Durkheim

David Emile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858 in Epinal, Lorraine. His mother was a merchant's daughter and his father was a rabbi. He attended rabbinical school since his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were rabbis. Soon after he arrived in Paris, he broke from Judaism completely. He attended the school at College d'Epinal. He obtained his baccaulaurets in Letters and Sciences. He was intent on becoming a teacher, so he left Epinal for Paris to prepare for admission to the Ecole Normale Superieure.

He failed his first two attempts at the entrance examination because of the stress of home, with his father ill and his financial constraints. He was finally admitted near the end of 1879. Durkheim had a constant fear of failure, which made it hard for him to be an active participant in the political and philosophical debates. Durkheim was ill through much of 1881-82 but successfully passed his examination that is required for admission to the teaching staff of a state secondary school. He then began teaching philosophy in 1882.

In 1882, the Faculty of Letters at Bordeaux had established France's first course in pedagogy for prospective schoolteacher, and in 1884 the state had begun to support it as part of its drive for a new system of secular, republican education. Durkheim greatly admired the gentlemen who first taught this class, Alfred Espinas, but he soon became the Dean of the Faculty. Durkheim's articles on Germany philosophy and social science had by now caught the attention of Louis Liard, then Director of Higher Education in France. He was intrigued by Durkheim's suggestions for the reconstruction of a secular, scientific French morality. Durkheim was then appointed in 1887 as "Charged'un Cours De Science Sociale Et de Pedagogie at Bordeaux. The "Science Sociale" was a concession to Durkheim, and it was under him that sociology now officially entered the French University system. Durkheim emphasized the value of sociology to the more traditional humanist disciplines of philosophy, history and law. He then aroused fears of "sociological imperialism" and fears that his particular explanations of legal and moral institutions through reference to purely social causes undermined free will and individual moral agency. These views kept him from the powerful Paris professorship to which he aspired. But he did gain the support of some of his Bordeaux colleagues.

Throughout this Bordeaux period (1887-1902), Durkheim's primary responsibility was to lecture on the theory, history, and practice of education. Each Saturday morning, however, he also taught a public lecture course on social science, devoted to specialized studies of particular social phenomena, including social solidarity, family and kinship, incest, totemism, suicide, crime, religion, socialism, and law.

In 1898, Durkheim founded the Annee sociologique, the first social science journal in France. Durkheim's intellectual virtuosity up to 1900 had implicitly contradicted one of his central arguments, namely that is modern societies, work should become more specialized, through remaining part of an organic whole. In 1896, putting aside his work on the history of socialism, Durkheim devoted himself to establishing a massive program of journalistic collaboration based upon a complex division

...