Durkheim's Philosophy Lectures

Moving back and forth between the history of philosophy and the contributions of philosophers in his own day, Durkheim takes up topics as diverse as philosophical psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, and seeks to articulate a unified philosophical position. Remarkably, in these lectures, given more than a decade before the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), the 'social realism' that is so characteristic of his later work - where he insists, famously, that social facts cannot be reduced to psychological or economic ones, and that such facts constrain human action in important ways - is totally absent in these early lectures. For this reason, they will be of special interest to students of the history of the social sciences, for they shed important light on the course of Durkheim's intellectual development.

Neil Gross is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California. He writes on classical and contemporary sociological theory, as well as the sociology of ideas. His work has appeared in such journals as Theory & Society, American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, and Annual Review of Sociology. Robert Alun Jones is the author of Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works (1986), The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism (1999), and The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society in the Works of McLennan, Smith, Frazer, Durkheim, and Freud (forthcoming), as well as numerous essays and journal articles on Durkheim and his contemporaries. He has also been editor of both Etudes durkheimiennes and Knowledge and Society.