Durkheim and Bergson, Durkheimians and Bergsonians

Abstract This chapter focuses on the relationship between Bergson and Durkheim, and between Bergsonians and Durkheimians. A brief first section reports the state of research on Durkheim versus Bergson. The second section sketches the relationship between the Durkheim school of sociology and Henri Bergson as a discipline-constituting aversion against a so-called Bergsonian philosophy of life, a so-called intuitionism and irrationalism, or a so-called philosophy of the subject. The third section reconstructs Bergson’s own sociological theory (The Two Sources of Religion and Morality) and the ways in which it follows, and contradicts, Durkheimian sociology. In some aspects, Bergson’s social theory can be called structuralist; in others, it is a new vitalism. A fourth section traces the elective affinities between Bergson’s philosophy and later theories of the social: authors such as Georges Canguilhem, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Cornelius Castoriadis develop a “Bergsonian” social thought beyond positivism, Cartesian divisions, and methodological individualisms.