1st Edition

The Political Durkheim Sociology, Socialism, Legacies

By Matt Dawson Copyright 2023
220 Pages
by Routledge

220 Pages
by Routledge

220 Pages
by Routledge

This book presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series of studies, it argues that Durkheim’s normative vision, which can be called libertarian socialism, shaped his sociological critique and search for alternatives. With attention to the value of this political sociology as a means of understanding our contemporary world, the... Read more

Introduction: In Defence of the Political Durkheim

Part 1: Socialism

1. Durkheim’s Alternative: Curing the Malaise

2. Individualism through Association: The Libertarian Socialism of Émile Durkheim and G.D.H. Cole

3. ‘An Army of Civil Servants’: Max Weber and Émile Durkheim on Socialism

Part 2: Politics

4. The COVID Malaise: The Failed Mission of Justice, Pseudo-Democracy and a Politics of the Future after the Pandemic

5. Social Solidarity, Penal Evolution and Probation (with Fergus McNeill)

6. ‘An Apotheosis of Well-Being’: Durkheim on Austerity and Double-Dip Recessions

Part 3: Legacies

7. A Salute to the Exegetical Giddens: Durkheim Scholar

8. Morality as Rebellion: Towards a Partial Reconciliation of Bauman and Durkheim

10. The Elementary Forms of Sociological Knowledge: Durkheim in British Sociology Textbooks

Postscript: Was Durkheim White? Anti-Semitism and the Dangers of Binary Racialised Readings of the Canon

Biography

Matt Dawson is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, UK, and the author of Social Theory for Alternative Societies and Late Modernity, Individualization and Socialism: An Associational Critique of Neoliberalism.