Sexual politics in Comte and Durkheim: feminism, history, and the French sociological tradition.

Abstract

n 1900, Emile Durkheim celebrated a new century by summing up the history of sociology in the old one. Although he named founding figures from both sides of the Atlantic, he characterized the new field as an "essentially French science" (1900, 609). Only France could provide an appropriate home for the new science; only France combined the innovations of a postrevolutionary social order with the continuous intellectual tradition of Cartesian rationality. In his earlier history of socialism, Durkheim had named Henri de Saint-Simon as the founder of "sociological" thinking (1958), but, in his new centennial history, he awarded the lion's share of the praise to Auguste Comte, the "father" of the field, the inventor of the term sociology, and, despite his debts to Saint-Simon, "for us, the masterpar excellence" (Durkheim 1900, 609-12).1 In subsequent histories of the discipline, Durkheim has joined his predecessor Comte among the acknowledged "founding fathers of modern sociology," and Comte and Durkheim's nineteenth-century French social science has become part of the prehistory of twentieth-century American