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Halbwachs, Maurice (1877-1945). French sociologist; he was greatly influenced by Durkheim. His work Les Causes du Suicide, 1930, differs in important respects from Durkheim’s classic: it argues, inter alia, that the anomie accompanying rapid urbanization is due, indirectly, to individual motivation affecting the degree of adaptation. He was interested in the nature of social classes, which he saw to be revealed in behaviour patterns - the higher the class the greater the approximation to the ideal of the good life within a particular society. (See L’Évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières, 1933.) He disagreed with Engels’s view that the proportion of income spent on rent and clothing is about the same for all classes. In Les Cadres Sociaux de la mémoire, 1925, and La Memoire Collective, 1950, he presents memory as a product of man’s social life; a recollection linked to society through language, spatial-time dimensions, association, etc. Halbwachs also pioneered the development of social morphology in his work of that name (1935).