ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim is the crucial figure in the development of sociology as an academic discipline. Before Durkheim sociology was a provocative idea; by his professional endeavors it became an established social fact. Durkheim inherited a nineteenthcentury sociological tradition, one with a distinctive French flavor of social realism and social reconstruction; much of contemporary sociology’s framework reflects basic features which were imparted by Durkheim’s refashioning of sociology into a systematic discipline. Two such features, “positivism” and “structural-functional analysis,” became in the 1960s and 1970s targets of much criticism (ideological as well as conceptual); nonetheless, one can also say that Durkheim’s visibility and esteem are presently at higher levels in both francophone and anglophone sociological circles than perhaps any previous period, including that of his own lifetime. Perhaps the quest for “roots of identity” is also operative in sociology as it has become in popular culture, and Durkheim is surely, alongside Max weber and Karl Marx, one of the deepest roots of the sociological imagination. whatever the reason, every self-respecting sociologist has read at least The Division of Labor and Suicide as an undergraduate or graduate student, and quite likely most sociologists will also have read during their career The Rules of the Sociological Method and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Each is a seminal study: the first in industrial sociology, the second in deviance, the third in methodology, and the fourth in the sociology of religion and of knowledge. Each is a venture in sociological analysis which does not fade with time, in a discipline where most works disappear from reading lists within ten years after publication. How many other sociologists have three or four of their works read firsthand by succeeding sociological generations? Moreover, Durkheim is not only still widely read but he is also more and more commented and reflected upon by new generations of sociologists, who are also producing new collections of his writings, some seeing print for the first time. Truly, it may be said that the past ten years have seen the production of the most extensive and high-caliber Durkheimiana of any comparable period since his death in 1917.
