 Logical conformism and moral conformism among the moderns: what remains of Durkheim's sociology of knowledge?Gildas Salmon Chapter 22 in The Elgar Companion to Émile Durkheim, 2026, pp 385-405 from Edward Elgar Publishing Abstract: The thesis of the “social construction” of reality that dominated science studies in the last third of the twentieth century embodied an individualist constructivism that is very different from Durkheim's ambition to demonstrate the impact of the forms of collective life on a group's cognitive resources. Does this mean that Durkheimian sociology of knowledge became obsolete after the Second World War? This chapter explores this question, examining the Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge, whose paradoxical filiation with the Durkheimo-Maussian paradigm has been overlooked. The rapprochement is most obvious in The Order of Things because its historicization of the transcendental is akin to that seen in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, although Foucault borrows his methods for describing the épistémès from Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism and not Durkheim. In History of Madness the connection is less apparent, but, as this chapter demonstrates, in this work Foucault in fact picks up on the Durkheim-Maussian framework by deciphering the intellectual categories of a culture from its social morphology. Keywords: Archaeology of knowledge; Durkheim; Foucault; Sociology of knowledge; Social morphology; Structuralism (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22860_22 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing |
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