Durkheim, Germany, War, Europe
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7202/1058556arAbstract
Among the classical authors of sociology, Émile Durkheim passed away the first on 15 November 1917. His conception of the war as well as his ideas of a possible way out of it, therefore, are far from the horizon of experience that characterized the last year of the conflict. His major war writing is a critical analysis of the intellectual sources of German militarism: L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout. Karsenti focuses on Durkheim’s examination of the “Über-Ideology”, which moulded German nationalism since unification in 1871, especially in the work of Heinrich von Treitschke. Durkheim’s book is a censorship of the enemy’s warfare. Yet, what is interesting to discover, according to Karsenti, is the particular perspective of Durkheim’s investigation. The writing is a critique of all tendencies to reduce international politics to an “Über”. Accordingly, for Durkheim, there is a possible way out of the war, yet it has to be read between the lines of his distinction between a “good and a bad tradition” of the moral sciences in Germany.
References
Dorpalen A. (1957). Heinrich von Treitschke, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Durkheim É. (1915). Germany above All. The German Mental Attitude and the War. Paris: Colin.
Durkheim É. (1961). Moral Education. A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education. New York: The free Press.
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Honneth A. (2014). Freedom’s right: The social foundations of democratic life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Megay E.N. (1958). “The Hegelian Tradition of German Liberalism”, in: Treitschke Reconsidered: Midwest Journal of Political Science, 2 (3), pp. 298-317.
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