On a Classic Thinker, Classically

On a Classic Thinker, Classically Marcel Fournier, Emile Durkheim. A Biography, Cambridge 2013 : Polity Press, 866 pp. ISBN: 9780745646459Six years after the publication of the French edition, an English translation has appeared of a biography of Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) by Marcel Fournier, a professor at the University of Montreal. The book is an event for historians of sociologya new synthesis of the research that has been done in the thirty-five years since Steven Lukes' groundbreaking work. Reading Fournier's book is not only important for historians of the discipline, however, but for all sociologists, as Durkheim's work forms part of the fund of knowledge shared by all researchers. Classic sociological writings form part of the outlook of every representative of the social sciences; they integrate and stabilize the academic community, while simultaneously still giving impetus to its undertakings.The biography by Fournier is long. With the footnotes, which make an essential supplement to the text, it has 866 pages. It presents Durkheim polymorphically as a scholar, teacher, lecturer, active participant in academic discussions, observer of social change, sometimes politically engaged intellectual, editor of L'Annee sociologique, leader of a social sciences school, authority and mentor for his young colleagues, regent of the Sorbonne, Jew, neurasthenic, son, brother, husband, and father. This biography makes Durkheim's sociology, which we study in the first years of our university education, an organic element in the tale of a genuine human being: a tale that is very traditional in its aims, forms, and manner of narration.The book keeps Durkheim in a central position. It is not an attempt to speak about the history of something else through a biographic prism. If, on the occasion, Fournier writes fascinatingly about French Judaism, about the schools and universities of the Third Republic, intellectual climate, academic ethos, political and scientific disputes, mentalities and habits, of the occupation of Alsace, the Dreyfus Affair, or the First World War, it is because Durkheim's life was entwined with all of these. They constitute, however, a background: reconstruction of the historical, cultural, political, and intellectual context allows the individual, socially located therein, to be understood without eliminating his subjective autonomy.Fournier's book adopts the most obvious form for a biography: Durkheim's life is presented in chronological order. The impression is that the author is guided solely by the sources available-most readily, wherever possible, allowing the protagonist to speak for himself. The biography is very heavily supplied with quotes and these have been linked to form a fine narrative. Fournier speculates unwillingly; he constantly bases himself, in every detail, on the source material, confronting one with the other and leaving questions unresolved where no further evidentiary proceedings are possible. The collection of sources and limiting of authorial commentary and interpretation are intended to ensure the biography's scientific validity. Obviously, Fournier, as a student of Pierre Bourdieu, will not have succumbed to the 'biographical illusion'. He is aware that all biographical writing endows the described life with meaning. Fournier consciously makes use of past biographical achievements, the sociology of science, and the history of ideas. The strength of the book is its realization of theoretical postulates without burdening the text with a theoretical apparatus. We are provided with an unusually thick description, to which, at least to a certain degree, we can give our own theoretical sense. The work is open in a dual sense: it can be supplemented by successive discoveries of fact, but above all, both Durkheim's life and his work can be grasped within the theoretical structure.Fournier's work does not provide a new, breakthrough interpretation of Durkheim's thought; the biography reconstructs the context of discovery and not its justification. …

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