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After documenting Tarde's neglect and placing him in the 19th-century sociological context, this paper argues that his concept of "imitation" was important because social learning (writ small) or culture (writ large), a non-genetic form of heredity, means that a distinct cultural evolutionary process including variation and selection resulting in descent with modification is inevitable. Beginning in the last half of the 20th century there was a flowering of theorizing and research about cultural evolution across the humanities and social sciences and eventually about culture in general in sociology. Unfortunately, what should have been recognized as Tarde's role as a forefather of these has only occasionally been recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a dual relationship between Adorno and Durkheim: on the one hand, Adorno adopts Durkheim’s perspective on society, describing it as an obscure, opaque thing that individuals cannot understand by themselves; on the other, he tries to get out of the opacity that he recognizes as a structural moment of the society he lives in. This last point engages us in a discussion of the relationship between political sociology and philosophy of emancipation, which allows to study in a new perspective the only text Adorno published in his lifetime on Durkheim: his preface to Philosophy and Sociology, the critical violence of which is well known and often interpreted as a complete rejection of Durkheim’s sociology. The thesis of this article is that the conflict between Adorno and Durkheim is a political one and that the division between the two authors lies in their evaluation of the capacity of the modern capitalist society to produce out of itself common ideals that assure the justice of the actual social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology can no longer avoid engagement with biological ideas, but it can incorporate them where they are useful. Most biologically inspired explanations of sociological processes from outside the discipline are simple and, moreover, too reliant on biological rather than sociological models of social processes. Yet, it is possible to engage these efforts by developing sociological concepts and theories that meet those using evolutionary theory from biology. This paper argues that the heavy reliance on Darwinian natural selection limits sociological explanations, although this approach can help sociologists understand the evolved behavioral propensities of humans as evolved apes. These behavioral propensities cannot, however, explain the evolution and dynamics of the layers of sociocultural phenomena studied by sociologists, and efforts to do so with Darwinian notions of natural selection on individual organisms will always be inadequate. As an alternative, we propose that there are other types of natural selection inherent in the organization of what Herbert Spencer termed superorganisms. We label these Durkheimian, Spencerian, and Marxian selection, and they explain what Darwinian selection cannot: the dynamics and evolution of sociocultural phenomena. [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.

The article focuses on sociologist Emile Durkheim. The death of Durkheim has a peculiarly melancholy interest for the Sociological Society. The second of two papers he promised at the inception of the society remains unwritten. The first appeared in the printed volume of the society's transactions in 1905. It was a paper dealing with "Method in the Social Sciences," and from that standpoint made a survey of the whole sociological field. As the years rolled on Durkheim's busy life became more and more filled with the activities, not only of the thinker and the teacher, but also with those of the active citizen.

The article presents comments on the paper titled "Sociology and Political Science," by Seymour M. Lipset, published in a 1964 issue of the journal "American Sociological Review." According to the author, in a recent review essay Lipset called attention to "the increasingly close theoretical and methodological identity between political science and sociological orientations," The concept of anomie is a special substantive instance of this trend toward inter-disciplinary convergence. Some 15 years ago, two eminent political scientists accorded that concept particular emphasis in their work. Sociologist Harold Lasswell transmogrified the term into a Freudian version. Sociologist Sabastian De Grazia in an earlier monograph made it clear that he was adhering to sociologist Emile Durkheim's strictly sociological formulation of anomie. De Grazia also observed in passing that sociologists themselves have not used the Durkheimian concept much in their writings. In the intervening years, of course, sociologists have measurably corrected this defect. The opening section of the article offers a critique of a "single model" version of anomie theory, a version perceived as implied works of Durkheim, Merton, De Grazia and other unnamed sociologist, to "clear the ground" for presentation of a new and "more adequate" psychological model.

Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, which posits the distinction between sacred and profane as the keystone of human understanding, grounds not only his approach to religion and epistemology but also his theory of modernity. This distinction between traditional and modern social forms is essential to Durkheim’s position. In traditional society, social facts are produced through consensus. Durkheim’s theory of modernity, however, focuses on the role of constitutive practices in the creation of modern social facts in situations lacking consensus. A tendency to consider the sacred only in traditional consensus-oriented (religious and symbolic) terms leads to the impression that modern society has entered a crisis period in which the sacred and the social facts the sacred/profane distinction make possible are in short supply. While Durkheim acknowledged a crisis in the transition to modernity, he maintained that new forms of constitutive practice would develop to replace the religious and cultural commonalities of the past, making it possible for modern society to produce strong collective solidarity, mutual intelligibility, and a new moral grounding in freedom and justice. The sacred essentially relocates, shedding its “institutional” character and becoming situated, “ordinary,” and self-organizing. In this article, we take three modern social facts and the constitutive practices they depend on, examining the moral and contractual relationships they enact, the reciprocities they require, and the distribution of participation they facilitate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Scholars have not infrequently called attention to the master metaphors in Durkheim’s writing, those figures, typically drawn from biology, physics and chemistry, which structure his sociological thought. Less attention has been given to the work that metaphors do in Durkheim’s texts, or to Durkheim’s fundamental ambivalence about metaphor. This paper argues that Durkheim depends on metaphor to construct the building blocks, and not just the overall architecture, of his argument in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). His conception of the ‘gods’ of totemism makes the theory relevant to modern European religion, and his construction of the concept of the sacred depends on electrical and epidemiological metaphors. I argue that Durkheim’s theory of social representation (the central argument of the book) is a theory of metaphorical relations between social organization and the organization of the cosmos. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I provide a critical examination of Warren Schmaus’s recently systematized “functionalist” approach to the study of collective representations. I examine both the logical and the conceptual viability of Schmaus’s brand of “functionalism” and the relation between his rational reconstruction and philosophical critique of Durkheim and the latter’s original set of proposals. I conclude that, due to its reliance on certain problematic philosophical theses, Schmaus’s functionalism ultimately falls short of providing a coherent alternative to the Durkhemian position or serving as a useful starting point from which to understand the origins of abstract categories in concrete experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An important and innovative conception of constitutive practices plays a key role in Durkheim’s theory of modernity as outlined in De la Division du Travail Sociale (1893), his first book. The idea of self-organizing constitutive practices presents a vision of a modern differentiated society that can be flexible, strong, and egalitarian; supporting individual freedom and equality between individuals; while at the same time facilitating coherence and social solidarity without exerting authority or constraint. In 1902 Durkheim added a second preface to underscore and clarify the essential role played by constitutive practices in differentiated modern contexts of work and occupations. In spite of the importance he placed on constitutive practices, however, and the foundational role he argued they would play in modernity, the point has been largely overlooked. Instead, Durkheim has been interpreted as a conservative thinker, lacking an adequate approach to modernity. The oversight has left sociology without an explanation for how social facts could be effectively shared in modern contexts. The consequences have been serious both for the appreciation of Durkheim and for the development of sociology. This paper offers a reassessment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For Durkheim, sociology, as a new kind of science, is part and parcel of the constitutional process of modern societies. This conception of sociology rests on two fundamental theses. First, society, as a normative realm made up of ideas, and especially of ideals, is an ontological novelty: it shows itself in the constitution of individuals, since human beings are persons able to think and act only as long as they are social individuals. Second, modern society is an historical novelty, constituted by an ideal of the person which asks and enables each social individual to become a fully autonomous being. The aim of this paper is to clarify these two basic foundations of Durkheimian sociology. Part I focuses on the first thesis: Durkheim’s reconstruction of the sociological tradition as a conceptual struggle toward the idea of society, conceived as a new order of reality. It examines the social philosophy Durkheim developed in order to account for the relation between society and the individual; the conceptualization of the human individual as social in The Division of Social Labor, its later development in the framework of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Part II, to be published in a second volume, will focus on the second thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory - including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes - as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in 'abnormal' forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that given the importance of