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Weber and Durkheim: A methodological comparison is a systematic, comparative analysis of the methodologies of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. Jensen shows how Weber and Durkheim analyse Protestants and Catholics in practice in The Protestant Ethic and Suicide, respectively. The very different ways that Weber and Durkheim carry out their analyses are then used to describe, analyse and contrast their methodological principles and points of view, raising fundamental questions in sociological and social science analysis, such as: What constitutes the object of sociology? How are concepts developed? What status can be attributed to laws? Which possibilities - and limitations - do we have for producing scientific insight into society? What are we to think of the relationship between 'Is' and 'Ought' - and how can social science deal with values? How are social phenomena to be explained? This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of sociology, social methodology, political theory, political science, social theory and philosophy.

Emile Durkheim, along with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is one of the three 'founding fathers of sociology'. This is the first book to situate his sociology in the context of his republican politics, freeing his ideas from more conventional studies and allowing the reader to see his ideas afresh. This critical introduction argues that Durkheim's defence of Republican France in the 1890s had a considerable influence on his sociology, which cannot be fully understood when removed from its historical and political context. His dismissal of economic factors in suicide rates, the influence of his anti-feminist position on his findings on marriage rates, and the idealism behind his claim that religion is the key determinant in shaping society are all discussed. Through analysing his writings, including The Division of Labour in Society, Suicide and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, this book provides a fascinating, critical counterpoint to the existing works on this key figure of sociology.

In this chapter I begin by arguing that in the very text that constitutes one of the finest moments of classical sociology’s commitment and struggle for progressive, liberal society, Durkheim’s 1898 intervention in the Dreyfus affair, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” ambivalences are operative that undermine this commitment and point instead to contradictions at the heart of modernity itself. Then I turn to another canonical text and argue that Max Weber wroteThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalismas a pro-capitalist challenge to German nationalist denunciations of the capitalist, or the American spirit, as mere utilitarianism, while maintaining intact

“The fundamental ideas of European sociology,” Robert Nisbet has argued, “are best understood as responses to the problem of order created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the collapse of the old regime” under the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.¹ Much the same could be said about nineteenth-century European antisemitism. Antisemitism, the historian Stephen Wilson has suggested, was “a rejection of modern society, as antisemites conceived and experienced it,” which offered a “mythical explanation and a scapegoat” to account for and exorcise poorly understood processes of social change.² But even when modernity was interpreted