Description
Book SynopsisDurkheim, in his very role as a ''founding father'' of a new social science, sociology, has become like a ?gure in an old religious painting, enshrouded in myth and encrusted in layers of thick, impenetrable varnish. This book undertakes detailed, up-to-date investigations of Durkheim''s work in an effort to restore its freshness and reveal it as originally created. These investigations explore his particular ideas, within an overall narrative of his initial problematic search for solidarity, how it became a quest for the sacred and how, at the end of his life, he embarked on a project for a new great work on ethics. A theme running through this is his concern with a modern world in crisis and his hope in social and moral reform. Accordingly, the book concludes with a set of essays on modern times and on a crisis that Durkheim thought would pass but which now seems here to stay.
William Watts Miller is editor of the journal, Durkheimian Studies, author of various books and article
Trade Review
“Watts Miller provides a meticulous, conscientious, and unpretentious reading of Durkheim, rooted in deep acquaintance not only with his unpublished lectures but also with the writing of his contemporaries…The strength of Watts Miller's book is that it harks back to a Durkheim of complexity and rich ambiguity.” · Choice
“…a brilliant piece of scholarship. It is exhaustive and extensively documented. Included are a series of tables that help us connect Durkheim’s antecedent lectures to the completed text of The Elemental Forms, compare his various definitions of religion, and trace the temporal progression of his work…this book would be an appropriate text in a graduate level social theory class and is a must read for any graduate level seminar focused on the work of Emile Durkheim.” · International Social Science Review
“This work is certainly densely written and requires an attentive reading; but the reader will be amply rewarded in his or her efforts to comprehend Durkheim’s way of developing his ideas. For beyond specific hypotheses about this or that point, reading Watts Miller’s study offers one of those rare occasions to approach the ‘sociological imagination’ that C.W. Mills honored with special praise in an essay in 1959.” · Archives de sciences social des religions
Table of Contents Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: INVESTIGATIONS OF A PROJECT
Chapter 1. The Idea of a Social Science
Chapter 2. The Creation of The Division of Labour
Chapter 3. In Search of Solidarity: The Division of Labour
Chapter 4. An Intellectual Crisis
Chapter 5. The Creation of The Elemental Forms
Chapter 6. In Quest of the Sacred: The Elemental Forms
Chapter 7. Transparence or Transfiguration?
Chapter 8. Towards a New Great Work
PART II: ESSAYS ON MODERN TIMES
Chapter 9. Power Struggles
Chapter 10. Hope
Chapter 11. Art
Chapter 12. Surviving Capitalism
Notes
References
Index