joining together local and global aspects of climate change, individual conscience needs to be complemented by critical consideration of collective forms of conscience. Evidence for the existence of such collective forms as relevant to climate debates can be found in public reactions to email leaks on climate science, dubbed ‘Climategate’ in the processes leading up to the United Nations Summit on Climate Change, COP-15. In critical engagement with Emile Durkheim’s conscience collective and Bernard Häring’s reciprocal consciences, I argue for collective conscience to be used as a heuristic tool in order to analyse both weaknesses in collective responsibility and appropriate actions of communities at local, national or international levels. I suggest that such an approach critically engages with more general notions such as the role of solidarity in public debate that both develops and critiques Jürgen Habermas’s more recent work opening up a religious voice in the public domain. Using an experiential case study from the Massai tribe, I intend to show just one way in which collective conscience might be expressed when faced with the problems associated with climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contends that Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1977 [1932]) is in pervasive and critical engagement with Émile Durkheim. We argue that both thinkers advance a sui generis concept of society that frames the organizing problem of their exchange: the relationship between society and biology. Our analysis traces the concept of society sui generis through Durkheim’s Division of Labor (1893) and Rules of Sociological Method (1895) to its reconfiguration in Bergson’s Two Sources. We argue that Durkheim’s concept of society sui generis avoids biological reductionism because it highlights the role of moral obligation in separating society from biology. Bergson assumes that social and biological life are inseparable and thereby disputes the privilege Durkheim gives to obligation. For Bergson, the sui generis nature of society is expressed by the singularity of human society in grasping the creative power of life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I use the concept of scapegoating to explain the ritualized character of "ethnic cleansing" after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. I provide an overview of the political background behind these events, introduce the role and influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church. and analyze the collective violence known as ethnic cleansing through the concept of scapegoating. The Serbian Orthodox Church's use of a scapegoat paradigm to incite violence created a pseudo-sense of solidarity among the Serbian people. Although this solidarity resembles Émile Durkheim's concept of mechanical solidarity, 1 question the stability of this solidarity insofar as it is based on the negativity of war crimes and genocide. Implications for understanding collective violence in other areas such as the Middle East and Iraq are drawn by way of conclusion. [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.

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]

The purpose of this paper is to compare the theories of religion held by Comte and Durkheim. My thesis is that, despite a number of differences on specific points, both theories share some significant perspectives with respect to the rle of religious beliefs and institutions in the evolution of humanity, and that these perspectives are founded upon similar assumptions concerning human nature and the characteristic features of primitive social behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I attempt to clarify Durkheim's theory of suicide rates. He maintains that two social variables, integration and regulation, jointly determine rates of suicide. A high rate is caused by an extreme condition of integration (egoism or altruism) or of regulation (anomie or fatalism), or by some combination of extreme conditions. A closer look at Suicide suggests, however, that altruism and fatalism really do not belong in Durkheim's scheme, and that egoism and anomie are identical. Thus, his four causes of suicide can be reduced to one, so that all variation in suicide rates is attributed to a single cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon an ethnography of two differently-priced UK residential care homes for older people. Informed by recent scholarship on the materialities of care, together with separate theoretical contributions by Mary Douglas and Émile Durkheim, I examine the spatial and material organisation of care work. I sketch out care workers' attitudes and practices concerning hygiene and bodily waste, and how these are established and reaffirmed through the marking out of boundaries between materials, spaces and persons. Central to understanding care workers' erecting of, or inattention to, these boundaries is an awareness of the material, temporal and cultural conditions of work. Variances in the availability of resources, the formal organisation of work and the layout of residential homes affect the care provided to residents. In examining these variances, I identify how care workers' use of space functions to maintain or undercut not only hygiene and infection control standards but, also, more interpersonal virtues, such as dignity and respect for older people receiving care. I conclude by highlighting how the (mis)treatment of older people is a story of both a deeply inequitable market for care provision and a broader context of oppression, devaluation and dehumanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article the author examines the debate between sociologists Emile Durkheim and Herbert Spencer concerning the rise of individualism. The author believes that Durkheim's model of individualism, a consequence of division of labor, is different from Spencer's model. He asserts that Spencer is a theorist of bio-psychological individualism with issues such as survival, pain avoidance and reproduction. Durkheim discusses the development of sociological individualism in his paper "The Division of Labor."

