Is there anything new to say about Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss?

The status of biography in the social sciences

Today very popular when it comes to politicians, writers, artists or even movie stars, biography remains a secondary genre in the social sciences, particularly in a francophone environment. We owe the only biography of Émile Durkheim to Steven Lukes, a professor from the UK. In our own discipline, biography is still viewed with suspicion. I can see several reasons for this. First of all, a certain Puritanism: in academia, gossip abounds about colleagues here and elsewhere. But we do not accept that a book about a scientist, writer or artist, should disclose the details of his or her private life. It is always assumed that by making private information public, the greatness of the works would be undermined. Who wants to know that Marx had mistresses, that Max Weber had mental problems, that Durkheim was suffering from neurasthenia, that Althusser killed his wife or even that Foucault frequented gay bars in San Francisco? The temptation of sensationalism is present now more than ever.

The sociologist-biographer is faced with a series of problems: access to sources, the memory of those who knew the subject of the biography, the many interpretations given to his or her work. I was lucky enough – I was the first – to be granted access to the Hubert–Mauss archives that the families donated to the Collège de France: thousands of letters, correspondence between Durkheim and Mauss, between Hubert and Mauss, manuscripts, unpublished writings, etc. An almost inexhaustible source! The results of 20 years of work with the feeling of discovering something new everyday are: the first biography of Marcel Mauss, the complete edition of Marcel Mauss’s Écrits politiques, the edition (with the collaboration of Philippe Besnard) of the Lettres de Durkheim to Marcel Mauss and a new biography of Émile Durkheim.

A new perspective

Any biography contains an implicit theory of action. The natural tendency for the author of a biography is to draw upon a model that combines an ordered time sequence, a consistent and a steady personality, actions without inertia and decisions without uncertainties. But life is not so simple, and individuals are far more complex. There are inconsistencies, contradictions, moments of indecision. Habitus and cultural backgrounds are at play. Between habitus and circumstance, how much room is there for the actor?

When the sociologist discusses the history of his or her discipline, he or she focuses on the history of ideas, theoretical discussion and the rereading of texts. Of course, one can introduce some biographical notes in a book about a particular author, sometimes even an entire chapter, but the reader or even the publisher will wait for one thing: the presentation of the scientific contribution. My intention was to build on an educational and theoretical background when writing the intellectual biography, first of Marcel Mauss and later of Émile Durkheim. But what really is an intellectual life? Is it the writings? thoughts? beliefs? The premise of any socio-biography which is in fact the sociology of knowledge appears to be this: a text can only be understood in context.

Finally, there is the main opposition between the individual and the society. Sociologists are rightly wary of what Pierre Bourdieu, who was the director of my doctoral thesis, called the ‘biographical illusion’. Bourdieu himself warned me against a trend that can be found in intellectual circles. The biographer is a kind of scavenger, who lives with corpses and finds pleasure in devouring them. Or some sort of parasite that wants to climb up on the shoulders of the great. Any biography seen as a story has a philosophy of history implicit in the sense of a succession of historical events. But what if life had no meaning, in both senses of significance and direction?

‘The man is the work’, Durkheim said, with his friend Frédéric Rauh in mind. The work is, however, no more a direct expression of a life than it is a reflection of a society or an epoch. The life, the work and society both interpenetrate one another and are far removed from one another. The challenge for the socio-biographer is to reconstruct the context, the ‘social surface’ on which the individual acts in a plurality of sectors or fields, at every moment. The use of a prosoprographic approach (research that combines individual and collective elements in the light of the exercise of political, economic and social power) and of a structural perspective analysis, e.g. in terms of scope and structure of social relations, not only helps to define the terms that reflect the social positions and trajectories, but also to identify margins and opportunities for innovation within the system. Since the beginning of my academic career, I have developed a research programme that emphasizes a historical approach, which is in the fields of sociology of science, sociology of the university system and the sociology of intellectuals.

The two biographies I have written differ from other studies in several respects: (1) the description of the life and work of the authors and their collaborators is strictly chronological and avoids the usual thematic approach; (2) the emphasis is on the collective dimension of their work; (3) the whole of their work (and, to a certain extent, that of collaborators) is discussed, as are the debates surrounding each book or article at the time of its publication; and (4) a sociological perspective is adopted and life and work of the authors are inscribed within the intellectual, institutional and political context of the years 1850–1920. The two books could have been entitled Durkheim, Mauss & Co, Part 1 and Part 2, to borrow an expression from Lucien Febvre. The goal was therefore to look at both the individuals and the field, the habitus and the field, and the événementiel and the structural.

