Robert Nisbet on Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work By Steven Lukes Harper, 676 pp., $17.50 Emile Durkheim is, along with Max Weber, one of the two dominating influences on contemporary sociology. Both deserve inclusion in the small group of minds during the past century that has exerted substantial and lasting effect upon entire disciplines of thought. Both have by now been abundantly interpreted, their ideas made the subjects of many books and countless articles. Neither, however, until now has been made the subject of an extended and detailed biographical study, one that unites exhaustive recovery of the ideas, circumstances, and events of a distinguished lifetime with illumination of relevant historical contexts: the kind of study, say, Harrod did of Keynes, with whom either Durkheim or Weber can be fittingly ranked.

For Durkheim this neglect has been pretty well ended. Steven Lukes, who is Fellow and Tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, has given us an extraordinarily good book, one made all the more remarkable by the youth of its author, who is barely into his thirties. It is perhaps a book for the specialist, given its rich detail (and price), but I don’t want to leave the impression that it is anything but eminently readable. The style is first-rate generally, the description of intellectual and academic life in France at the turn of the century fascinating, and Lukes’ exploration of Durkheim’s life leaves little to be desired.

RN

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Robert Nisbet

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Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work By Steven Lukes Harper, 676 pp., $17.50 Emile Durkheim is, along with Max Weber, one of the two dominating influences on contemporary sociology. Both deserve inclusion in the small group of minds during the past century that has exerted substantial and lasting effect upon entire disciplines of thought. Both have by now been abundantly interpreted, their ideas made the subjects of many books and countless articles. Neither, however, until now has been made the subject of an extended and detailed biographical study, one that unites exhaustive recovery of the ideas, circumstances, and events of a distinguished lifetime with illumination of relevant historical contexts: the kind of study, say, Harrod did of Keynes, with whom either Durkheim or Weber can be fittingly ranked.

For Durkheim this neglect has been pretty well ended. Steven Lukes, who is Fellow and Tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, has given us an extraordinarily good book, one made all the more remarkable by the youth of its author, who is barely into his thirties. It is perhaps a book for the specialist, given its rich detail (and price), but I don’t want to leave the impression that it is anything but eminently readable. The style is first-rate generally, the description of intellectual and academic life in France at the turn of the century fascinating, and Lukes’ exploration of Durkheim’s life leaves little to be desired.