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This chapter investigates the relationship between sociology and antisemitism in France through a case study of French sociology’s central figure: Émile Durkheim. It distinguishes reactionary and radical forms of French antisemitism and shows how Durkheim’s sociology responded to both of them. His writing about Jews directly addressed antisemitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its historical legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French antisemitism. While the chapter mainly seeks to understand Durkheim’s ideas about the Jews and Judaism in relation to French antisemitism, it also briefly compares his depictions of Jews to his characterization of four other social groups or categories: Protestants, women, Germany, and Europe’s colonial subjects. The chapter concludes that Durkheim’s responses to French antisemism form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews.

This chapter examines what Émile Durkheim could have meant by his statement that sociology is a “moral science” and whether the project it implied is a defensible one. Durkheim's goal was not only to study morality scientifically; he also proposed to put morality on a scientific footing—a goal that most contemporary sociologists would be uncomfortable with. This chapter argues that Durkheim's vision of “moral science” was inspired primarily by Aristotelian ethics and that it anticipated many of the ideas of virtue ethics and related schools of thought and research. It considers a number of reasons why there is a connection between Durkheim and Aristotle and why that connection has received so little attention. Finally, it explains why Aristotelian ethics was much better suited to Durkheim's purposes than was Kantianism or utilitarianism.

This chapter examines how three masters of the sociological tradition—Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber—came to terms with social life. Two major themes run throughout Marx's work: the first has to do with the effects of the class struggle on the human spirit; the second has to do with the effects of class struggle on human thought and human institutions, a topic he dealt with under the general headings of class consciousness and ideology. The chapter also considers Durkheim's views on the nature of the social order and on the nature of sociology, and more specifically on questions such as those relating to division of labor, suicide, and religious life. Finally, it discusses Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as well as his thoughts on topics ranging from the nature of sociology to forms of political authority.

This chapter approaches the Romantic period as an instructive earlier moment for today’s digitally networked life, and views Shelley’s poetics as offering a compelling way of being a networked being. Shelley sat at the nexus of two contemporaneous discourses: proto-sociological discourse found in Scottish conjectural histories and Romantic-era reflections on poetic communication. From this position, Shelley engages in sociological and medial thinking. He offers the obscure medium of abstract poetry as a model for a specific form of social interaction suited to modernity: an interaction that would forge a middle way between an empty commercial kind of dependence and the total intersubjectivity that he calls “love.” Reading Epipsychidion (1821) in light of these concerns, and positing a “poetry of ambiversion” that allows for both connection and disconnection, this chapter suggests that Shelley arrives at a modern ethos of communication that is neither purely business-oriented nor amatory.

Chapter 3 investigates the work of the eighteenth-century humanist, Giambattista Vico, to conceive a secular history in the distinction of the Hebrews. It begins with two theorists who fought such distinctions. Émile Durkheim corrects for distinction insofar as it undergirds Christian-Western dominance by conceiving forms of religion shared by all societies, indeed the form of religion that is society as such. Edward Said advances an alternate solution, whereby distinction is robbed of its power through magnification of its operation in Orientalism. If Durkheim’s elementary form of the religious life is designed to rectify what Vico privileged as the God of the Hebrews, the critique of Orientalism embraces Vico’s distinction, but in reverse. It shall now be the nations distinguished from the Hebrews, distinguished, that is, from distinctiveness, who take up the charge of eliminating invidious distinction in commitment to a history purged of God altogether. Yet Vico’s distinction between the Hebrews and the gentile nations proves paradoxically a more capable resource than either a generic religion or a critique of Orientalism in addressing both the violence of distinction and the work of inclusion.

This chapter examines sociology as an emerging discipline in Great Britain and France between the 1850s and the 1890s. It considers the transfer of models, metaphors, and analogies from evolutionary biology and argues that sociology emerged in continued interaction with this biology. It also analyzes interactions of social thought and Lamarckian evolutionary theories. The chapter focuses on the work of two social theorists who were influential internationally and in their respective countries, Great Britain and France—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).

