ABSTRACT
Durkheim and his followers, grouped around the Année sociologique, shared fully in the vast heritage of historical thought. Most of the Durkheimians seem to have recognized the importance of history, and indeed they made it one of sociology's principal "auxiliary sciences". Works on ethnology or history of religion, of which as we know the Durkheimian school produced great many, have been systematically left aside. Durkheim's work has been examined from various angles—political, religious, economic—but little analysis has been devoted to key role that history played in his thinking. We may say that Durkheim's sociology stands somewhere between strict empiricism of some historians and broad, speculative visions of philosophy of history. The need for organization and unity, both moral and methodological, dominates all of Durkheim's writings. In posing the problem of memory as collective reality, Maurice Halbwachs was remaining faithful to Durkheimian thinking, but, it seems, influence of Henri Bergson led him down a metaphysical path.
