The Oxford Handbook of Émile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim remains one of the most controversial, and one of the most deeply misunderstood, classics of social theory. His work differs from the dominant version of sociology that has essentially accepted the modernist self-description of contemporary societies; and it squarely contradicts the individualism that has come to dominate the social sciences. For everybody who is interested in constructing theoretical alternatives to this individualism, Durkheim’s sociology can be a highly useful inspiration - not only because of the solutions it suggests, but already because of the questions it asks. Making use of the theoretical possibilities offered by the Durkheimian tradition, however, requires going beyond the familiar appropriations.

Therefore, The Oxford Handbook of Émile Durkheim takes stock of the different recent debates on Durkheimian sociology, and makes them accessible to a wide audience spanning various disciplines; this includes crucial debates that, due to language barriers, are not easily accessible for an English-reading public. The handbook’s chapters elucidate the controversial key concepts of Durkheimian sociology; situate them within the contemporary political and theoretical debates they were originally responding to; offer surveys of empirical research that uses Durkheimian concepts (on topics that were already central for Durkheim’s own work as well as on topics that Durkheim hardly touched upon), thus demonstrating the possibilities of a Durkheimian sociology; bring out the divergent, and competing, ways in which Durkheim’s ideas have been appropriated and reformulated within more recent theoretical developments in the social sciences. In doing so, this volume is an important resource for all scholars and students looking to understand Durkheimian sociology.

Hans Joas is Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at Humboldt University Berlin and Visiting Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in 1979 (G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought, MIT Press, 1985, 1997). Among his numerous prizes are the Max Planck Research Award in 2015; the Prix Paul Ricoeur in 2017 and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award of the German Sociological Association in 2022. His last book in English is The Power of the Sacred. An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment, Oxford UP, 2021.

Andreas Pettenkofer studied sociology at the Free University of Berlin, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of Bielefeld, and received his PhD at the Max Weber Centre, University of Erfurt. After positions at the University of Göttingen and at the Fernuniversität in Hagen, he is now a fellow at the Max Weber Centre, University of Erfurt, where he heads the group ＂The Local Politicization of Global Norms＂.