ABSTRACT
DURING DURKHEIM’S LIFETIME The reception of the Rules in America was overwhelmingly hostile. The work was first fully summarised and discussed in a review of French sociology in the American Journal of Sociology in 1896, by J.H.Tufts. In January 1898 Gustavo Tosti followed this up by contributing a critical essay on ‘Suicide in the light of recent studies’ which considered Durkheim’s wider methodological position. Durkheim himself was stung to reply, making one of his rare and almost invariably ineffective sorties into the Anglo-Saxon orbit. He accused Tosti of making some fundamental errors of interpretation, especially concerning his conception of the relation of the individual to society. In July of that year Tosti answered these criticisms in an extremely hostile essay entitled ‘The delusions of Durkheim’s sociological objectivism’. He insisted that Durkheim had ignored the contribution of the individual to the construction of social phenomena. Without this element, he wrote, ‘the cyclopic scaffolding of a so-called “objective” sociology falls into ruins, and nothing is left of it but a certain number of vague and empty formulas’ (Tosti, 1898:176). Durkheim left it there. These articles initiate in the Anglo-Saxon world a parallel to what had already become a mainly acrimonious and negative reception in France itself. The persistent line of criticism followed the objection that Durkheim was utterly mistaken to suggest that social phenomena are external to the individual and above all must be analysed by using a method which avoided the subjectivity of the individual. Such an approach appeared to be an obstacle to the development of sociology. Tarde’s own sociological orientation seemed much more reasonable to the Americans, and his Social Laws and Laws of Imitation were translated in 1899 and 1903. Durkheim had to wait until 1915 for a major work to appear in English translation.
