The republication of several of Durkheim's chief works testifies to the familiarity surrounding them in the sociological world. This may explain why the essays of this short anthology focus on more modest Durkheimian texts (articles, essays, and correspondence). Indeed, after he has gone through the key figures responsible for the Durkheimian “renaissance” in the seventies (forgetting the 1973 biography by Steven Lukes) and traced the discussions and debates provoked by Durkheim's œuvre in the short foreword, editor Bernard Valade promises the reader both re-readings (relectures) and contemporary relevance (actualité).
The first text is a short biographical sketch by Marcel Fournier, which does not really add much to the overall picture of Durkheim's life, though it radicalizes certain aspects: the lasting influence on Durkheim's thought of his Jewish origin and upbringing, the long journey to Paris and Sorbonne, as well as the felt hardship during the last years of his life, and a definite turning point in Durkheim's thought in the year 1896 with the “revelation” of religion as the principal object for the study of social life.
Bernard Valade traces Durkheim's key scientific ideas as they found expression in disparate articles, reviews, and mémoires some of which are to be found in the Journal sociologique, others in collections of Durkheimian texts, La science sociale et l'action, and the three tomes of Textes. Valade treats the conceptual development of Durkheim's notion of the social and his conceptual demarcation of the object of the new science of sociology. He also touches upon more well-known issues: Durkheim's mistrust of philosophical generalization and speculation, his negative view of the use of analogies and metaphors, his emphatic demand for empirical investigation. More interesting is Valade's account of Durkheim's idea of a “general sociology” and its placement in the envisaged architecture of the social sciences, as well as Durkheim's different strategies of appropriation or down-right “sociologization” of the disciplines of history and economy.
Massimo Borlandi retrieves Durkheim's short critique of the work of the Belgian statistician and sociologist avant la lettre Adolphe Quetelet to be found in Suicide. Borlandi's specific confrontation of central paragraphs of the two authors does not leave much doubt: Durkheim hypostasizes Quetelet's thoroughly nominalist concept of “l'homme moyen”; he attributes to Quetelet a reification of what is to Quetelet nothing but a statistical principle and intimates that Quatelet used this principle as an explanatory parameter in an essentialist way; as if the common “tendencies” or patterns of behaviour of the “general type” of a certain nation was founded in its ethnic origin. Durkheim was apparently unaware that Quetelet in fact shared his sociological holism, and that the latter's notion of a “general type” was indeed – as in Durkheim's own work – nothing but a reflection of external social influences. Thus Durkheim could criticize Quetelet theoretically while continuing to employ the statistical principles laid out by him – even if he finally chose other explanatory variables to explain changes in the rate of suicide. Was Durkheim's “strategy” deliberate? Borlandi's answer is negative for, he claims, Durkheim “had never read Quetelet”.
Patrick Watier examines the relation between the individual and the social in Durkheim and Simmel. In his reading the “place” of the notion of psychology in the works of the two thinkers mirrors their respective ideas of the new science of sociology they both wished to found. The development of a genuine social psychology, an attempt to analyze concretely how individual inclinations and motives on the one hand, and social forces or representations on the other, really interact, conflict, and influence one another in the mind of the individual was never a Durkheimian project. His concessions to a possible “social psychology” in the letters to Bouglé are in reality conditioned by a total divesting of all individual psychological connotations from the notion of psychology itself. For Simmel, in contrast, the discipline of sociology – the analysis of the transformation of interactive forms, of their maintenance and renewal, the discovery of new forms and of the resurgence of old ones – is not possible without recourse to social psychology.
In this light, Watier's thesis, that the two authors in actual fact are closer to one another than either of them would probably have liked, is indeed both courageous and interesting. Both have an idea of the social as sui generis. However, to this reviewer this resemblance seems rather spurious. Simmel's famous digression on the “possibility of society” and his conceptual development of the notion of form is indeed philosophical (in Durkheim's rather pejorative use of the term): it is still characterised by a Kantian extra-worldliness. In contrast, Durkheim's discovery of the origins of the social, his turn to “primitive” religion – even if his analysis in actu may entail moments of introspection and ad hoc psychological explanation – is a logical consequence of the same demand for scientific and empirical analysis which characterized his thought since the early days at l'Ecole normale supérieur.
