ABSTRACT
On the one hand are the views which claim that the work is naively scientistic, crudely and unreflectively empiricist, a radical or maximallist positivism; on the other it has been called both a subjective and objective idealism, voluntaristic, even spiritualist. Others have suggested that the work oscillates between empiricism and idealism, nominalism and apriorism, and between subjectivism and objectivism. Another current of opinion suggests the work has to be situated in Durkheim’s development from objectivism to subjectism, positivism to voluntarism; others have contested this evolutionism, stressing the remarkable continuities of themes and methods not only in Durkheim’s work but in French social theory itself. Others have seen the work as fundamentally ambiguous, or as a fragile dialectical artifice, unable to stand up as consistent in any real test. Some have seen it as a genuine attempt to avoid the pitfalls of philosophical metaphysics and empirical fragmentation, while others have rejected this, arguing that its solution is arbitrary or impossible. The philosophical basis of the work has been seen variously as Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian, Comtean, Marxist, even compatible with Jamesean pragmatism. The political orientation has also been seen as a liberal socialism or proto-fascism. Some have argued that Durkheim had a specific propensity to think in contradictory terms.
