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

Abstract

<jats:p>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.</jats:p>

Influence Work, Resistance, and Educational Life-Worlds: Quintilian’s [Marcus Fabius Quintilianus] (35-95 CE) Analysis of Roman Oratory as an Instructive Ethnohistorical Resource and Conceptual Precursor of Symbolic Interactionist Scholarship

“…Mindful of these emphases, symbolic interactionist theory may be characterized by the following premises. 2 Human group life is (1) intersubjective (is contingent on community-based, linguistic interchange); (2) knowingly problematic (with respect to the "known" and the "unknown"); (3) object-oriented (wherein things constitute the contextual and operational essence of the humanly known environment); 3 (4) multiperspectival (as in view-2 In developing this list of premises, I am very much indebted to Herbert Blumer (1969) and scholars in the interactionist tradition, as well as the intersubjective, ethnographic materials developed by the reality constructionists, the ethnomethodologists, the realist anthropologists, and the pragmatist sociology of Emile Durkheim (1915Durkheim ( [1912[1887; also see Prus 2009b;2011c;2012;2019). 3 Consistent with Blumer (1969), the term "object" refers to anything (material, physiological, behavioral, conceptual, technological, interactional, or organizational) that people might act toward, knowingly attend to, discuss, think about, or otherwise reference as instances or categories of phenomena.…”

“…As indicated inDurkheim's Pragmatism and Sociology (1983 [1913-1914) and his 1993 (1887) Durkheim: Ethics and the Sociology of Morals, both Emile Durkheim and Wilhelm Wundt (on whose text on ethicsDurkheim [1887] clearly had built) addressed "pragmatist social thought" with its attentiveness to community-based knowing and linguistic interchange. This was not an unknown emphasis in 18 th -early 20 th century German social thought (see: Cloeren 1988;Prus 2009b;2019).Robert Prus…”