On the basis of a close reading of two early articles by Patrick Geddes, which form the basis of his later approach to sociology, it is argued that Geddes should be reclaimed by sociologists from the geographers and the town planners, as the founder of a distinctive environmental sociology in Britain at around the turn of the last century. Certain of Geddes’ arguments are seen to be comparable with those of Durkheim, in particular, and Marx to a somewhat lesser extent. Moreover, his work contains a distinctively sociological account of the ‘structuring’ of social (and environmental) reality via the creative agency of human beings actively working in a variety of environments. Geddes’ naïve optimism may make him as much Utopian as sociological, but does not invalidate his contribution to the development of a classical environmental sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I want to ask whether there is anything to be gained by taking seriously a posthumanist analysis of the relationship between humanity and the natural world, one that in fact extinguishes the dualism and produces only ‘naturecultures’. I will examine this question through a new analysis of the relationship between gum trees and Australia. Most humanist accounts, such as those developed in ‘traditional’ social anthropology and sociology, privilege the activity, agency, and representations of humans, and in so doing render the natural world and its individual species as passive and of interest only insofar as they provide a palette of meanings for essentially human symbolism, dreamings, and imaginaries. Such an approach has an impeccable track record from Emile Durkheim to Mary Douglas and it is not one I want to challenge here per Se. What I do want to challenge is the implicit assumption that this is all there is to, or all we can say about, the relationship between nature and humanity. Rather than (only) ask what nature (or gum trees in this case) means, I want to ask (also) what nature does, and, importantly, what implications those actions have for the world, nature, humans, and ‘the social’. I argue that this approach takes us considerably further towards a more mature sociology of nature in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on collective behavior and anti-pornography crusades in Durkheiminian perspective. The author, in this article, attempts to develop a Durkheimian theory of collective behavior, mass hysteria and mass movement. In the present paper, theory of the famous sociologist Emile Durkheim is applied to communities rather than to societies. By community the author understands a geographically and physically distinct collection of living and interacting human beings, sharing a common space, economy and culture. The principal argument concerns the relationship between the size of the community, the division of labor, the degree of mechanical solidarity and the style of the deviant and his act in determining the degree of insult to the collective consciousness, and the degree of mass hysteria and the severity of the social movement which tries to reconstitute the disturbed collective entity. Durkheim was familiar with and concerned with phenomena similar in structure and content to anti-pornography crusades. When contrasting the occupational guild structure Durkheim thought to be most characteristic of organic solidarity with the homogeneous aspect of mechanical solidarity as a frame of reference on society.