This chapter discusses the practice approach that locates itself within the same theoretical tradition but emphasizes different aspects of influential contributions. It looks into the meta-concepts that provided analytic tools, rather than the culturally circumscribed applications to which they were put. It also mentions Émile Durkheim's categories of sacred and profane as fundamentally different aspects of reality. The chapter studies the practice approach that emphasizes Durkheim's discussion of the rituals in which people engage to create, maintain, and empower divisions. It explains how structuring processes refer to a series of actions that unfold over time and do so within the constraints of circumstances, resources, and previous activities. It also analyzes the theoretical contributions associated with the shift from classificatory concepts to structuring processes.

General William Tecumseh Sherman famously declared that ‘war is hell’. This chapter begins by exploring how literary representations of combat in the twentieth century have confirmed his aphorism. Combat is commonly conceived as a domain of inhumane and senseless brutality. However, although undoubtedly terrifying for the soldiers on the battlefield, there is no reason to presume that, in fact, combat is a domain of genuine anarchic and a-social chaos. On the contrary, combat itself is a social activity amenable to sociological investigation as Tony Ashworth and Randall Collins have shown. By focusing on the smallest military group engaged in the simplest but most extreme human activity, the infantry platoon, this book seeks to address the question of how cohesion has been generated and sustained by western armies on the battlefield from the First World War to Afghanistan.

This chapter describes classical approaches to defining religion and attempts to classify them. Definitions are distinguished on the basis of their defining religious data in terms of some basic and substantive essence, or in terms of their function and context. It argues that, in the end, most classic academic definitions of religion fail to demarcate consistently what they aim to demarcate. Following Asad, the explanation for this failure is found in the political nature of “religion” as a category.

This essay explores the work of San Francisco-based artist Paul Madonna, his unique use of the tropes of imagetext and its implications concerning authority, readership and meaning in a post-modern, post-secular world. In reading through the absences in Madonna’s work – the absence of people in the landscape, the absence of an observing entity, the absence of a clear symbol and reference, this essay argues for a philosophical approach that underlies this work, one that can be dubbed “Durkheimian Existentialism.” In analyzing the ‘space’ Madonna creates in his work between an empty city landscape and human communication through the French thinker, Émile Durkheim, this essay argues for meaning behind the visual absence of people in Madonna’s comics: a celebration of people’s centrality and importance in a reality with no external meaning, to the extent that they themselves can become a revelation.

This classic essay by Hubert and Mauss was both an early contribution to Durkheim’s struggle to establish an academic discipline studying social phenomena and, for the authors, the start of a collaborative study of religious phenomena. A summary is offered of the very dense argument, which concentrates on comparing animal sacrifice in Vedic India and early Judaism. The essay emphasizes the variety within sacrificial practice and the potential incompatibility of sacrifice and totemism. It proposes an origin for sacrifice of a god (as in Christianity) rather than to gods, and having defined sacrifice as effecting communication between the sacred and profane, explores its function, which can for instance be one either of sacralization or of desacralization (the latter including scapegoat rituals). The essay is enriched by the authors’ introduction when they reprinted it in 1909, and the chapter ends with a selective account of more recent reactions to it.

This chapter's analysis of language brings back consideration of society as the matrix both of communal experience in religion and of the individual quest that can never leave this primal model and source far behind. Ferdinand de Saussure's conception of langue as a superpersonal, passively registered “collective inertia” immune to individual variation closely accords with Émile Durkheim's exaltation of society as a transcendent entity to which its submissive constituents pay homage. No elementary religious form could work more pervasively toward the summum bonum of maintaining social stasis than the supremely autonomous language system postulated by Saussure, as absolute in its dictates as any divinity. This dialectic of fixity and movement, structure and process, characterizes not only life in general, but its extensions in human consciousness, language, and society.

