Durkheim’s war for civilization

Abstract

Émile Durkheim’s collaborations with other French intellectuals during the war in various committees and polemical pamphlets, editorials, and scholarly essays are treated here as both a continuation of and a challenge to ideas he had developed earlier concerning social solidarity, the science of sociology, socialism, the modern state, and, ultimately, the moral foundations of civilization itself. Writing on behalf of the French war effort and against German “barbarism,” he tacitly or explicitly developed insights from his books On the Division of Social Labour, Suicide, The Rules of Sociological Method, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and he elaborated on themes from his lecture courses on socialism, professional ethics and civic morals, and education. Although his wartime writings were largely commissioned, written, and published as propaganda, they also provided him with an opportunity to test, refine, and in some instances revise sociological arguments he had been working on throughout his career. Rather than bringing Durkheim’s scholarly production to an abrupt halt or signaling a gradual decline in his intellectual capacities, the war provoked him to rethink some of his key sociological ideas and inspired him to take his research program in new directions.