Emile Durkheim developed his sociology in part by pointing to the insufficiency of contractual explanations of society. This article examines several iterations of 'the contract' in light of the rediscovery of Durkheim's (2011 [1894–1895]) lectures on Hobbes' De Cive. By viewing these recovered lectures alongside his canonical texts, we find three ways in which Durkheim distinguished his sociology from political and economic understandings of the social, in contrast with the contractarianism of Hobbes, the contractualism of Rousseau and the 'contractual solidarity' of Spencer. In his accounts of these thinkers, Durkheim explicates both his philosophical anthropology and his ontology of the social. Whereas contractual explanations of society treat the social as artificial and/or a mere aggregate formation, the social for Durkheim arises spontaneously and exists as a sui generis formation. Through the clarification of these conceptual coordinates, the nature of the social and its relationship with the political for each of these four thinkers come more fully into view. The article concludes with a consideration of the problem of the dissolution of society, pointing to a limit point or horizon for what is thinkable within Durkheimian sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relation between a theorist's theories and his daily life practices, using Émile Durkheim as an example. That theory and practice should be consistent seems not only scientifically proper but also morally right. Yet the concept of consistency conceals several different standards: consistency with one's own theoretical arguments, consistency with outsiders' judgments of oneself, and consistency within one's arguments (and actions) across time and social space. Analysis of 750 pages of Durkheim's letters shows that Durkheim lived a life consistent with and informed by his theories for most of his career. In his professional relations, his personal relations, and his political positions, Durkheim's moral activity usually proceeds from his theoretical commitments. However, the death of his son in combat could not be theorized within the Durkheimian system, and it broke up this long stable pattern. The analysis concludes that under modern conditions, the issue of moral consistency relates closely to the general problem of solidarity and invites more complex theorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his introduction to the first German translation of Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society, Luhmann hails the work as a “classic” of sociology, stressing its continued relevance and the need to persist in thinking with Durkheim. The present study focuses on this interpretative gesture, that is, on how Luhmann read Durkheim and set out a research program for sociology by defining its field of investigation, paying particular attention to his discussion of Durkheim’s approach to modern individuality. According to this interpretation, the French sociologist worked out a “sociological” conceptualization of the individual. On the one hand, in Luhmann’s view, Durkheim’s theory sheds light on a decrease in social control. On the other hand, he stresses that this inquiry into individuality was closely connected with a critical investigation of another conception of the individual that seems to derive from it, namely, the idea of human beings as “self-constituting.” Nevertheless, a complete examination of Luhmann’s interpretative gesture must also consider what is overlooked, namely the political conception of the individual Durkheim aimed to develop. In an attempt to fill this gap, this article highlights the political effects that such an occultation may entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simmel was the only German sociologist who directly cooperated with Durkheim. After an initial impression of convergence between the sociology of social facts and the sociology of social forms, a break between the two founders of sociology became inevitable. Yet, Durkheim and Simmel went on positioning themselves against one other in the years ahead. Durkheim’s allegation of ‘individual psychologism’ induced Simmel to a veiled reception of Durkheim’s methodological approach that permitted him to refine the sociological epistemology he eventually presented in the Soziologie published in 1908. On this basis, he was able to formulate a final criticism of the sociology of social facts as a social psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blending the science of acknowledged mystics—Dostoevsky, Weil, Péguy, Pascal, Hölderlin, and Augustine—with the insights of social scientists over the course of a long and distinguished career, René Girard contributed to an understanding of the mysticism of social life through focusing attention principally on the ersatz mysticism of metaphysical desire and mob behavior, but also on the interdividual’s contrastive experience of Christ’s “innermost mediation” of grace for conversion and charitable work in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using the classic works of Durkheim as a theoretical platform, this research explores the relationship between legal systems and social solidarity. We found that certain types of civil law system, most notably those of Scandinavia, are associated with higher levels of social capital and better welfare state provision. However, we found the relationship between legal system and societal outcomes is considerably more complex than suggested by currently fashionable economistic legal origin approaches, and more in line with the later writings of Durkheim, and, indeed, the literature