The status of sociology in Simmel and Durkheim

Abstract

Throughout the 1890’s, Simmel and Durkheim concurently published their first works of sociology and they appear as the two leading figures of this new-born discipline. This article studies the two conceptions of sociology comparatively and shows that, although coming from different backgrounds, Simmel and Durkheim have more in common than is generally believed, even if fundamental differences made any collaboration impossible. Whether sociology is considered as a heuristic principle or as an autonomous science — micro or macro-sociological —, or as a philosophy of the social sciences, or as a social science among others or still again as the social sciences corpus, the problems discussed a hundred years ago are still of the moment.