The Social Thought of Emile Durkheim by Alexander T. Riley

Author:Alexander T. Riley [Riley, Alexander T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781483310862
Google: GFh2AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2014-02-04T03:37:03+00:00

Conclusion

The results in Durkheim’s day of his efforts to contribute to the founding of a new social science with the publication of these two books were mixed. The Rules is probably the single most-read work Durkheim wrote, and many summaries of his approach to sociology are based, often inappropriately so, on this book alone, and even on one chapter in the book. Yet, in Durkheim’s lifetime, the book received a critical response, even by some of those sympathetic to the effort to make the case for sociology as a unique, empirically based science. One of the closest associates of Durkheim and his students, the philosopher, ENS librarian, and leading figure in Parisian intellectual socialist circles, Lucien Herr, described the book as conjuring up “the ghost of the old realist metaphysics” (Borlandi & Mucchielli, 1995, p. 272). Durkheim himself had the impression that it was largely a failed effort, at least in terms of its effect in proselytizing for Durkheimian sociology. Today, one of the most important commentators on Durkheim’s work, Steven Lukes, writing in the preface to a new translation of the book, has bluntly classified The Rules as not among his best works, arguing not only that it does not give a good guide to how Durkheim actually did sociology subsequently (i.e., he broke his own rules), but also that it is a good demonstration of “why [the] aspiration [to an objective social science] was, and must remain, frustrated” (Durkheim, 1982/1895, p. 23). Nonetheless, its place among the classics of social science is assured. It was seen by many sympathetic readers of the time as a much-needed assault on dilettantism in sociology, as Durkheim mercilessly criticizes those who would use the term in order to attempt to legitimize impressionistic and unsystematic efforts to examine the social world.

Suicide certainly failed to produce the response Durkheim perhaps, in his heart of hearts, hoped to achieve. In several letters to Marcel Mauss in the wake of its publication, he complained of being caught between two worlds with this book, the specialists finding the book too broadly pitched and the “literary types” disdaining the book’s scientific rigor (Durkheim, 1998, p. 48), and he bleakly anticipated a fair approximation of what would turn out to be the book’s reception in France: “I feel profoundly discouraged. I thought my Suicide was going to dissolve the misunderstandings . . . [but] I have the impression, and it matters little whether it is founded or unfounded, that [it] will be a sword strike in the water” (Durkheim, 1998, pp. 77, 78).

After the book’s initial publication in 1897, it was reissued in 1912, the same year Durkheim published The Elementary Forms, and thereafter no new editions appeared until the 1960s. In France, the book was almost certainly his least successful. It was largely ignored in the English-speaking world until the 1950s, and it was the last of Durkheim’s major works to be translated, in 1950 (Besnard, 2003, p. 231). Yet, despite all this, it is now recognized as a classic text in the establishment of the reasoning of the discipline of sociology.

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