![]() ![]() He was, like many others of his day, deeply exercised by the Dreyfus Affair, and the obvious miscarriage of justice meted out on a Jewish officer scapegoated by his military superiors for a crime he did not commit. He was utterly committed to rational scholarship, describing (however inaccurately) his argument in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in terms of an experiment, and his conclusions as confidently proven by scientific method.Īt the same time, Durkheim was a man of moral passions. Unlike more recent attempts to understand morality through cognitive or neuro sciences though, exemplified by writers like Jonathan Haidt or Sam Harris, Durkheim's emphasis was on a social science that could understand morality in terms of the processes and structures of society. He believed that a scientific approach to understanding human life could be the basis of a new public morality. On the one hand, he was utterly committed to what he understood to be the scientific foundations of the sociological method to which he was committed. ![]() Yet within Durkheim's unflinching commitment to la vie serieuse, there is a striking dichotomy. His moral seriousness was such that his nephew, Marcel Mauss, was reportedly struck by a deep panic at almost being discovered by his uncle while in the midst of the venal pleasure of enjoying an afternoon beer outside a Parisian cafe. As the few surviving photographs we have of him suggest, Emile Durkheim was by all accounts a somewhat stern man. ![]()
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