on comparative capitalisms. Relative communitarianism was strongly affected by relative development, reflecting the complex relationship between institutions, state capabilities and informal social ties and networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the profound impact Durkheim’s Suicide has had on the social sciences, several enduring issues limit the utility of his insights. With this study, we offer a new Durkheimian framework for understanding suicide that addresses these problems. We seek to understand how high levels of integration and regulation may shape suicide in modern societies. We draw on an in-depth, qualitative case study (N = 110) of a cohesive community with a serious adolescent suicide problem to demonstrate the utility of our approach. Our case study illustrates how the lives of adolescents in this highly integrated community are intensely regulated by the local culture, which emphasizes academic achievement. Additionally, the town’s cohesive social networks facilitate the spread of information, amplify the visibility of actions and attitudes, and increase the potential for swift sanctions. This combination of cultural and structural factors generates intense emotional reactions to the prospect of failure among adolescents and an unwillingness to seek psychological help for adolescents’ mental health problems among both parents and youth. Ultimately, this case illustrates (1) how high levels of integration and regulation within a social group can render individuals vulnerable to suicide and (2) how sociological research can provide meaningful and unique insights into suicide prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of recent attempts to more adequately engage with Adorno’s approach to sociology and social theory, this article argues that such a project requires a more complete understanding of the philosophical basis of Adorno’s critical material perspective on knowledge and language. In particular, the interpretation of Adorno within sociology has been hampered by a fundamental misunderstanding regarding his methodology of critique and composition, which prioritizes the content of Adorno’s claims regarding sociology and social theory, over their rhetorical and performative character. This character is identifiable in Adorno’s prose, and grasped through a close attention to his account of the negative dialectic. Using Bernstein’s articulation of the ‘complex concept’ as an analytical framework, and Adorno’s introduction to Durkheim as its material, the article argues that the inability to grasp the rhetorical character of Adorno’s critical interpretive approach prevents an understanding of his potential relevance for sociology and social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durkheim’s claim in Suicide that humanity’s ‘inextinguishable thirst’ (soif inextinguible) causes suffering was adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument that the will-to-live’s ‘unquenchable thirst’ (unlöschbaren Durst) causes suffering, which was previously adopted from the Buddha’s argument that ‘ceaselessly recurring thirst’ (tṛṣṇā) causes suffering. This article retraces this demonstrable though seemingly unlikely history of ideas and reveals that the philosophical underpinnings of Durkheim’s theory of anomie are rooted, through Schopenhauer, whose thought influenced many thinkers during the Neo-Romantic fin de siècle period, including Durkheim, in the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth – a doctrine made available to Schopenhauer in European translations of Buddhist texts during the previous turn of the century’s ‘Oriental Renaissance’. By achieving a more thorough understanding of the ambiguous concept of anomie through its Eastern intellectual origins, this project shows that the common conceptualization of anomie as ‘normlessness’ is inconsequential without presupposing that humans thirst and unconstrained thirst causes pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages the so far neglected intellectual dispute between Emile Durkheim and Arnold van Gennep. It revisits the most salient points of van Gennep’s critique of Durkheim’s sociology, especially as relates to the study of religion. In this context, the article also discusses the possible influence of van Gennep’s work on Marcel Mauss. The article ends by indicating why a revisitation of van Gennep’s critique of Durkheim might matter for contemporary sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to clarify the difference between the anthropological category of the person, as analyzed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), and the modern ideal of a free autonomous person, which had been at the center of Durkheim’s sociological project since The Division of Social Labor (1893). After explaining the need to return to a sociological perspective, the article considers Durkheim’s examination of the transformations implied by the modern cult of the person in the practical and intellectual organization of social practices. The modern ideal constitutes morality as a social fact, requiring a new form of moral education, as a first step toward a wider political transformation, based on social aspirations to justice that it is the task of sociology to explain, understand, and help realize. This practical commitment opens the way to an understanding of sociology’s original place in the modern epistemological discussion and, consequently, to an appreciation of the novelty Durkheim achieved in founding the French School of Sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Durkheim founded his sociology on his unique