His reading of Alfred Espinas, and later personal contact with him, led him to his central conception of the "collective consciousness" of a society and the related conviction that the laws of social life are sui generis and not reducible, for instance, to laws of individual psychology. In "Individual and Collective Representations" (1898) he argued that we should not attempt to infer social laws from biological laws, but that the findings of biology should be compared subsequently with independently established social laws on the assumption that "all organisms must have certain characteristics in common which are worth while studying." His conception of a positive science of ethics received a powerful new impetus from a visit to Wilhelm Wundt's psychophysical laboratory in Leipzig while on a leave of absence during the school term of 1885–1886. In 1887 he was appointed
chargé de cours at the University of Bordeaux, becoming the first to teach social science at a French university; he also taught pedagogy and thus began to develop an enduring interest in the relevance of sociology to educational questions.
In 1896 Durkheim was promoted to professor of social science at Bordeaux.
This is a free page. This page contains 181 words. This
article contains 2,541 words (approx. 8 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Durkheim, ÉMile (1858–1917) Access Pass.
