By his ill-considered and scientifically pretentious psycho-mysticism Durkheim has contributed to give the color of justification to the new religion of the altar of divus Augustus and to the neopagan philosophy of Caesar-worship. This (scholastically speaking) "realistic" attitude toward society, although applied by Durkheim in sociology, as by Gierke in jurisprudence, for the benefit of the group, was philosophically indispensable for the new religion of the state. Political monism reappeared, out of the political pluralism in vogue in the first quarter of this century, in a form more formidable than even Hobbes ever dreamed.

The significance of Durkheim's concept of fatalism in Suicide is wholly unappreciated. The idea is seldom discussed and then only in relation to the study of suicide. Unlike anomie, it has had a most undistinguished sociological career. This is curious because if anomie can serve to illuminate in a quite general way the nature...