epistemology and his corresponding sociology of knowledge, it is the positivist and structuralist interpretations of his work which have mainly influenced sociology, while the foundational sociology of knowledge has languished. This article explores Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge and the theoretical grounding it offers to contemporary fields of inquiry that are focused on an empirical analysis of practical knowledge and its uses in action, particularly those initiated by Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Warrants for continued attention to the sociological classics take diverse forms. This variation appears to be linked to a diversity of narrative interpretations of the sociological tradition. Positivist narratives affirm classics as building blocks for a naturalistic social science and as sources of material not yet incorporated into mainstream sociology. Pluralist narratives celebrate classics as exemplars of different legitimate perspectives. In synthetic narratives, classics are hailed for raising fundamental problems and pointing the way toward culminating syntheses. In humanistic narratives, classics appear as texts of enduring significance for their admixture of poetic insight and moral rumination as well as deep sociological analyses. Contextualist narratives view classics as expressive documents, giving voice to a cultural ambience or complex of collective interests. Dialogical narratives hail classics as parties to transnational and transgenerational conversations. This schema helps organize the wide array of interpretations of Émile Durkheim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emile Durkheim said that when all of the members of a tribe or clan come together, they can sanctify the sacred and experience a spiritual “effervescence.” Friedrich Hayek suggested that certain genes and instincts still dispose us toward the ethos and mentality of the hunter-gatherer band and that modern forms of political collectivism have, in part, been atavistic reassertions of such tendencies. Picking up on Hayek, Daniel Klein has suggested a combination of yearnings: (1) a yearning for coordinated sentiment (like Smithian sympathy) and (2) a yearning that the sentiment encompasses “the people,” that is, some focal and seemingly definitive set of “we.” This article reports on an experiment designed to explore the demand for encompassment by having subjects sing together. In each trial, one person in the room was designated not to sing unless every one of the others in the room had made a payment sufficient so as to have that person sing. Our evidence of a demand for encompassment is threefold: Subjects chose to sacrifice money to achieve encompassment 47.4% of the time, with 59.6% of the subjects doing so in at least one trial. An exit questionnaire showed that subjects’ chief reason for making such a sacrifice was a belief that the singing would be more enjoyable if it encompassed the whole group. Furthermore, the subjects reported significantly higher enjoyment when they had experienced encompassment. We are well aware of the significant differences between the situation of the experiment and the situation of actual political life. We nonetheless discuss the experiment as a parable for a penchant toward political collectivism, a parable that helps to clarify the role of encompassment in the sentimental facets of Hayek’s ideas about the psychology of political collectivism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Emile Durkheim’s ideas on religion have long served as foundational blocks for sociological theories. Yet, a mystery remains over where Durkheim’s insights into religion came from and especially the event that opened his eyes to religion’s importance in social life. Durkheim never supplied details on this conversion, but he did credit Robertson Smith for his new understanding. Did Smith really play the key role in Durkheim’s turn to religion? This essay examines Durkheim’s revelation in 1895 by starting from a novel angle—the first edition of The Division of Labor and his original stage model with the “cult of nature” as the starting point for religion. Tracing the implications of his initial choice of naturism as the elementary religion, a choice he would later soundly reject as “the product of [a] delirious interpretation,” offers new insights into why Durkheim found Smith’s ideas so inspirational. It also sheds light on why Durkheim overhauled his theory of solidarity, discarding his famous distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. In Robertson Smith’s work, Durkheim discovered a more inclusive and enduring basis of solidarity in the social universe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that approaching social science as a ‘patterned activity’ draws attention both to the distinctive nature of social science and to its central subject matter – meaningful (symbolically oriented) behavior and theoretical entities based on it – enabling therefore a constructive perspective on the major debate regarding social science’s organizing principles. A patterned activity is defined as a cluster of behavior oriented to a basic (that is, characteristic or defining) goal or aim accorded value; the goal or aim, by which the norms of the patterned activity are bounded, is the satisfaction of a certain appetite, desire, or need. The concept of a patterned activity is rooted in and developed from elements of Max Weber’s methodological writings. This concept is evaluated against Clifford Geertz’s ‘cultural systems’ approach and Robert K. Merton’s view of the norms of science, and the article then addresses the legacy of Talcott Parsons more generally. Lastly, Émile Durkheim’s and Weber’s respective approaches to social science are assessed so as to illuminate their views regarding its central subject matter and to demonstrate a convergence of their views. