Reconceptualizing the Study of Community Life:

Emile Durkheim may be best known as a structuralist and an empiricist of a distinctively quantitative sort, but a comparatively neglected set of lectures on pragmatism presented by Durkheim just prior to his death suggests that this characterization is only partially justified. Interestingly, whereas Durkheim is critical of pragmatism in some very consequential respects, he not only uses pragmatism to indicate the major shortcomings of rationalist and empiricist approaches to the study of human group life but he also builds on pragmatism as an instructive resource in developing his own thoughts on human knowing and acting. These lectures may help scholars appreciate some of the more enduring tensions in Durkheim’s scholarship, but they also reveal some of the inadequacies of contemporary “sociological theory” with respect to both depictions of the scholarship of Emile Durkheim and the more fundamental study of human knowing and acting.