For the Centenary of the Birth of Durkheim

Although generally downplayed, Émile Durkheim's (1858–1917) works emerged out of the milieu of classical French socialism that placed religion at the core of the social question. Virtually every study of socialism up until the mid-nineteenth century appears to have emphasised its central focal points of religion and mysticism as well as the need to analyse their role in society utilising science (Jamil 2024; Picon 2003; Strube 2017). Consequently, socialism and sociology emerged interwoven. To illustrate, Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) wrote that socialism ‘was born at the same time as social science’ and this was ‘an important fact in the history of science and human morality’ (Mauss 2013: 260–261). However, by the late nineteenth century, alternative variants of socialism emerged that downplayed social science and the role of religion in society. As early as the mid-1880s, Durkheim criticised the ‘despotic socialism’ that placed violence and class conflict as the motor of social transformation (Fournier 2008: 54). Relatedly, Durkheim rejected Marxist theory in his 1897 review of Labriola's Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, and in a letter to Mauss, Durkheim wrote ‘I anticipate and hope, a theory will emerge from L'Anneé sociologique. That theory, the exact opposite of historical materialism, which is so crude and simplistic despite its objectivist current, will make religion rather than economics the matrix of social facts’ (quoted in Fournier 2006: 69). Importantly though, Durkheim did not engage with Karl Marx's (1818–1883) works in-depth (Llobera 1980).