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In sociological or political-theoretical discussions of monarchy, the voice of Émile Durkheim is mostly absent. Although Durkheim himself had little to say on the topic, his theory of religion, and elements of his political sociology, provide resources for an engagement with monarchy both as a social institution and as a political possibility. The twentieth-century crisis of religion which Durkheim addressed in a particularly trenchant fashion has an analogue in the twentieth-century crisis of monarchical sovereignty: its supposed collapse into irrelevance, its survival, and its return in other forms. In the work of Schmitt and Agamben, this is represented as a theologico-political dilemma. This article explores what Durkheimian sociology might still contribute to a discussion of sacral and juridical aspects of sovereignty. By this is meant not only examination of its sociopolitical location and functions, but also a study of the ‘fictions’ and paradoxes of monarchical sovereignty as exemplary instances of the paradoxicality of the social. What are the features and consequences of a king-shaped hole or an empty throne in modern political imaginaries? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent revival of Gabriel Tarde’s distinctive approach to the study of human interaction raises the issue of the possible reasons for his fall into oblivion, particularly given his prominence during his lifetime as an intellectual competitor of equal standing with the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim in the first years of the 20th century. This problem calls for an exploration of those central ideas and qualities of Tarde’s work that may once have compromised his legacy and that now provide some explanation of his revival. Consistent with Tarde’s ideas about human interaction, or ‘inter-subjectivity’, the reception of his legacy has been shaped by the forces of imitation and opinion, acting on a changeable, persuadable public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars of the early French sociological school shared strong common intellectual interests, but they pursued these interests in both convergent and divergent perspectives. Focusing on the ideas of soul and spirit, this essay examines how Mauss and Hertz approached these ideas differently from Durkheim, leading to their distinct understandings of human solidarity and social inequality. It argues that the powerful legacies of these three formative members of the Année sociologique group become even more powerful and relevant if understood in an integrated perspective and in critical relation to one another. The discussion will be illustrated by an ethnographic study of Vietnamese culture of commemoration concerning the souls of tragic war dead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using survey data from the Netherlands, we find that Muslims have relatively high levels of religious philanthropic behavior and relatively low levels of secular philanthropic behavior, whereas Hindus have relatively low levels of religious philanthropic behavior and higher levels of secular philanthropic behavior. Results indicate that the community explanation and the conviction explanation of the relationship between religion and philanthropic behavior are both valid to some extent when it comes to differences in philanthropic behavior between Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. In addition, we find a relationship between group orientation in worship rituals on the relation between religion and philanthropic behavior. The more group-oriented the worship rituals, the stronger the relation between religion and philanthropic behavior. The results suggest that Durkheim's theory (La Suicide: Etude de Sociologie. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, ) may only be valid in a Christian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates how recent approaches to culture management have tacitly assimilated Merton’s and Mayo’s reformulations of Durkheim’s theory of anomie.This reformulation legitimates an instrumental focus upon the need for ‘experts’ to regulate the means by which naturalized utilitarian ends are pursued by developing culture management practices that aim to (re)integrate the mal-socialized. In contrast to this technocratic approach, we explore how Durkheim’s original formulation of anomie, far from accepting utilitarian ends as givens, articulated concerns about the unfettering of egoism he saw to be engendered by the classical liberal free market assumptions at the heart of utilitarianism. How this free market ethos, articulated by recent neoliberal discourses, guides the content and processes of post-bureaucratic culture management manoeuvres is then investigated. This article concludes by showing how, from Durkheim’s stance, such managerial processes paradoxically serve to express and propagate the incidence of anomie. In stark contrast, as a means of re-establishing social cohesion as a bulwark against anomie whilst protecting individual freedoms, Durkheim’s communitarian agenda emphasized the need to establish an organic solidarity, knowingly agreed by all on an equal basis, thereby potentially legitimating a more democratic approach to organizational governance that has contemporary relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]