ABSTRACT
Some theorists have intersected with history in such an odd way that they seem to require an introduction in the form of a thought experiment (cf. Latour, 2002; Latour and Lépinay, 2008: 9): What if Durkheimian sociology had had, from the very beginning, a thoughtful and vocal opponent; one who queried the ‘thingness’ of the social and the holistic, bounded nature of societies and human groups; one who accused Durkheim of disregarding the contingency of history in the search for scientific ‘structure’; one who proposed a radical reversal of the organic analogy, claiming that organisms are societies and not the other way around; one who foregrounded imitations, oppositions and inventions where Durkheim saw conformism to a rule as the key component of the social; one who had already found a way to dissolve the linked contrasts between individual and society, micro and macro, agency and structure, freedom and constraint – Durkheim’s main (and for many, troublesome) legacy to twentieth-century social science?
