ABSTRACT
Near the beginning of his lectures on Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (first delivered in the 1890s but published only posthumously), Emile Durkheim voices a sentiment that academic readers will probably find unfamiliar, incomprehensible, or amusing. He laments the fact that conferences are not held more often, and he expresses the wish that they might last longer. “It is quite an exception,” he says, “to find a whole group of workers…meeting in conference to deal with questions of general interest.” “These conferences last only a short time; they do not endure beyond the special occasions for which they were convened, and so the collective life they evoked dies with them” (1957, 9).
