ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that historical materialism was another important obstacle to the consolidation of Emile Durkheim's brand of sociology and that it was paramount for him and his associates to destroy historical materialism's claim to scientificity. It shows that the rejection of historical materialism by Durkheim and the Durkheimians was fundamentally ideological and that to this effect they concentrated on the perpetuation of the strawman of economic determinism or so called 'vulgar Marxism'. The chapter also shows that leading French 'Marxists' as J. Guesde, G. Deville and P. Lafargue fit perfectly well into this category. It outlines a different sort of Marxism available in France, that of G. Sorel and A. Labriola, was either ignored by Durkheim and his followers, as in the case of Sorel, or distorted, as in the reduction of Labriola's Essays to some kind of economic determinism.
