Durkheim, Language, and History: A Pragmatist Perspective

Jones, Robert Alun; Kibbee, Douglas A.

doi:10.2307/202140

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Two broad positions have emerged over this, the 'presentist' and the 'historicist'. The 'historicists', who largely initiated the debate, are sometimes unsympathetic to the idea of classic texts per se, but more generally they object to the 'presentist' reading of them (eg Jones, 1977(eg Jones, , 1984Jones and Kibbee 1993;Camic, 1979Camic, , 1986Camic, , 1992. Their objections centre around what they see as the naivety of assuming our present concems are the same as those foregrounded by the founding fathers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

That's Classic! A Gadamerian Defence of the Classic Text in Sociology

How

1998

The Sociological Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many in sociology believe the discipline to be ill served by its classic authors, and that there are now good strategic and cognitive reasons to dispense with the canon. To some, in this more heterogeneous, postmodern world, Marx, Weber and Durkheim have outlived their usefulness and inhibit rather than encourage the growth of sociology. Using Gadamer's hermeneutics as a resource this paper challenges such claims, arguing instead that classic texts are an important and valid product of the human sciences. Classic texts illuminate the real nature of the present by showing how much it still shares with the past. To jettison classic texts would not democratise, but impoverish the discipline.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

That's Classic! A Gadamerian Defence of the Classic Text in Sociology

How

1998

The Sociological Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, while I allude to some of these events below, it is not my aim to provide this sort of comprehensive account here. The development of Durkheim's sociological work and the broader context in which he formulated his ideas have been well documented by others (Alexander 1988;Birnbaum 1995;Clark 1968Clark , 1973Collins 2005;Fournier 2005Fournier , 2007Jones 1977Jones , 1986Jones , 1994aJones , 1994bJones , 1997Jones , 1999Jones and Kibbee 1993;Lukes 1973;Pickering 1994;Strenski 1997;Vogt 1991) and cannot be adequately addressed in the scope of this article. Instead, this article focuses more narrowly on one aspect of Durkheim's cultural and discursive milieu: it seeks to understand his ideas about the Jews and Judaism, at least in part, as a dialectical response to opposing ideas that could be found in the public sphere in nineteenth-century France.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

The Jews, the Revolution, and the Old Regime in French Anti-Semitism and Durkheim's Sociology

Goldberg

2011

Sociological Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist,Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews."The fundamental ideas of European sociology," Robert Nisbet (1966:21) argued, "are best understood as responses to the problem of order created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the collapse of the old regime" under the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. Much the same could be said about nineteenth-century European anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism, the historian Stephen Wilson (1982) has suggested, was "a rejection of modern society, as antisemites conceived and experienced it" (1982:613), which offered a "mythical explanation and a scapegoat" to account for and exorcise poorly understood processes of social change (1982:635). But even when modernity was interpreted in less threatening and more positive terms as an emancipatory and progressive development, the Jews could serve equally well to signify the threat of restoration and reaction. Moreover, this function of the Jews as symbols of modernity or its antithesis was not unique to anti-Semitism; within classical sociological theory, too, the Jews were identified, for example, with capitalist modernization (Marx, Sombart) or, conversely, with a traditionalistic economic ethos (Weber). All of this suggests that European sociology not only emerged alongside of and within the same milieu as nineteenthcentury European anti-Semitism, but also in relation to it. This would mean that the ideas of European sociology and anti-Semitism were not only responses to the same revolutions; they were also responses to each other.

show abstract

“…There is a heated debate over the fundamental methodological issues of how to deal with a classic, and over the relation between history and theory, historicism and presentism. For a synthesis of its history and for some of the most eminent opinions, see Alexander (1996); Jones (1977Jones ( , 1997, Jones and Kibbee (1993); Poggi (1996).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inhabiting No-Man's Land

Rosati

2008

Journal of Classical Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article is a translation of the Editor's Introduction to the new Italian edition of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In it, the author maintains that though The Elementary Forms does not suggest how the experience of the sacred could be publicly recovered by citizens of modern democracies, it nonetheless recommends that modernity must remain open, with both courage and humility, to radical self-assessment in light of the centrality of ritual and the sacred to social life. The tentative suggestions to this end in Durkheim's work — the cult of the individual, loyalty towards democratic political values — are the best solutions available to us, though they are part of a way of life that cannot be satisfied either with its present or with its desired state, even when the latter appears fully consistent with its own ideal aspirations. Thus, The Elementary Forms points to the continued need for a more substantial reconsideration of modern Western identity.

show abstract

Durkheim, Language, and History: A Pragmatist Perspective

Cited by 13 publications

References 33 publications

That's Classic! A Gadamerian Defence of the Classic Text in Sociology

That's Classic! A Gadamerian Defence of the Classic Text in Sociology

The Jews, the Revolution, and the Old Regime in French Anti-Semitism and Durkheim's Sociology

Inhabiting No-Man's Land

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About