ABSTRACT
The chapter demonstrates that the concept of imitation can be used as a prism to make visible a series of conceptual transformations separating the young Durkheim of The Rules of Sociological Method and Suicide from the older Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim wants to secure an exclusive object for the new science of sociology and this leads him to the idea of the social as sui generis and thus to his wish to distance himself from everything ‘psychological’ or ‘individual’. Durkheim insists on his methodological program: even in the crowd, the social is still to be conceptualized as a whole, as something of ‘a different order’, detached from and existing prior or externally to individual sentiment. Durkheim starts by distinguishing three different uses of the term ‘imitation’, two of which he then wants to show are spurious. Durkheim never systematically works out all his different but interrelated and partly overlapping uses of the concept of imitation.
