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Emile Durkheim: Religious Life
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His scholarly work in the Paris period, though extensive, by no means exhausted Durkheim's energies. He played a major role in the general intellectual life of France, as well as in the university. He was an active defender of Dreyfus during the heyday of the affair and attained eminence as a left-of-center publicist and spokesman. Durkheim ... became a key figure in the reorganization of the university system. He served on innumerable university committees, advised the Ministry of Education, helped to introduce sociology into school curricula, and in general did yeoman's work to make sociology the cornerstone of civic education. In these years he came nearest to realizing his youthful ambition of building a scientific sociology that would be applied to moral re-education in the Third Republic and at the same time to the development of a secular morality.
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Durkheim was born in Epinal, France. He was concerned primarily with what he perceived to be the breakdown of social norms and the increasingly impersonality of social life. Incidentally, in developing explanations of these phenomena, Durkheim is credited with attempting the first scientific approach to social phenomena, coining the sociological term social fact to describe distinct units of social information.
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Shortly after his traditional Jewish confirmation at the ageof thirteen, Durkheim, under the influence of a Catholic womanteacher, had a shortlived mystical experience that led to aninterest in Catholicism. But soon afterwards he turned away fromall religious involvement, though emphatically not from interestin religious phenomena, and became an agnostic.
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Shortly after his traditional Jewish confirmation at the age of thirteen, Durkheim, under the influence of a Catholic woman teacher, had a shortlived mystical experience that led to an interest in Catholicism. But soon afterwards he turned away from all religious involvement, though emphatically not from interest in religious phenomena, and became an agnostic.
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This is a very good and concise summary of Durkheim's life and work by an internationally recognized authority on Durkheim. It contains a brief overview of Durkheim's major publications, along with a very useful annotated bibliography of works by Durkheim and some secondary literature.
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