Durkheim and Bourdieu: The Common Plinth and its Cracks

For lack of being able to offer here a systematic comparison between Bourdieu's sociology and the thought of Durkheim – which would require an historicalanalytic monograph capable of reconstituting the double chain, social and intellectual, of the ramifying causations that link them to each other and to their respective milieu – I would like, by way of selective soundings, to bring out four of the pillars that support their common base: namely, (1) the fierce attachment to rationalism, (2) the refusal of pure theory and the stubborn defence of the undividedness of social science, (3) the relation to the historical dimension and to the discipline of history, and (4) the recourse to ethnology as a privileged device for ‘indirect experimentation’.