Francis Affergan's contribution can be seen as a more concrete illustration of Durkheim's appropriative attitude toward the environing scientific disciplines already discussed by Valade. However, Affergan, examining Durkheim's “condescending” “usurpation” of the nascent discipline of ethnology, writes in a more polemical vein. Durkheim, he claims, strategically and rhetorically constructs an image of the sister discipline that satisfies its “necessary” submission to sociology. Thus the need for sociological tutelage indeed only comes about by reducing the ethnologist to a roaming fact finder with no theoretical direction of his own. But Durkheim actually practised what he preached: what is Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse if not a grandiose attempt to redeem his claims on behalf of sociology? His appropriation of ethnology is in no way bought on the cheap, but founded in his sociology of knowledge and of “primitive” religion. It may be that Durkheim's universalist evolutionism hinders him from seeing “primitive” sociality as nothing but an early instance of what is to come thereby blinding him to alternative societal and historical developments. It may also be that his central concept of the totem is empirically debatable or even dubious. But why do these claims need even today – so long after Van Gennep and Lévi-Strauss – to be falsified again and again? Why the polemical tone in Affergan's argumentation? Many of Durkheim's intuitions are still effective, inspirational, and provocative.
Raymond Boudon reviews the Cambridge Companion to Durkheim from 2005 edited by Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, discussing different contemporary interpretations of Durkheim's thought with his usual rhetorical finesse and critical edge. His two main themes come as no surprise: a critique of contemporary “relativist”, “culturalist” or “irrationalist” interpretations of Durkheim's sociology of religion and his continual attempt to rescue the moments of explanative individual interpretation in Durkheim against the grain of Durkheim's explicit methodological considerations, but still de facto present in an increasing measure throughout the Durkheimian œuvre. Boudon does not try to turn the mature Durkheim into a methodological individualist malgré lui. Rather his efforts are to be conceived of as a reminder of the need to avoid reductionist and crude readings of an immensely rich and multifaceted œuvre.
This collection is caught between introductory demands and detailed research; between layperson and expert. The reader already familiar with Durkheim would have liked to see Fournier develop his thesis of a turning point in Durkheim's thought instead of the more general biographical essay he delivers. He would have liked Valade to concentrate on the interesting inherent tensions in Durkheim's concept of a “general sociology”, instead of going through most of Durkheim's key ideas. However, if the texts by Fournier and Valade still have a somewhat introductory trait to them, the succeeding texts are rather too narrow and specialized for the reader unfamiliar with Durkheim.
Moreover, contrary to the editor's promise, there is a lack of contemporary or actual discussions and aspects related to the Durkheimian œuvre and the “institution” of sociology. Boudon's essay is to some extent an exception, and yet even his text has a somewhat remote, abstract and dusty tinge: “Culturalist” sociology is discussed in relation to Richard Rorty and “irrationalist” sociology to the circle around Bataille. This is not exactly an up-to-date critique. Why not look closer to home and to the actual debates traversing the institution of sociology? I here restrict myself to two names: Bruno Latour and Michel Maffesoli. The strident and sometimes indiscriminate critique of the Durkheimian explanatory paradigm found in Bruno Latour's œuvre currently haunting the hip sociology departments in England, is not addressed with one word. However, in wishing to inaugurate Gabriel Tarde, and not Durkheim, as the majestic founder of sociology, Latour in fact attempts a complete turnaround of the institution of sociology. As for Maffesoli, his work has indeed succeeded in actualising Durkheimian perspectives in a so-called “postmodern” context. And yet his interpretation of the notion of effervescence and the Durkheimian sociology of religion is not addressed with one word. This is indeed disappointing. Even though the contributions are engaged, meticulous and well written, the book does not manage to shake off an unnecessarily antiquated, dusty aspect, which neither Durkheim nor the institution of French sociology deserves.
