ABSTRACT
In a letter to his nephew Marcel Mauss written in November or December 1896 even before he finished Suicide, Emile Durkheim wondered about how the book would be received:
Will it make converts? I don’t know. Though it seems to me I’ve been gaining more ground than I’ve been losing, I’m still sceptical. I’m afraid of being between two chairs, the specialists not finding me enough of a specialist and the philosophers and literati preferring more entertaining science.
