For a reconstruction of the durkheimian tradition

Abstract

The present text seeks to address the so-called "Durkheimian tradition", until then associated with a more or less scattered set of intellectual developments in order to answer the following question: would it be possible to find, behind the apparently contradictory theoretical developments by authors such as Levi-Strauss, Parsons, Goffman, and other would-be heirs of the Durkheimian legacy, some kind of conceptual scheme endowed with logical development possibilities so open that we could still allocate them within a coherent intellectual heritage endowed with coherence and unity? Such a problem goes back, of course, not only to the identity of the tradition but to a possible unity within the Durkheimian work. Our working hypothesis is that the theory of collective representations, as formulated by the French sociologist in his late texts, could provide a possible resolution to these issues.