The nephew Marcel

My first step was the biography of Marcel Mauss (1872–1950). One can easily identify the determinants that influenced the life of Mauss: his rabbi grandfather, son of a family of merchants and small manufacturers, a child of Épinal in the Vosges, a nephew of Émile Durkheim, only 14 years younger (Durkheim was born in l858 and Mauss in l872). The question is how Mauss, the Jew from Épinal, who passed the aggregation exams without being a regular student at the École normale supérieure, how Mauss, in the shade of Durkheim, provided a highly original contribution to the development of the humanities and became the father of modern French anthropology. Everybody in the social sciences knows Marcel Mauss’s famous essay on the gift. But who is Marcel Mauss?

Mauss wrote hundreds of articles. His life, like any, is characterized by uncertainty and prevarication. Until his late marriage, he lived the life of a bachelor, a Bohemian. His family despaired of Marcel: a position in an institution (École pratique des hautes études) that was a ‘trap’, low pay, an uncompleted thesis (‘The prayer’) and unmarried. Mauss’s life, a failure? In 1930, he was elected to the Collège de France, which seemed to him an ‘asylum of liberty, independence, and pure science’. Fame came late in his life. It was one that Durkheim dreamed of for himself.

Carrying out my study of Marcel Mauss required considerable research and documentation. The first book follows the major stages of Mauss’s life chronologically and comprises four parts: ‘Durkheim’s nephew’, ‘The totem and tabou clan’, ‘The heir’ and ‘Recognition’. The epilogue covers the Second World War and the postwar years.

One of the most difficult issues I struggled with during my work was the question of what really happened during the Second World War. For the duration of the Occupation, Mauss lived in Paris. His wife was ill. Was he protected by his connections and his reputation? Former classmates or colleagues held administrative functions, among them Marcel Deat who was a close friend. They were both agrégés of philosophy, Durkheimians and veterans; they had fought together in the socialist movement. At the end of April l939, Mauss sent Deat a subscription to La Tribune de France and wrote to him: ‘I have seen very few of your recent articles that I would not have approved.’ ¹ A troubling confidence considering that Marcel Deat committed himself to fascism in May l940.

In my second book, Écrits politiques, I seek to present an overview of Mauss’s writings through an account of his life, a key moment in the history of the constitution of human sciences. The book has five parts: ‘The first engagements (1896–1903)’, ‘The intellectual and the militant (1904–1912)’, ‘Pacifist and Internationalist (1913–1914)’, ‘The scholar and the politician (1920–1925)’ and ‘Mauss, the father (1925–1942)’. We may gain a clearer understanding of the scope of Mauss’s influence, significant not only to the generation of researchers he trained, but also to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu to mention only two.

Marcel Mauss’s Écrits politiques

Mauss was a scholar who never lost interest on what was happening around him. Unlike his uncle Émile, he was actively engaged in politics from his university days: a member of a collectivist student group, of the French Workers Party. He supported Émile Zola during the Dreyfus Affair; he was a contributor to Le Devenir social and Mouvement socialiste; and later a reporter for L’Humanité. Still, little is known about the role political activity played in his life. Mauss’s most politically active period were the years after the First World War, when he wrote more than 95 texts.

All told, he published almost 200 articles and began to write two books. After the First World War, Mauss wrote a long series of articles on violence, published an important piece entitled ‘A sociological appreciation of Bolshevism’ and began a book on the nation. It was also the time he composed ‘The gift’, an essay that attests not only to the research concern of a specialist in history of religion and ethnology but also to the sensitivity of a politically engaged intellectual.

Uncle Émile

After Fayard’s publication of my Marcel Mauss and the edition of Émile Durkheim’s letters to Mauss, Olivier Bétourné, who was at the time an editor at Fayard, issued an invitation that was also a challenge: ‘Now we need a Durkheim’.

Great myths surround Durkheim: Durkheim-the-prophet, Durkheim-Regent-of-the-Sorbonne, Durkheim-the-friend-of-Jaurès-but-never-became-a-socialist. He is also associated with the image of the leader of a tightly knit group around the journal L’Année sociologique and a conservative political thinker who is above all preoccupied with the social order and the moral integration of societies.

The objective of the biography I wrote was to demolish the myths that surround the life and career of the founder of sociology in France, and to challenge or qualify received ideas about his work. The life and career of the ‘real’ Durkheim can easily be divided into a few main periods: childhood and education; lycée teacher (Puy, Sens, Saint-Quentin, Troyes) and travels in Germany; lecturer and Professor of Social Science and Pedagogy in Bordeaux; appointment to the Sorbonne, Paris; the First World War. These are the main sections of my book. While the Bordeaux period seems to have been the most productive, with the publication of the Division of Labour in Society (1893), the Rules of Sociological Method (1895) and Suicide (1897), and the foundation of L’Année sociologique in 1896, the Paris-Sorbonne period was more active in terms of his range of intellectual, administrative and political activities, and the First World War period was certainly the most tragic, with the death of several collaborators and of his son André.

