Durkheim

Summary

Dominique Pagani sees Durkheim as the founder of sociology, which emerged in Marx's immediate wake, at the moment the continent of history was opened up12. He reads The Rules of Sociological Method closely and presents it as the work that gives sociology its autonomy: there the discipline breaks away from biology and history to find an object of its own, the social fact3. A commentary on this text is the origin of the formula "every science is defined by its object"4. He often returns to the definition of the social fact by the coercion it exerts on what is naturally spontaneous: laws forbid only what one wants to do, and constraint ranges from penal repression to laughter or ridicule5. He endorses the rule of "treating social facts as things", which is useful against introspection, and judges this sociologism preferable to today's neo-positivism and cognitivism67. From Suicide he takes the first quantified study: suicide is more frequent in Protestant settings, where someone who has strayed from the moral order is reintegrated with more difficulty89.

1. 1#2 Rousseau, a world that begins20 Sept 2014 · 27:38
2. 2Preface to Simon Verdun's master's dissertation, “The critique of neo-Kantianism in Michel Clouscard”5 Jul 2018 · 25:06
3. 3Pagani without detours21 Sept 2019 · 16:33
4. 4#5.3 bis Questions (Facebook Live)13 Jan 2019 · 5:16
5. 5#4.5 Angélique (by Nerval)12 Feb 2018 · 1:30:28
6. 6“Red-browns”, “decolonial”: should we use the dominant language?31 Mar 2021 · 13:38
7. 7#9.18 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation3 Apr 2021 · 35:44
8. 8At the bistro (part 1)18 Jun 2016 · 48:30
9. 9#14 Mozart once more7 Feb 2021 · 42:58

Summary produced automatically from 21 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.