Blackwell Reference Online

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(1858–1917) French social theorist. Recently a friend and I were hiking along a well-established trail in a state park. At the trail-head a sign announced that the trail was restricted to hikers and that no bicycles were allowed. Further on we encountered a couple of youngsters tearing along on bicycles. My friend shouted out that bicycles were not allowed. The cyclists looked sheepish and rode on. My friend's protest nicely illustrates the collective consciousness, a central concept around which Emile Durkheim built much of his theory of society. Emile Durkheim clearly ranks among the foremost social theorists of all time for both sociology and anthropology. Writing and teaching at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Durkheim succeeded in focusing both fields centrally on group-level social phenomena – social institutions and culture respectively – and in providing both fields with a firm self-identity as a science with practical applications. These ideas had occurred to earlier writers, but Durkheim had global influence owing to the elegance of his analysis, the brilliance of his writing and lecturing, the breadth of his scholarship, and his lifelong commitment to reshaping social investigation into a new scholarly enterprise. Son of a long line of Jewish rabbis, Durkheim himself initially planned to study for the rabbinate. These expectations ... log in or subscribe to read full text