go about understanding the "classic texts" of sociological theory? This paper begins by reviewing tile historicist position of Jones, with its foundations in the work of Quentin Skinner and other historians of political theory, This position then is criticized from the standpoint of the neo-Deweyan pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Specifically, Rorty's pragmatism encourages us to revise Skinner's and Jones's historicism on three specific points: the acceptance of treatments of classical texts that are undeniably anachronistic but nonetheless unobjectionable; the restriction of Skinners notion of an agent's "privileged access" to his or her intentions; and the adoption of a view of the history of sociological theory as a succession of vocabularies a view that encourages a new kind of dialogue between historians of sociological theory and theorists themselves. The last point is articulated in a concrete example of the interpretation of one of Durkheim's most characteristic arguments. The conclusion again stresses the benefits to be derived from viewing sociological theory - both past and present-from this pragmatist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emile Durkheim has long been viewed as one of the founders of the so-called variables-oriented approach to sociological investigation. This view ignores his considerable achievements using the methodology of "case-based" historical analysis, most prominent among them, his lectures on the history of French education (The Evolution of Educational Thought). In this paper I first outline the intimate relationship that Durkheim envisioned between historical and sociological investigation. I then turn to his work on French education for substantive illustrations of his approach. Finally, I explore certain points of intersection between Durkheim's approach to history and present-day concerns, especially in regard to the role of culture in history and the opposition between prospective and retrospective ("teleological") strategies of historical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the "classicity" of Durkheim `s first book: the innovative way viewing the compatibility of social order and individual autonomy; his sensitive perception of uneasiness with regards to the crisis of anomie; the lucid sociological account, especially the tripartite explanation of the division of labor in terms of its functioning, emergence, and consequences; and the conceptualization of the problem of order--i.e., the relationship of differentiation and integration. In all of these respects, Durkheim's book is a classic. Yet "classical" neither means original nor flawless. This is shown with respect to the relationship of division of labor and organic solidarity by looking at the historical debate on the division of labor, by elucidating mechanical and organic solidarity, and by carving out some of the problems "inside organic solidarity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the works of Emile Durkheim, a number of scholars have claimed that, for a given society over time and in the absence of major societal upheavals, the proportion of people subjected to punishment by the state closely approximates a constant. In this paper, we address the "Stability of Punishment Hypothesis" with data from California for the period from the opening of the prison system in 1851 to 1970. The Stability of Punishment Hypothesis is formulated through recent modeling developments in macroeconomics, with which the presence of equilibrating tendencies can be explicitly represented, and for the first time direct tests are undertaken. No evidence for the hypothesis is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, materials for sociology are hardly scarce. Data archives multiply and data sets are as readily available as convenience foods and carburetor kits. Three major journals of sociology, alone, received about 1,800 manuscripts last year and published about 180 of them. Add to these a second circle of important journals in sociology together with 150 related publications and one has some sense of the problem of coverage in an annual review. It is not now famine, but glut that dismays readers. Perhaps, then, it is not remarkable that none of these three volumes treats the range of subfields that grace the discipline and from which work flows in indigestible volume. But one would not wish to convey the false impression that, except for the omissions noted, the field is covered. Perhaps an annual review of sociology is impossible, too, under U.S. editorship. Apparently distance and strange tongues must consign non-U.S. sociologists to oblivion. The first annual review, carried a piece by a sociologist whose essay on how social forms sustain themselves had equal billing with Emile Durkheim's statement on the origins of the incest prohibition.

This paper examines the controversial question of whether the theory of social solidarity contained in The Division of Labor in Society remained crucial to Durkheim's thinking after the book's publication in 1893. It is argued that this theory is rooted in a number of assumptions concerning primitive social life, the boundaries between nature and culture, and human nature. An analysis of material written after 1902 shows that Durkheim revised his approach to these topics to such an extent that he appears to be in the process of constructing a new theoretical framework for the investigation of social solidarity. In both the early and the later theories, however, the models of primitive social behavior, though different, perform similar intellectual functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]