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In this piece I explore how Bhambra and Holmwood's Colonialism and Modern Social Theory implies three different questions that can be asked concerning the connections between colonialism and social theory. With reference to their discussion of Durkheim, I suggest the answers they offer to these possible questions return us to what Kurasawa termed the 'constitutive paradox' of Durkheim's relation to colonialism, namely a mix of political acceptance while also questioning its ideological legitimacy. While exploring Durkheim's comments on colonialism, race, the state and his own Jewishness, I emphasise the need for a careful historical sociology which reckons with the different possible connections between social theory and colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to bring the sociologies on morality developed by Zygmunt Bauman and Émile Durkheim into conversation. Rather than adopting an approach which sees their perspectives as opposed, it will be suggested that while there are differences in their broad approaches there is also a hitherto uncommented upon overlap concerning the possibility of moral rebellion. For Bauman, inspired by those who were part of the resistance to the Holocaust, this is seen to reside in the pre-social moral impulse to be for the other while Durkheim links this to the role of education as a form of moral socialization. By exploring these links, we can see that both rely upon a conception of the conscience which, expressing the moral ideal lying behind our morally imperfect world, inspires actors to act morally in immoral times. The paper concludes by suggesting that this argument reflects recent claims concerning the potentially humanist elements of a sociological perspective and long-running debates on the potentially ‘oversocialized’ conception of individuals common to sociology. Therefore, this paper raises wider questions about the notion of the human resting behind sociological ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is an attempt to contribute a view on the economic crisis from classical sociology, a voice often missing from the sociological response to the crisis. The work of Émile Durkheim provides a unique perspective here centred on morality and inequality produced in a historical context akin to our neoliberal times. It is argued there are four key points to take from Durkheim’s work. First, that the initial credit crunch can be more fully understood with reference to the economic anomie which Durkheim sees as ‘chronic’ in a time of marketisation. Second, that this creates an antagonistic relationship between a supposedly self-dependent rich and lazy poor. Third, this conception of self-dependency and individual initiative makes any attempt to regulate the economy akin to sacrilege. Finally, the state is unwilling to intervene due to the emergence of ‘pseudo-democracies’. Therefore, Durkheim’s theory accounts for the initial crisis, austerity and double-dip recessions in a sociological framework. The article concludes by returning to the centrality of morality to the crisis for Durkheim and highlighting the omission of this in contemporary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars analysing Durkheim’s relation to socialism have generally focused on whether Durkheim was personally a socialist and/or his discussion of socialism as a ‘social fact’. This article focuses on whether Durkheim had a socialist theory. I will highlight how Durkheim’s normative and socialist political sociology aimed its critique at: the dominance of the market economy; economic polarization; class conflict; the ‘capitalist state’; and the impossibility of universal individual realization without radical economic change. From here Durkheim’s framework for an alternative political society will be outlined. This alternative, with its advocacy of political organization in ‘corporations’, can be located within a tradition of ‘libertarian’ socialism found most prominently in the work of the early 20th-century English social theorist, G.D.H. Cole. It will be argued Durkheim offers a powerful explanation for the continued dominance of neoliberal ideas ‘after the crash’ and the resulting ‘Occupy’ protests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]