ABSTRACT
We have noted that the reputation and influence of Marx within sociology have recently waned. Durkheim’s reputation too has undergone travails, though in his case the decline came a good deal earlier, and there are now signs of recovery. With the rising popularity of poststructuralism there are moves to revisit his thought. Even so, Durkheim’s influence in contemporary sociology is much less than it was forty years ago. In the immediate post-World War II period it seemed that Durkheim’s influence was to be greater and more sustained in sociology than Marx’s or Weber’s. A main reason was the preeminence within Anglo-American sociology then of Talcott Parsons’s theoretical scheme (see Chapter 5), which was understood to be a consensus theory and, therefore, owed more to Durkheim than to the other two great founders. Another source of Durkheim’s reputation was his methodological writings, exemplified in his study Suicide (1951), which was widely regarded as his most significant work. If Durkheim’s concern with social solidarity rather than conflict was dominant at the theoretical level, then his manipulation of suicide statistics in Suicide made him for a time the very model for sociological method. He had given a decisive lead to the development of more sophisticated statistical techniques, which were seen as the key to scientific progress in the discipline.
