This book is the first intellectual biography of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), the father of modern ethnology and a leading early figure in the French school of sociology. Mauss left a rich intellectual legacy in the social sciences, influencing the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others. His masterpiece, the 1925 essay The Gift, on reciprocity and gift economies among archaic societies, remains required reading in anthropology, and his work more broadly resonates today with students and scholars in fields from the history of religion to sociology. Mauss taught the first generation of French field researchers in anthropology and helped secure the legacy of his uncle, émile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology. In Marcel Mauss: A Biography, Marcel Fournier situates Mauss's ideas in their biographical context, focusing not only on the details of Mauss's life but also on the people and the academic milieus with which he was associated in early twentieth-century France. He shows how Mauss--through his writings, teaching, and socialist politics--found himself at the center of the intellectual and political life of his country and of Europe through two world wars. The book addresses, among other topics, the effect of the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War on Mauss's thought, and the inner dynamics of the group of scholars around Mauss and Durkheim at the journal they helped establish, Année Sociologique. The fruit of vast research, Marcel Mauss: A Biography is the life story both of a legendary scholar and of the institutionalization of sociology and anthropology.

This book bears testimony to the value of a progressive form of academisation of social work education in most European countries, including former communist countries which had to re-establish social work education. It also manifests the confidence of contributors in belonging to a serious academic discipline, and the fruitfulness of bringing research ‘home’ from neighbouring disciplines such as sociology, psychology, social policy, or pedagogy into the mainstream of social work. The contributions to this book converge on a small number of core issues for contemporary social work. These are methodologically the conceptualisation of different and interacting dimensions of diversity, and practically the defence of professionalism and discretion against encroachment by neo-liberal ideologies and cost-cutting regulations. In so doing, this underscores that theory matters in social work. Authentic social work research can demonstrate that social work practice has no reason to shy away from basing itself on evidence and being professionally accountable as long as its notion of evidence recognises and does justice to the complexity of social problems and acknowledges the value of inter-subjectivity in producing useable and ethically grounded evidence. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Social Work.

International scholarship over the last twenty years has produced a new understanding of Emile Durkheim as a thinker. It has contributed to reassembling what, for Durkheim, was always a whole: a sociological selection on morals and moral activism. This volume presents an overview of Durkheim's thought and is representative of the best of contemporary Durkheim scholarship.

Emile Durkheim is widely lauded as one of the founding fathers of modern Sociology and for his substantial contribution to the sociology of education. This set brings some of his most important writings on the subject together for the first time.

A new appreciation of Durkheim, now into its fourth decade, has extended our grasp of his intellectual ambitions beyond standard academic boundaries. Contributions to this revival of interest in Durkheim, many secreted away in obscure periodicals, are well worth being recognized for their unqualified excellence in helping us to uncover the original Durkheimian intellectual project in all its interdisciplinary complexity. Besides classic Durkheimian subjects such as religion, social solidarity and suicide, these studies bring to light Durkheim's intellectual inquiry into political theory, comparative ethnology, social reconstruction, questions of civil society, and his articulation of an updated individualism in conversation with Marx, Hegel, Spencer and others. Authors who have helped us attain this more rounded conception of the Durkheimian project include such well-known figures as Robert N. Bellah, Robert Alun Jones, Anthony Giddens, W. S. F. Pickering and Edward Tiryakian. More than matching these contributions are the surprising writings by authors from across the disciplines, including such contemporaries of Durkheim as historian Henri Berr and theologian Alfred Loisy, as well as modern-day writers who deserve to be much better known, such as philosopher, John Brooks III or historian John Bossy. Although this collection is overwhelmingly drawn from sources in English, two classic critical pieces by French contemporaries of Durkheim enhance the value of this anthology.