Explore the vast range of titles available.

This is the first collection of essays to be published on Durkheim's masterpiece The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It represents the work of the most important international Durkheim scholars from the fields of anthropology, philosophy and sociology. The essays focus on key topics including:* the method Durkheim adopted in his study* the role of ritual and belief in society* the nature of contemporary religionThe contributors also explore cutting-edge debates about the notion of the soul and collective rituals.

Thorough and wide-ranging examination of the science of morals, reviving and defending the tradition of a scientific approach to ethics. Engages with recent debates on modernism and morality, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of Durkheim's ideas. This book is intended for social and political theory, philosophy of science and Durkheimian studies within sociology, philosophy and politics.

These are lectures on morality, attributed to Durkheim by Raymond Lenoir and given to Steven Lukes, who reproduced them in his doctoral thesis on Durkheim. They are published, here, together and in full for the first time. The first group of lectures covers the family, as well as general issues in morality and moral education. The second group of lectures, on civic ethics, covers citizenship, democracy, the state, occupational groups, law, and the idea of la patrie. The lectures conclude with a familiar discussion of discipline, and a more original discussion of duties to oneself. The editorial introduction to the lectures explains the circumstances in which they came to light, and discusses issues of authenticity but also of the general role, in Durkheimian studies, of texts variously attributed to Durkheim or based on notes by his students.

To understand a study, you have to understand something about the process of its creation. Durkheim began writing Les formes elementaires (The Elemental Forms) in 1906 as a concern with the study of early elementary religion. But even at the start, and especially regarding his criticism of animist and naturist theories of early religion, he had to make claims about basic elemental characteristics of all religion. The manuscript was finished in 1911, but work on it continued. Especially after the two publications of Spencer and Gillen on the native tribes of Central Australia. Eventually references to Spencer and Gillen outnumber any others, and the reason why Durkheim and Mauss spent a lot of time working out a response to them. Which he did, by the way, also in close collaboration with his nephew, acknowledgement of which was rather light. At the heart of The Elemental Forms, as in The Division of Labour, there is a modern secular rationalist ideal of transparence. Wanting a transparent faith (a faith without myth, symbolism without opacity, the sacred without transfiguration) might seem desperate, since eliminating or trivializing what is actually there, creates a fundamental ambivalence between a sociology of transparence and a sociology of transfiguration. References. O. van Zijl

The article assesses Durkheim's Latin thesis on Montesquieu, published 100 years ago, and concentrates on what it tells us about his own rather than Montesquieu's views. The thesis underlines Durkheim's commitment to a comparative social science, hence to the idea of the normal, but also to the need to get at a society's essential nature and dynamic. There are two routes to the normal - observation of the general and explanation in terms of such a dynamic - and Durkheim worries if they might diverge. Like Montesquieu, he looks for 'necessary connections which follow from the nature of things', but hits problems both over externalist versus internalist and final versus efficient explanation, while his justified reservations with functionalism miss the power and point of explanation in terms of a self-realizing dynamic. The thesis is evidence of continuing tensions in his work between emphases on tendencies towards system and on conflict and change, and between emphases on morphology and on ideas. His modern social dynamic consists of two interdependent elements, the division of labour and individualism-humanism, corresponding with the 'structures' and 'principles' of Montesquieu's theory. Finally, the complexities are examined of Durkheim's lifelong ambition to get from science to ethics.

A minor mystery is when Durkheim began and how he crafted and created his monumental work, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie. As a work about art, it generates an approach to aesthetics that I shall discuss as 'total aesthetics'.