ABSTRACT
Book reviews are normally among the more instantly forgettable forms of academic writing, even more so than some of the books they discuss. For Durkheim and his colleagues, however, they were one of the most important ways in which their own still to be established ideas could be propagated and directly confronted with those of their rivals. They were also a principal means of working out the methodology of the new sociology in a manner that was more compressed and often more obviously polemical than was the case in the articles and books they wrote. Their journal, the Annee Sociologique, was originally intended primarily as a vehicle for discussions of contemporary anthropological writings, as befitted a group of scholars whose raw material was almost exclusively the previously published work of others, and reviews remained important right through Durkheim's custodianship of the journal, even when articles also began to be included regularly.
