Word: durkheim
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...second idea which sets Moynihan apart from more conventional liberals is his concern with the "silent majority" of Americans who are worried about violence and disorder. Borrowing from Emile Durkheim, and more particularly from the conservative American sociologist Robert A. Nisbet, Moynihan argues that the central problem of modern civilization is to overcome the atomization of society into disoriented individuals through the conscious strengthening of groups and group norms. This effort--Nisbet's "quest for community"--is in Moynihan's view the origin of lower middle-class "reaction' to lower-class violence, which is seen as disorienting, destabilizing, and therefore...
...first modern work on suicide, by French Sociologist Emile Durkheim, was published in 1897, and is still a classic. Durkheim laid the blame for suicide on the interplay between individual and society. He divided suicides into three main strains: 1) Egoistic, in which the individual is too much on his own, isolated from the community; 2) Altruistic, in which the individual is too little on his own and at the mercy of society, like the Indian wives who committed suttee by throwing themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres; 3) Anomic, in which society's controls over the individual...
...Later, Freud formulated his famed "death instinct," into which suicide fitted neatly as death's triumph over the life instinct. Many psychoanalysts do not accept the death instinct, but most modern thinking swings between versions of Freud's psychodynamics of depression on the one hand and Durkheim's sociological factors on the other...
...dead theologians are the reductio ad absurdum of American Protestant theology. When they have not fallen into the perennial heresy of gnostic mysticism, like Altizer, they are conscious or unconscious followers of Durkheim, in that the real object of their worship is 20th century culture, particularly 20th century intellectual culture. They put themselves in the ridiculous position of saying to God, "Either come up to us 20th century intellectuals or get out." It would be a mistake to take them too seriously...
Certainly, research into the subjective reality of abnormal mental states could lead to a better understanding of many objectively important non-verbal states such as love, faith, and conversion. The writings of Durkheim and Weber were produced because of a realization of the importance of subjective states of mind. Perhaps knowledge such as Leary might provide could fill a blind spot concerning our inadequate notion of the type of transcendental subjective experience which has not only been the focus of traditional Western religion and many Asian cultures, but which also plays an important role is such diverse modern sociological phenomena...