Of Durkheim's key works the most neglected is Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. This is not only careless it is also negligent for the book makes a seminal contribution to our understanding of the State. Durkheim's characterization of the State as the ultimate moral force in society is an important contrast to the views outlined by both Marx and Weber.

In "Professional Ethics and Civic Morals," Emile Durkheim outlined the core of his theory of morality and social rights which was to dominate his work throughout the course of his life. In Durkheim's view, sociology is a science of morals which are objective social facts, and these moral regulations form the basis of individual rights and obligations. This book is crucial to an understanding of Durkheim's sociology because it contains his much-neglected theory of the state as a moral institution, and it provides an understanding of his critique of anomie and egoistic individualism. The growing interest in cultural revolution and moral regulation make this edition of Durkheim's classic work especially timely. The new preface by Bryan Turner sets the book in its intellectual and historical context, and illustrates the relevance of this work to present day debates on the state, society, and moral regulation.

Émile Durkheim is one of the founding fathers of sociology and Professional Ethics and Civic Morals is one of his most neglected yet insightful works. Durkheim's view that the instability of industrial society was connected to the decline of religion and his characterization of the state as the ultimate moral force in society reveal his lifelong engagement with the relationship between the individual and society. In Professional Ethics and Civic Morals Durkheim poses a major question: given the negative social consequences of unfettered markets, which caused what he termed ‘anomie’, how is the state to reconcile morality with the market? Durkheim argues that the answer is to be found in the evolution of a civil religion, in the form of professional codes and civic values, which would counteract the effects of individualism, just as guilds had regulated medieval economic life. Arguing that the state has a vital role to play in moral life and that morals are at bottom social facts – a controversial position which drew considerable criticism – Durkheim also argues that the state had a duty to protect the rights of the individual, via a form of cosmopolitan patriotism. Durkheim also articulates a highly original and critical interpretation of the rules around property and inheritance – a perspective which resonates with debates about inequality and the redistribution of wealth today. Included in this Routledge Classics edition is a new introduction by Bryan S.Turner, placing Durkheim in contemporary context and outlining the key tenets of Professional Ethics and Civic Morals.

Excerpt from Professional Ethics and Civic Morals His work, brought out by the Faculty of Law in the University of Istanbul, is a collection of some hitherto unpublished lectures of Emile Durkheim. In 1934, in Paris, I had set about the writing of a thesis for a doctorate in law on The Concept of the State held by the Pioneers in the French School of Sociology. It then seemed to me that before all else I must make a study of the precise ideas and thought of Durkheim, as founder of this school, on the problem of the State. As a sociologist, Durkheim had made no special study of this problem and was satisfied in his published works merely to raise certain questions relative to it. On that account I came to the conclusion that relevant and detailed exposition might perhaps be found in his unpublished work, if any such existed. To this end I approached the well-known ethnographer Marcel Mauss, the nephew of Durkheim. He received me most cordially and spoke of his great feeling for Turkey, which he had visited in 1908. He then went on to show me a number of manuscripts with the title The Nature of Morals and of Rights. These, he said, were a course of lectures given by Durkheim between the years 1890 and 1900 at Bordeaux and repeated at the Sorbonne, first in 1904, and then in 1912, and revived in lectures some years before his death. Mauss had no hesitation in entrusting them to me, a fact which I recall with pleasure, and he handed over to me at my request a typescript copy of part of the manuscripts likely to be of especial interest to me. I take this opportunity of paying tribute to the memory of the late scholar: I owe him a debt for his invaluable help. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The title, Behemoth, derives from the Hebrew word Behemah-a beast, an enormous creature, monstrously huge and vast. It is an apt description of the State on the eve of the twenty-first century. Loved by few, vilified by many from all perspectives, it nonetheless continues to grow; by turns rivaling and co-opting that more pleasant-sounding word: Society. Political sociology aims to define and understand the interrelationship between these two huge terms: State and Society. Continuing in a path begun by Horowitz in the 1950s in The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Social and Philosophical Thought, expanded upon in the 1970s with Foundations of Political Sociology, this summing up in the late 1990s is an effort to extract and evolve the canon of political sociology. Starting with Montesquieu, Horowitz proceeds through the European experience of Rousseau, Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, and Weber. He then takes the field on its tangled migration to America with the Frankfurt School in exile, followed by searching chapters on Schumpeter, Mills, Arendt, and Huntington, among others. The result is a stunning revaluation of the intellectual sources of the present day divisions between statists and socialists, welfarists and individualists, advocates of dictatorship and of democracy, mandated rules and voluntary association, hard realists and soft utopians, a world without states and a world with a single state. Horowitz does not offer the usual evolutionary notion of doctrines, but a canon embedded in and embattled with the societies they aim to serve or overthrow in the present as in the past. The result is a major recasting of the theory and practice of social science and normative frameworks. The final chapter offers Horowitz's own prognosis of what we can expect in the recasting of the Welfare State to include the Welfare Society, and its growing nemesis the global economy which threatens to engulf State and Society alike in a return to civilizational concerns. This is an essential text for policy-makers and social scientists interested in macroscopic changes in the political order.