ABSTRACT
Social scientists writing about Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) typically put him to some rhetorical use, either as a founder of the discipline of sociology or anthropology, to whom one can appeal in the justication of one’s own methodology, or as a whipping boy to punish for all that is seen as wrong with the social sciences. He has been attacked for trying to model the social sciences on the natural sciences and for employing a functionalist model of explanation that provides a theoretical justication for the status quo and conservatism. Others have accused him of deviating in his empirical studies from his professed methodology in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895a)1 or have argued that he was constantly changing his methods over the course of his career. Rarely has the aim of the social science literature on Durkheim been to give a careful exegesis of his works. In Anglophone social sciences, the problem has been compounded by theorists building on unreliable translations, which sometimes go so far as to translate a French term with its exact opposite in English. Durkheim has been made out to be such an incoherent and unattractive thinker-at least in Anglophone sociology-that one can only wonder how he managed to be included in the Holy Trinity of founding fathers: Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.
