Émile Durkheim
Founder of sociology as a discipline; anomie and the collective consciousness
His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were rabbis—eight generations of Alsatian rabbis. He did not stand aside in the Dreyfus affair: in 1898 he was one of the founders of the League of the Rights of Man, and in 1899 he answered Henri Dagan's survey with the essay Antisemitism and Social Crisis, analysing antisemitism as a symptom of crisis rather than as an opinion. It is his most direct text on the subject and worth knowing.
His son André was killed on the Balkan front in December 1915; the father never recovered and died two years later. And one thing must not be printed: he did not convert to Catholicism. There is a report (Lukes) of a brief adolescent mystical phase under a Catholic teacher—that is a report, not a baptism.
Sources
Documents of the period
- É. Durkheim, Antisemitism and Social Crisis (1899) — antisemitism as a symptom of social crisis
Basis: documents and evidence.