Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs was a prominent representative of Durkheimian sociology during the interwar years, and an important contributor to the Annales sociologiques. He was also a statistician, a demographer, an expert at analyzing working-class budgets, and an urban sociologist. His pathbreaking contribution to sociology, however, consists in the way he conceptualized how memory is socially constructed. Maurice Halbwachs was born in Reims, France, in a Catholic family of Alsatian origin that opted to remain French when Alsace was annexed by Germany in 1871. Liberal in political ideas, the family moved to Paris in 1879. Influenced by Henri Bergson, his teacher at the Lycée Henri IV, Halbwachs studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the elite school where most great French teachers are educated, and in 1901 he obtained his agrégation , the competitive diploma required to teach in the French secondary system. Halbwachs soon became attracted to the social sciences, acquired two doctorates and sharpened his mathematical skills. He joined the Durkheim group, and from 1905 he contributed extensively to the Année sociologique . Bergson's influence on him, however, remained undeniable. Halbwachs' central program, the analysis of memory, was a lifelong attempt to reconcile some Bergsonian insights into consciousness, time, and remembering with Durkheimian ... log in or subscribe to read full text