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His scholarly work in
the Paris period, though extensive, by no means exhausted Durkheim's
energies. He played a major role in the general intellectual life
of France, as well as in the university. He was an active defender
of Dreyfus during the heyday of the affair and attained eminence
as a left-of-center publicist and spokesman. Durkheim also became
a key figure in the reorganization of the university system. He
served on innumerable university committees, advised the Ministry
of Education, helped to introduce sociology into school curricula,
and in general did yeoman's work to make sociology the cornerstone
of civic education. In these years he came nearest to realizing
his youthful ambition of building a scientific sociology that would
be applied to moral re-education in the Third Republic and at the
same time to the development of a secular morality.
When
the war came, Durkheim felt obliged to aid his beleaguered fatherland.
He became the secretary of the Committee for the Publication of
Studies and Documents on the War, and published several pamphlets
in which he attacked pan-Germanism and more particularly the nationalistic
writings of Treitschke.
Just before
Christmas, 1915, Durkheim was notified that his son Andre had died
in a Bulgarian hospital from his war wounds. Andre had followed
his father to the Ecole Normale and had begun a most promising career
as a sociological linguist. He had been the pride and hope of a
father who had seen him as his destined successor in the front rank
of the social sciences. His death was a blow from which Durkheim
did not recover. He still managed to write down the first paragraphs
of a treatise on ethics on which he had one preparatory work for
a long time, but his energy was spent. He died on November 15, 1917,
at the age of fifty-nine.
Emile Durkheim,
the agnostic son of devoted Jews, had managed during his career
to combine scientific detachment with intense moral involvement.
He was passionately devoted to the disinterested quest for truth
and knowledge, and yet he was also a figure not unlike the Old Testament
prophets, who castigated their fellows for the errors of their ways
and exhorted them to come together in a common service to moral
unity and communal justice. Although a Frenchman first and foremost,
he did not waver from his allegiance to a cosmopolitan liberal civilization
in which the pursuit of science was meant to serve the enlightenment
and guidance of the whole of humanity. A man made of whole cloth,
he still managed to play a variety of roles in a distinctive intellectual
and historical context.
From
Coser, 1977:148-149.
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