For Durkheim, sociology, as a new kind of science, is part and parcel of the constitutional process of modern societies. This conception of sociology rests on two fundamental theses. First, society, as a normative realm made up of ideas, and especially of ideals, is an ontological novelty: it shows itself in the constitution of individuals, since human beings are persons able to think and act only as long as they are social individuals. Second, modern society is an historical novelty, constituted by an ideal of the person which asks and enables each social individual to become a fully autonomous being. The aim of this paper is to clarify these two basic foundations of Durkheimian sociology. Part I focuses on the first thesis: Durkheim’s reconstruction of the sociological tradition as a conceptual struggle toward the idea of society, conceived as a new order of reality. It examines the social philosophy Durkheim developed in order to account for the relation between society and the individual; the conceptualization of the human individual as social in The Division of Social Labor, its later development in the framework of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Part II, to be published in a second volume, will focus on the second thesis.

Source d’un malaise profond, en raison d’une histoire qui l’a vue se confondre avec le nationalisme, la nation ne fait plus l’objet d’une réflexion approfondie en philosophie politique, laquelle cherche au contraire à s’en passer en pensant les conditions d’une démocratie postnationale. Contre cette tendance, cet article revient sur l’essai de Marcel Mauss, La Nation , pour souligner à quel point la sociologie permet de repenser le sens de la nation et de dégager la voie d’une autre politique des modernes. Celle-ci vise à étendre aux relations entre nations et classes le « sens du social » que la nation développe en son sein en élaborant, par l’éducation et la loi, la culture politique propre à une société démocratique. Par là, c’est le cadre sociologique général de la pensée de Mauss qui s’éclaire comme le fondement d’un engagement reposant sur le primat accordé à l’analyse du développement sociohistorique, horizon où il convient d’inscrire les autres travaux anthropologiques du neveu de Durkheim.

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The aim of this article is to clarify the difference between the anthropological category of the person, as analyzed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), and the modern ideal of a free autonomous person, which had been at the center of Durkheim’s sociological project since The Division of Social Labor (1893). After explaining the need to return to a sociological perspective, the article considers Durkheim’s examination of the transformations implied by the modern cult of the person in the practical and intellectual organization of social practices. The modern ideal constitutes morality as a social fact, requiring a new form of moral education, as a first step toward a wider political transformation, based on social aspirations to justice that it is the task of sociology to explain, understand, and help realize. This practical commitment opens the way to an understanding of sociology’s original place in the modern epistemological discussion and, consequently, to an appreciation of the novelty Durkheim achieved in founding the French School of Sociology.

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