Redefining the Sociological Paradigm: Emile Durkheim and the Scientific Study of Morality

Robert Prus

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.15.1.01

Authors

Robert Prus University of Waterloo, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.15.1.01

Keywords:

Emile Durkheim, Theory, Sociology, Morality, Pragmatism, German Social Realism, Wilhelm Wundt, Ethics, Folk Psychology, Aristotle, History, Symbolic Interaction

Abstract

Whereas Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) has long been envisioned as a structuralist, quantitative, and positivist sociologist, some materials that Durkheim produced in the later stages of his career—namely, Moral Education (1961 [1902-1903]), The Evolution of Educational Thought (1977 [1904-1905]), The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915 [1912]), and Pragmatism and Sociology (1983 [1913-1914]) attest to a very different conception of sociology—one with particular relevance to the study of human knowing, acting, and interchange. Although scarcely known in the social sciences, Emile Durkheim’s (1993 [1887]) “La Science Positive de la Morale en Allemagne” [“The Scientific Study of Morality in Germany”] is an exceptionally important statement for establishing the base of much of Durkheim’s subsequent social thought and for comprehending the field of sociology more generally. This includes the structuralist-pragmatist divide and the more distinctively humanist approach to the study of community life that Durkheim most visibly develops later (1961 [1902-1903]; 1977 [1904-1905]; 1915 [1912]; 1983 [1913-1914]) in his career.

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Author Biography

Robert Prus, University of Waterloo, Canada

Robert Prus is a sociologist (Professor Emeritus) at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. A symbolic interactionist, ethnographer, social theorist, and ethnohistorian. Robert Prus has been examining the conceptual and methodological connections of American pragmatist philosophy and its sociological offshoot, symbolic interactionism, with Classical Greek, Latin, and interim scholarship. In addition to his work on the developmental flows of pragmatist social thought in rhetoric, he also has been studying the flows of Western social thought in the interrelated areas of poetics (fictional representations), philosophy, ethnohistory, religion, education and scholarship, love and friendship, politics and governing practices, and deviance and morality. As part of a larger venture, Robert Prus also has been analyzing a fuller range of texts produced by Emile Durkheim (most notably Durkheim’s later, but lesser known, works on morality, education, religion, and philosophy), mindfully of their pragmatist affinities with Aristotle’s foundational emphasis on the nature of human knowing and acting, as well as Blumerian symbolic interactionism.

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Prus, Robert. 2007b. “Human Memory, Social Process, and the Pragmatist Metamorphosis: Ethnological Foundations, Ethnographic Contributions and Conceptual Challenges.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36(4):378-437. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241606299029

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Prus, Robert. 2011b. “Morality, Deviance, and Regulation: Pragmatist Motifs in Plato’s Republic and Laws.” Qualitative Sociology Review 7(2):1-44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.07.2.01

Prus, Robert. 2012. “On the Necessity of Re-Engaging the Classical Greek and Latin Literatures: Lessons from Emile Durkheim’s The Evolution of Educational Thought.” The American Sociologist 43:172-202. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-012-9154-5

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Prus, Robert. 2013b. “Representing, Defending, and Questioning Religion: Pragmatist Sociological Motifs in Plato’s Timaeus, Phaedo, Republic, and Laws.” Qualitative Sociology Review 9(1):8-42. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.09.1.01

Prus, Robert. 2013c. “Generating, Intensifying, and Redirecting Emotionality: Conceptual and Ethnographic Implications of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.” Qualitative Sociology Review 9(4):6-42. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.9.4.01

Prus, Robert. 2015. “Aristotle’s Theory of Deviance and Contemporary Symbolic Interactionist Scholarship: Learning from the Past, Extending the Present, and Engaging the Future.” The American Sociologist 46(1):122-167. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-014-9250-9

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