There are still some enigmas surrounding Durkheim’s personality and psychological states, his relationship with Judaism, his family life, his relations with friends and close collaborators, his politico-administrative responsibilities and his political views.

Politics

Science can and must, in Durkheim’s view, guide behaviours and help to find solutions to problems. He kept his distance from political parties and the partisan life, but the ‘social question’ was central to his preoccupations. Sociology would eventually allow him to satisfy his need for both knowledge and action. Durkheim did not publish any major works devoted primarily to political analysis, and he was politically active on only two occasions: during the Dreyfus affair and during the First World War. He was also directly caught up in three major events: the occupation of Alsace-Lorraine by German troops during the Franco–Prussian war (1870–1871), the establishment of the Third Republic and the growing number of social conflicts and the development of the socialist movement in Europe.

Durkheim’s political stance is that of the ‘expert intellectual’ or, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s expression, the ‘specific intellectual’, who, while he defends the autonomy of science, also acts in his areas of competence, as an advisor to the prince or popular educator. Durkheim seems to have been the man of the golden mean and –why not? – the third way: he attempted to reconcile the contradictory forces of individuality and solidarity, and individualism and socialism because the two great threats to contemporary societies were, in his view, totalitarianism and anarchism. Could it be said of him that he was a liberal socialist?

Durkheim was, in a word, an intellectual steeped in the spirit of the Third Republic. This was la République des professeurs and its credo centred on: democracy, secularism and science. The republican ethos, as defined by Montesquieu, on whose writings Durkheim had written his Latin thesis, was: love of the laws and the fatherland, the democratic and egalitarian ideal (equal rights), recognition of the ‘power’ of education, defence of the public interest as opposed to individual self-interest and the feeling of an immense debt towards a society that promoted altruism as opposed to egotism.

Judaism

Durkheim’s given names were David Émile. Born in 1858 in Épinal, a small town and capital of the department of Vosges in Lorraine, he was the son of a rabbi and while he kept his distance from Judaism (and claimed to have rejected it, describing himself as a free thinker), his contemporaries often described him as a Jew and identified him with the Judaism of his parents.

Durkheim’s relationship to Judaism was a complex one. On the one hand, he remained within the close-knit Jewish provincial family, he kept his affiliation with the Jewish community and suffered from anti-Semitism. On 17 October l887, he married a Jewess, Louise Dreyfus, in a civil marriage at the mairie of the 10th arrondissement in Paris, and in a religious ceremony the next day in the great La Victoire synagogue where the couple were blessed by Zadoc Kahn, the Chief Rabbi of Paris. On the other hand, Durkheim’s way of life was that of an ‘assimilated’ Jew. He lectured on Saturdays at the University of Bordeaux; he did not go to the synagogue or eat Kosher food, Nor did he give his two children, André (l892–l917) and Marie (l888–1953), ² Hebrew names.

Durkheim was not active in the Jewish community until the First World War. He supported a Jewish organization (the Comité français d’information et d’action auprès des Juifs des Pays Neutres) and he was appointed to a commission examining the situation of Russian refugees in France. When Durkheim died in l917, he was buried in the Jewish section of the Montparnasse cemetery and on a corner of his tombstone there is an inscription in Hebrew.

Should his interest in religions, and especially primitive religions, be seen as an instance of the return of the repressed? Durkheim analysed the passionate relationship between societies and religion as a scientist, and discovered that many forms of knowledge, beliefs and emotions were religious in origin.

Durkheim’s main preoccupation was society’s ‘moral discontent’: European societies were going through a ‘moral crisis’. Anomie was not a temporary problem caused by an over-rapid economic transition; it was something deeper, and a characteristic feature of modern society. How could it survive this moral crisis? And if the preconditions for its survival were, as Durkheim believed, the separation of church and state, the gradual release of morality from the grip of religion and the development of a science of moral facts, what would the society he wanted to see look like? There was only one answer to that question: it would be a secular society.

Melancholia

Durkheim was culturally and personally predisposed to developing a collective psychology. There are three things about his life that we are certain of: his hyper- or ‘feminine’ sensitivity, his neurasthenic crisis and his illness during the last days of his life.

Durkheim’s own diagnosis of his mental state was: neurasthenia and melancholia.

