Are There Only Detours and Dead Ends? Durkheimian Routes to the Suburb of Europe

The paper aims at extrapolating several qualitative hypotheses concerning detours and dead ends in social science from a case study of three generations of Polish scholars influenced by a Durkheimian school in sociology. By this, it attempts to contribute to a larger and seemingly paradoxical question: whether a foreign reception of a school of thought might lead it into a dead end?

In the narrative of history of sociology, the origins of a Durkheimian approach in Poland are associated with Stefan Czarnowski (1879-1937), a student of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, the author of Le culte des héros (1919) and the founder of the first chair in sociology in Warsaw in the 1930s. On the basis of the analysis of his unpublished letters to Mauss and Hubert (rediscovered by the author of the paper), the paper shows the initial organizational and cultural obstacles to the institutionalization of the discipline and to the transnational exchange of ideas. Then, it moves to the case of Czarnowski’s student Nina Assorodobraj-Kula (1908- 1999), showing how she combined the Durkheimian thought with Marxism. Although the results of this unusual merge were interesting, the question arises whether they could be considered Durkheimian anymore. Finally, the works of a third generation (represented by Assorodobraj’s students) show that what was still left from the Durkheimian core was more and more undermined by a reception of American sociology. Several tentative conclusions are drawn from this overview: 1. Although relatively influential in Poland, the Polish Durkheimians were internationally unknown, which already forms one of the dead ends of the school; 2. The way Durkheimian thought was reinterpreted, provokes the question whether it was still Durkheimian; 3. There has not been a conceptual innovation starting with the third generation. These observations can be extrapolated for the sake of future comparisons.