Chris Rojek

“The war, that was meant to be over in a few weeks, or, at worst, a few months, dragged on for four grinding years. All generations felt the lash, but the cut ran deepest among the young men. During the hostilities Emile Durkheim lost many of his most talented students: Maxime David, Antoine Bianconi, Charles Peguy, Jean Rainier and Robert Hertz, all perished at the Front... When he learned the sad news that his son, Andre´ had succumbed from his battle wounds, he wrote, in a letter to his nephew, Marcel Mauss, ‘I feel detached from all worldly interests. I don’t know if I ever laughed much, but I’m through with laughing . . . due to no longer having any temporal interest’ (Besnard and Fournier, 1998: 508)...

Durkheim died on 15 November 1917, nearly a full year before the Armistice brought hostilities to an end. One cannot rid oneself of the feeling that he died of a broken heart… It was not just his son, his most promising students and the children of others, who had died. The rational hopes of the Enlightenment, and the positive sociology of La Belle Epoque, lay in shreds.

(Chris Rojek, The longue durée of Spengler’s thesis of the Decline of the West, 2017)”
― Chris Rojek