Emile Durkheim: The Political Subject

This article examines how since 1939, Anglo-American biographers have presented a non-political narrative of Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) that over time rendered subordinate the more politically directed assessments of Edward Tiryakian (1979) and Robert Alun Jones (1986). This is despite evidence that corroborates these latter researchers' understandings. Subsequently, it looks at the role rhetorical literary practice and the development of discursive statements played within these biographies to facilitate this end, drawing on the ideas of Plato. More broadly it strives to substantiate how a lack of recognition of the valuations of Tiryakian and Alun Jones affected a wider limit of knowledge formation around Durkheim's identity. Methodologically, these endeavours are grounded by a pairing of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method and Derrida’s deconstruction bridged by Marie-Laure Ryan’s (2007) view of ‘narrative’ and Judith Butler’s (1997) explanation of textual ‘silence’. The objective is to locate and analyse points of agreement within Anglo-American biographies on Durkheim to confirm that the statements they make are exclusionary in form while concurrently enabling these statements to be appraised against others presented by more historically directed researchers such as Clark (1973), Weisz (1983), Nord (1995) and Tombs (1996). The aim is to a) establish if the interpretation of the political aspect of Durkheim’s identity they convey retains ‘legitimacy’ (Van Leeuwen, 2007) in the contemporary context and b) open up discussion around the issue of the level of reflexivity (Bourdieu) that underlies the above situations and c) at a broader level of inquiry formally establish Durkheim as a political entity through verifying him as a ‘subject’ (Foucault) of the French Third Republic.