Who Wanted War?: The Origin of the War According to Diplomatic Documents

by Émile Durkheim, Ernest Denis, A.M. Wilson-Garinei (Translation)

WHO WANTED WAR? is a historic monograph on, and argument about, the origins of World War I. Two famed University of Paris professors document their "brief" on the diplomatic and historic causes of the Great War, and especially its spread throughout Europe (and eventually to the United States). Published early on in the conflict—reading almost as current events—the tract serves as a fascinating rebuttal to the usual assumptions about the causes of the jarring leap from the Balkans to a pan-European war; it undermines the simplistic but accepted litany of interlaced alliances and the murder of the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Quid Pro 's modern version of this important book features close proofreading of the original text, contemporary formatting and typeface, and many corrections of distracting misprints found in the original. It adds a 2012 Introduction by Steven Alan Childress, Ph.D., J.D., a senior law professor at Tulane University. Unlike other republications previously available, the Quid Pro Books edition presents the original properly and as the authors intended, and explains its import in the new Introduction. The book reads like a compelling, tragic, and unfolding drama.

Genres: History

90 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2012

About the author

Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology.

In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.

Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions,[citation needed] its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic; that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.

He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

Insightful (in his own field) sociologist produces a propaganda document unsurprisingly concluding that the then-current war was caused by the enemy, not his peace-loving country and its allies, in whose motives he seems less interested. Later investigations have been generally more negative in all and more general in placing responsibility as to how the continent-wide abattoir WWI came about.