ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical relationship between the educational realism and the social realism epitomized. It provides the Emile Durkheim's realism—both social and educational—within the larger context of his political commitment to the Third French Republic. In Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated a kind of "negative" education, free from books, abstract concepts, and the tyranny of human wills, so that the child learned in accordance with his own nature and the "heavy yoke of necessity" imposed by the dependence on real, concrete things. Durkheim's social realism has thus attracted the interest of sociological theorists and philosophers of science for some time. Education was a life-long interest and concern of Durkheim's, and as his note to Xavier Leon indicates, he considered the themes of Le Contrat social and Emile to be "closely linked." Societies can come into existence, Durkheim observed, only if man is prevented from remaining in the state of nature.
