A case can be made that Émile Durkheim is the least appreciated of the founders of modern social theory with the most unexplored potential to help us imagine and shape society's movement today. This is because he wanted both to understand France's Third Republic as a national society and to identify the moral glue that might help it to survive. He produced three giant studies, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Suicide (1897) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), formed and led the most remarkable team in the history of social science around his journal, L'Année Sociologique, and in the process founded sociology as a modern academic profession.
Marcel Fournier's labors as a biographer, editor, and archivist have transformed scholarly access to Durkheim's work and to that of his nephew, Marcel Mauss, not least through the publication of this present volume. There is much more available in French, and Polity are to be congratulated on making this monumental book available unabridged in English, unlike the translation of his biography of Mauss that preceded it. Readers hoping to gain an overview of Durkheim's intellectual significance or of his relevance to the politics of our own times would be better served by Steven Lukes's Émile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study (1975). Rather, what we have here is an exhaustive and irreplaceable compilation of Durkheim's life, social relations, and, to some extent, historical context. But his ideas get buried in the detail.
Durkheim, who grew up in a Jewish family of small manufacturers in Alsace, was twelve years old when Germany seized control of the province in the Franco-Prussian War, to be followed shortly by the formation of the French Third Republic. His loyalty was always to France, but his German-sounding name caused him some problems. He married a rich woman who seems to have seen it as her vocation to help him write his books. It took him until he was thirty-four, while teaching at Bordeaux University, to complete a Ph.D. thesis which he published as his first masterpiece. He took the Année Sociologique team with him to a chair in Paris and then turned to more subjective aspects of life in society, completing his last and most important book, on religion, in 1912. His son, André, died in the Great War and Durkheim followed him soon afterwards at just short of sixty years old.
The biography has six sections: 1. Introduction and Youth (12 percent); 2. Founding Sociology (18 percent); 3. The Année Sociologique Team (23 percent); 4. The Sorbonne (16 percent); 5. Morality and Religion (21 percent); and 6. The Great War and Epilogue (10 percent). Fournier's research is monumental and his aim here is clearly to provide future researchers with the fullest possible access to the relevant archival material. He makes much of Durkheim's situation as a Jew, which was surely significant in the age of the Dreyfus Affair, and we learn a great deal about his academic and personal life, including his lecture courses, close colleagues, and occasional writings.
Fournier lets drop at one stage the astonishing remark that no-one knows who really wrote Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse—Durkheim himself, with or without his nephew, Mauss, or an Année Sociologique collective. There is a lot more research left to be done, that's for sure. Take this note, for example, in response to a new collection of essays on religion published by Mauss and his close friend, Henri Hubert: “Your preface causes me a lot of pain. The beginning in particular seems to me to be perfectly ridiculous. The tone is that of someone who has lost all self-respect. It contains everything that could discredit you. And rightly so. You are your own master and you have the right to publish it if you wish to do so. But not in the L'Année series. I will not take the responsibility.” This to the religion specialist of the team, a candidate for the College de France at the time, his nephew and closest collaborator. No wonder Marcel and his son André took the earliest opportunity to get away to the war.
The problem with Fournier's writing style is that we learn a bit too much about Émile Durkheim's personality and social relations. He sounds like an old man when he was a teenager and at times comes across as an intolerable prig. Geniuses are not supposed to be likeable, but readers of this volume will not find out how and why Durkheim really nailed what it means to live in society and left us with such an exciting unfulfilled agenda for future social research.
Émile Durkheim saw more deeply into the roots of modern national society than anyone else. Now that it has been overtaken and undermined as a social form by emergent world society, we urgently need to absorb the lessons he left us and to apply them to our moment of history. Marcel Mauss is the key link since everything he did after his uncle's death was intended to push his intellectual legacy in a more inclusive, international direction. Fournier's immense work of scholarship complements earlier commentaries such as those of Parsons, Giddens, and Lukes, but it does not replace them as an invitation to sociology. Rather, it provides the spadework for further research and leaves unanswered why we should care about Durkheim's place in history.
