Durkheim and After. Philip Smith

Preface and Acknowledgments

      There have been many books about Durkheim and his works, especially for the crucial period from about 1893 to 1917. This one is different. It looks at Durkheim and also the long Durkheimian tradition in social thought. It looks at lineages and connections and covers the span of around one hundred and thirty years of published scholarship from 1893 to 2020. It is at once an introduction, a review, a critical commentary, and a narrative about how things unfolded. To date this is the first book-length effort to attempt this task.

      We move fast and I offer basic cultural literacy in a relatively short text. I hope that in around two hundred pages this book gives readers a sense of the terrain. About one-third of the material is on Durkheim himself. It covers his main contributions and his life. This is what I hope will be a time-efficient but somewhat detailed introduction. I have tried to be uncontroversial, and also comprehensive by sweeping up his less well-known thoughts. The remaining two-thirds look to the legacy and its relationship to his original ideas. We investigate the work of the students Durkheim inspired directly, and also the rise of structural functionalism, structuralism, systems theory, normative functionalism, and cultural sociology and anthropology. Material is organized with reference to such traditions and also in terms of nations. This does not reflect the sin of “methodological nationalism” but rather the empirical reality that creative intellectual activity has tended to cluster in specific paradigms in specific national contexts in specific epochs. As one door closes another opens, often in another country.

Our concern with all these diverse traditions of Durkheimian work is not whether scholars at one time or another read Durkheim accurately or “got him right” or “really understood him.” It is with how they interpreted his legacy, picked up certain ideas and ran with them, played with them, expanded them, perhaps improved upon them. To be clear: this is not a book of Durkheim scholarship that attempts to provide a brilliant new, or more precise, or more sensitive reading of Durkheim, or of anyone else. Nor is it a report about scholarship on Durkheim that provides an encyclopedic history of reception (although there is some of this here). It is rather a text about the more significant uses of Durkheim and his tradition for creative social explanation and theory building. The attempt made here is to offer an introduction and overview of a vibrant and significant paradigm as it shaped social thought and empirical work, attracted talented thinkers and researchers, and gave birth to new ideas, theories, and visions of the social world. Other books on the Durkheimian legacy are possible, perhaps looking more to his normative reception, or to the detailed history of Durkheim interpretation, or to his impact on social philosophy. Those are tasks that are left for another author with another skill set. And I hope someone picks them up.

      Finally I disclose that I cite myself in this text more than a little. I trained initially in social anthropology in the UK as an undergraduate, and later in sociology in the USA for the doctorate. I currently work in the United States and I am a visible member of the Strong Program that is described in the final chapter. This information may assist interpretation of the narrative that is provided as well as account for the scope of this work in terms of inclusions and omissions. I admit to being somewhat uncomfortable that American cultural sociology emerges as a kind of savior toward the end of the book. My intention has been to provide a truthful account and not a Whig history. I am calling it the way I see it.

Over the years many Durkheim experts have been sounding boards for the thoughts that have gone into this volume. This group includes Jeffrey Alexander, Randall Collins, Marcel Fournier, Alexander Riley, and Ken Thompson. Various scholars have been helpful in email exchanges during the course of writing where I sought advice on particular themes, issues, or national traditions: Perri 6, Aynur Erdogan, Nicole Holzhauser, Dmitry Kurakin, Jason Mast, Stephan Moebius, Anne Rawls, and Helmut Staubmann. I was a visitor at Nuffield College, Oxford University, during the writing of this book. I thank Nuffield for their hospitality and for providing a quiet intellectual space to get the job done. Nadine Amalfi at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology assisted with manuscript formatting issues. Fiona Sewell was a remarkably perceptive and detailed copy-editor. At Polity Press George Owers and Julia Davies provided editorial and production support and were receptive to my suggestion that a book such as this would be more useful than “yet another” one on Durkheim.