Emile Durkheim

For fifteen years Emile Durkheim worked on the journal L'Annee Sociologique--selecting editing writing shaping the goals and methods of the French School of sociology. Now for the first time Durkheim's own contributions to L'Annee are available in English. Classified and explained by Durkheim scholar Yash Nandan this useful collection clarifies: the role of L'Annee Sociologique in the development of scientific sociology; the position of L'Annee in the body of Durkheim's own work and the development of Durkheim's ideas; the importance and function of Durkheim's categories of sociological data; Durkheim's view of contemporaries including Simmel Westermarck Tarde Glotz and Steinmetz; the exchange of ideas between historians and the L'Annee group; and the reasons for L'Annee's reputation as a unique publication in the history of sociology. <P>Professor Nandan has organized this material according to Durkheim's own classification system with major sections on the concepts and methodologies of general juridic and moral sociology criminal sociology and the statistics on morals. Subdivisions treat issues in law suicide social political and domestic organization juridic and moral systems the social contexts of crime the sociology of knowledge political sociology social history and historical sociology. <P>These reviews notices and introductory sections by a major figure in intellectual history represent more than a decade of effort to define and clarify a new form of scientific investigation. Together they offer a suggestive new picture of Durkheim as Scholarch of the French School and master of a whole school of social thought.