Steve Fuller
The First Sociologist
Emile Durkheim: A Biography
By Marcel Fournier (Translated by David Macey)
Polity Press 866pp £45 order from our bookshop
Every sociology student learns that Emile Durkheim was the first proper sociologist. Durkheim, born in 1858, is credited with having rescued the word ‘sociology’ from the person who coined it, Auguste Comte, an outré ideologue who meant by the term something like ‘scientific socialism’ (though Marx and Engels later criticised Comte as a bourgeois utopian). By contrast, Durkheim engaged in the hard graft of discipline-building, writing carefully reasoned and amply documented works that undermined what economists had to say about the division of labour, psychologists about suicide and theologians about religion. He also built up an enduring school – one that included his cleverer relatives – that extended its influence from the education faculty in Bordeaux to a powerful chair at the Sorbonne.
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