The Anthem Companion to Emile Durkheim

Starting in the 1970s, the collective work of revision and rediscovery of a ‘new Durkheim’ has begun unveiling the richness of Durkheim’s sociology, freeing his legacy from the limits of previous interpretations. For some decades now, researchers have begun confronting and revising the traditional image of Durkheim as a sociologist who has a strong epistemological continuity with positivism, who is ideologically conservative and whose abstract functionalism often lacks a proper historical understanding of political institutions. 

What links the contributions in this Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim is a shared conviction of the necessity of moving forward and contributing to a new phase characterized by a new vision of Durkheim’s theories. The contributions to this volume provide new insights into Durkheim’s classical texts and juxtapose them with the reconstruction of his lectures and lesser known writings to offer a wider understanding of his oeuvre. 

The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim intends to offer different practical attempts to build on Durkheim’s legacy and investigate the issues and controversies that characterise contemporary societies and thus contribute to develop further this path of critical enquiry into ‘classical sociology’.