Many distinguished academic appointments, including Professorships of Sociology at the Universities of Strasbourg, Columbia and the Sorbonne. Regarded as the most important of Durkheim’s successors, and the central figure in postwar French sociology.
Main publications:
(1924) Fichtes System der konkreten Ethik.
(1930) Les Tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande
reissued. Paris
Vrin, 1949.
(1932) L'Idée du droit social: reprinted, Aalen: Scientia-Verlag, 1972.
(1937) Morale théorique et science des moeurs: third edition, Paris: PUF, 1961.
(1942) Sociology of Law.
(1945) Twentieth-century Sociology. New York: Philosophical Library.
(1946) La Déclaration des droits sociaux. Paris: Vrin. (1950) La Vocation actuelle de la sociologie: third
editon, Paris: PUF, 1963.
(1953) Déterminismes sociaux et liberté humaine, Paris: PUF.
(1954) Le Concept des classes sociales. Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire.
(1957) Les Cadres sociaux de la connaissance sociologique, Paris: PUF.
(1962) Dialectique et sociologie, Paris: Flammarion. (1966) Mon itinéraire intellectuel, New York: Essay Press.
Secondary literature:
Duvignaud, J. (1969) Georges Gurvitch, symbolisme social et sociologie dynamique, Paris: Seghers.
La Rosa, M. (1974) Sociología, realta e astrazione in Georges Gurvitch, Bologna: Cooperativa libraría universitaria éditrice.
Stéfani, M. A. (1974) Georges Gurvitch: sociologodel diritto, Rome: Carucci.
Swedberg, R. (1982) Sociology as Disenchantment: The Evolution of the Work of Georges Gurvitch, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Toulement, R. (1953) Sociologie et pluralisme dialectique: introduction à l'oeuvre de Georges Gurvitch, Louvain: Nauwelaerts.
The philosophical interest of Gurvitch’s work rests on his consistent rejection of static analyses of social reality of the kind to be found, for example, in the work of Talcott Parsons or LéviStrauss. Gurvitch insists, by contrast, that there is no single set of concepts able to do justice to the complexity and variousness of social phenomenaPluralism of analytic concepts and an insistence on the reality of 'discontinuity' are accordingly major features of his work. He distinguishes ten levels of depth in the analysis of social phenomena, from the superficial morphology of social reality to the most pr°" found, that of mental states and collective psychological attitudes. Unless sociological analyses arc in this way pluri-dimcnsional, he argues, they risk becoming rigid and insensitive. The object of sociological study is human action in its ambient circumstances. Actions have many and changing levels, and show multiple and ceaselessly changing interrelations. It follows that sociology cannot be regarded as the study of social laws repeatedly manifesting themselves in different historical circumstances. The social fabric is too discontinuous to allow this. Universalisais >n the theory of sociology are simplistic, false and to be avoided.