Much of Durkheim’s significant work during the 1890s was concerned with psychology, heredity and pathology. ‘Malaise’ and ‘anxiety’: there were often questions concerning psychic problems, mental diseases and neurasthenia in The Division of Labor in Society. While Durkheim did not quote Freud, his introduction of the notion of collective consciousness and the frequent use of metaphors (such as ‘courants nerveux’, ‘ondes’ and ‘énergies latentes’) is basically a collective psychology and an effort to objectify psychic problems. The causes he discovered were not only individual but social, not only in the ‘profondeurs de l’âme’ [depths of the soul] but also at the ‘soubassement de la vie collective’ [base of collective life].

In Le Suicide (1897), Durkheim, constantly preoccupied with the question of ‘social disintegration’, analysed what he saw as the most significant types of suicide in contemporary societies. What he called after Châteaubriand the ‘mal de l’infini’ [disease of the infinite] takes different forms: for some, it is the ‘infini du rêve’ [infinity of the dream] and for others, it is the ‘infini du désir’ [infinity of desire]. He also identified ‘currents of collective sadness’ which he believed were not pathological if they were not excessive, apart from the fact of relativisim: what is morbid for individuals can be normal for societies. In a footnote, Durkheim used neurasthenia as an example of this.

In the first volumes of the L’Année sociologique, there was an interest in (if not a tolerant reception of) the work of ‘hygienists’ and psychiatrists on social ‘illnesses’. During the early years, as the index of the L’Année sociologique details, the issues deemed most important included: crime and criminality, economics, education, punishment and responsibility, religion, women, suicide and the city. There was also an obvious interest in the family, marriage, kinship and sexuality (particularly incest and prostitution). New issues grew in importance as a result: belief, cult, God, dogma, church, ritual, fetishism, magic, myth, sacrifice, superstition, taboo and totems. These characterized the new Durkheimian programme: the critical study of the ‘social unconciousness’ as an objectivization of irrationalism.

It is tempting to describe Durkheim’s sociology as an attempt to objectify his own personal problems. We must also take account of the intellectual and social context. Fin de siècle France was characterized by the cult of self and the primacy of irrationalism. An expression of the emergence of these new cultural trends was, in literature and in art, symbolism. At the same time, a new body of knowledge was being consolidated and popularized, the ‘psychologie nouvelle’, which concerned itself with the exploration of the interior of the human organism as a febrile, mechanistic system of nerves and with the examination of the visual dimensions of mental operations; often with an emphasis on hypnotism, suggestion, dream, hallucination, split personality. All these ‘extraordinary phenomena’ rapidly became among the most important of intellectual interests, and the issues surrounding them were not only philosophical (the nature of the mind) but also social and political (in terms of criminal behaviour and crowd phenomena).

As I tried to demonstrate throughout the study, Durkheim was certainly a man of his time. We can see him sitting on a pebble beach, wearing a jacket, a tie and a hat and holding a newspaper in August 1915. The photograph was taken at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux. The image it projects is that of a stern professor who is conscious of his authority, function and status. He was a man with a sense of discipline and duty, unstinting in his efforts and always ready to make sacrifices. He led an austere life that was completely devoted to his academic work of preparing lectures, meeting students, writing articles and books, editing a journal and corresponding with colleagues.

The collective dimension of the French School of Sociology

The opposition between the master (Durkheim) and the disciple-heir (Mauss) seems to be an opposition between theoretical rigidity and flexibility, between a stance that is doctrinaire and one that is subtle. Of Mauss there are two opposing images: Mauss the nephew of Durkheim, in the shade; and Mauss, another Durkheim but a ‘better equipped one’, as Charles Andler said of him when Mauss was elected to the Collège de France.

The nephew and the uncle were different in many ways, ranging from personality to their lifestyles and political commitments. But there is a collective dimension to their works. In their collaboration, Durkheim was undeniably the intellectual leader, the master – but the influences were multiple and reciprocal. This is seen in individual books.

Who, for example, is the author of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life? Durkheim or Mauss? The nephew made a vital contribution to his uncle’s work. It is possible – and I was tempted – to find a single explanatory principle in the work and life of Mauss: The Gift, which, in life, becomes giving of oneself. The central notion of the work: reciprocity; the central value of life: generosity. So everything turns, in work as in life, around Durkheim’s main concern: solidarity.

When he was writing the obituary of the English anthropologist James Frazer, Marcel Mauss formulated the following wish: ‘A work of art can only be suggestive. The story of a scientist must be true, and we must tell everything.’ Tell everything? We can never claim exhaustive coverage. There are occasional errors, sometimes even censorship. Thus, any biography is tentative. I now have two new projects: the edition, with Jean Terrier, of the Marcel Mauss manuscript on The Nation and a book, Marcel Mauss in America: about his trip to the USA in 1926 where he visited campuses on the East Coast (Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Chicago) and met many American scholars.