Mary Douglas (1921–2007) was raised a Roman Catholic and was a practising Catholic throughout her entire life. She did her doctoral work at the Univerisity of Oxford with fieldwork among the Lele in the Congo. As a leading anthropologist, Douglas sought to present her church in a more favourable light, especially by using grid-group analysis (later known as cultural theory) to reveal the validity and virtues of hierarchy. Her classic study, Purity and Danger, included an influential treatment of the food taboos in Leviticus. This early interest in the Hebrew scriptures flowered later in her career as she became increasing committed to biblical studies. While acknowledging herself to be an intellectual disciple of Durkheim, Douglas expounded the doctrine of the Incarnation as a way of refuting the assumption that Durkheim’s insights undercut the veracity of the Christian faith.

This book examines the mythology of the United Airlines Flight 93 disaster in America's collective consciousness. Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and it eventually crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Drawing on the basic intellectual framework created by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss nearly 100 years ago, the book explores the myth of Flight 93 and its relationship to the myth of America. It shows how the myth of Flight 93 is articulated in news coverage of the crash, in books and films about the flight and its passengers, and in the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel and the Flight 93 National Memorial erected at the crash site in Shanksville. The book analyzes the various sites in which the narratives, collective memory, and meaning of Flight 93 have been produced and are constantly being reproduced.

This chapter focuses on the religious sociology of Catholicism in twentieth-century France, with emphasis on how traditional Catholic observance waned considerably and numerous parishes became obsolete. It first looks at the pioneers of the history of religious sociology, including Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Gabriel Le Bras, as well as religious history and geosociography and the issue of de-Christianisation before considering the ebb and flow of religious practice within an overall general decline. The chapter then discusses some of the factors that influenced the level of religious practice across the century, from gender, age, and geographical location to various socio-historical events such as the emergence of an increasingly dominant secular climate and the aftermath of May 1968.

This chapter offers a number of critical reflections on the analysis of religion in both contemporary sociology and social philosophy, with particular emphasis on how religious practice has been transformed by the twin processes of commercialization and democratization. To this end, it considers Émile Durkheim's notion of belief and suggests that secularization must be analyzed under two headings (the social and the political). It also explores the link between philosophy and post-secularism and how the triumph of popular, democratizing, global consumer culture is affecting the traditional, hierarchical, literate religions of the past. The chapter cites the work of Bryan Wilson and suggests that the debate around secularization and “post-secular society” is too narrowly focused on the West.

This chapter moves the focus from the offender-state binary to a broader discussion about the relationship between penal policies, prisons, and society. It does so using a partly Durkheimian approach. The sociologist Émile Durkheim saw the function of the institutions of penality less as a form of instrumental rationality and more as a kind of routinized expression of emotion. According to such an approach, thinking of punishment as a calculated instrument for the rational control of conduct would be to miss its essential character, to mistake superficial form for true content since the essence of punishment is irrational, unthinking emotion fixed by a sense of the sacred and its violation. Furthermore, this chapter suggests that interpreting and implementing the rights of prisoners’ children and families provides a perspective on criminal justice systems, which can potentially change the current state-offender dynamic.

The chapter analyses the reaction of the European legal culture to the US indeterminate sentence system, its theoretical rejection, and the building of a different method by which indefinite preventive detention was applied to dangerous offenders as a supplementary measure after punishment. It examines Garofalo’s proposal of a new criterion of punibility based on the temibility of the offender, the relationship between psychiatry and criminology, the concerns of liberal jurists for the implications of individualization, and their defence of judicial sentencing powers. The chapter also considers the theoretical impact of Durkheim’s and Tarde’s sociological retributivism on the European penal reformism, and analyses the dual idea of indefinite detention described by Prins as a reformation-oriented punishment or as a security-oriented measure. It finally examines the creation of a double penological regime, the ordinary retributive one for normal delinquents and the preventive one for abnormal offenders.

In this chapter, three questions are posed: (i) When does a collection of individuals form an entity that is more than just the mereological sum of its constituent persons? (ii) Given that there is a group of this sort, under what conditions does it know (or believe etc.)? (iii) When we talk of, for example, ‘the growth of scientific knowledge’, can we regard this scientific knowledge as an epistemic state of some social entity? Drawing upon ideas from distribution cognition and Durkheimian sociology, responses are provided to the first and second questions and thereby a positive answer is given to the third.