The “category project”—seeded by Émile Durkheim’s foundational work on collective representations and growing through the pages of the Année Sociologique after its founding in 1898—proposed that the categories we use to understand the world, such as time, space, causality, and law, are fundamentally social in origin. This marked a significant break from the Kantian idea that such categories were innate attributes of the human mind, an idea that much of anthropology had absorbed into its evolutionist accounts of how such concepts manifested in rudimentary or advanced forms across cultures. The project’s founding figures—the uncle-nephew duo Durkheim and Marcel Mauss—took social experience and its crystallization in varied social phenomena (especially communal rituals) as formative of the classificatory schemes that humans use to frame and filter everyday life. The bold and thoroughgoing claims the project’s affiliates derived from this axiom—original, broadly applicable, operating at a high level of abstraction yet built from the ground up—invited, and continue to invite, prolific engagement across scholarly disciplines. The Social Origins of Thought: Durkheim, Mauss, and the Category Project captures the fecundity and significance of this project, gathering an international group of scholars who trace the hidden influences behind it, the debates it sparked, and its adaptations in and impact on later theory.

The essays comprising the volume show the category project’s originality, scope, and ambition, as well as its embedded and blatant shortcomings. This review considers select essays, including contributions that offer a picture of the project as a collective endeavor and those that provide stimulating interpretations of specific arguments the project put forth. First in the anthology, Gregory Schrempp’s essay takes up the issue of relativism—the most provocative of the project’s contentions for many—that Durkheim’s epistemology leads to, comparing it with other “routes to relativism” pioneered by Max Müller and David Hume. For Durkheim, categories of thought are relative because they project a society’s social morphology: the structure of a clan determines its ways of spatial classification, for instance. For Müller and Hume, it is the influence of language and custom, respectively, that renders social categories relative. What is remarkable, as Schrempp shows, is the toggling between universalism and particularism in each of these routes to relativism: although particular social morphologies, linguistic conventions, or cultural practices give rise to specific forms of classification, each of these modalities is universal insofar as it is determinative on a large scale. A social morphology, no matter its particular structure, models a society’s classification criteria.

But how do categories of thought emerge from the morphology of society? Susan Stedman Jones’s essay offers an answer to this question, which lies at the heart of the project, by expounding on Durkheim’s peculiar use of the notion of labor. Social contiguity leads to social cooperation, and from the exchange and synthesis of individual consciousnesses emerge the collective representations Durkheim equates with categories. Jones shows the category project’s ambition, but more so its conflations, epistemological bluntness, and contradictions. The first and most damaging conflation is between concepts and categories, the latter of which Durkheim often takes to be classifications. As Steven Lukes notes in his intellectual biography of Durkheim (1985), Durkheim slides from the claim that the criteria of classification are socially derived to the far stronger claim that cognition itself (the capacity to classify) is socially created. Jones’s discussion of the repetition of action illustrates this point: “[R]epetitions [for Durkheim] form unconscious connections and thus relational structures that rise up to become forms of judgment operated by the understanding. … [T]he division of labor allows intellectual differentiation and thus distinction” (80). Besides recasting what is in effect habit as a metaphysical notion of labor (Arendt’s work-labor distinction comes to mind), Durkheim takes repetition to issue simply from external stimuli rather than from the interplay of stimuli with the body’s own interoceptive and exteroceptive senses. And when Durkheim remarks that repetition forms connections in the unconscious that then form relations, the explanation recedes a step: the unconscious is made to do the explaining but is itself never explained.

Anne Rawls’s essay takes up the moral implications of the category project. Durkheim gave priority to explaining the constitution of moral principles and categories via social practices over expounding the nature of these principles and categories themselves. In this, he anticipated the American pragmatists, Jürgen Habermas, and other twentieth-century theorists who accorded primary significance to intersubjective communication: the medium through which moral precepts emerge and devoid of which they cannot be conceived at all. This prioritization of the constitutive practices of morality over moral precepts was doubly important for Durkheim because he saw modernity as having frayed the forms of solidarity that once secured society’s moral principles. Given this fact, procedures of cooperation must sustain the stability of moral arrangements, but Durkheim never specifies what this procedural framework actually consists of; he tells us only that it is constitutive.

Apart from several essays devoted to Durkheim, there are several on Mauss, who did most to empirically widen the scope of the project, revealing its larger ambition and potential. Rid of Durkheim’s fixation with securing a distinct theoretical standing for sociology, Mauss’s category project actually analyzed the categories per se and ethnographically explored their genesis and representativeness in different cultures. The notion of the social whole that Mauss sees invoked through gift exchange or that of the “total social fact” (fait social total) that he takes the gift to epitomize carries forward much of what Durkheim meant by “totality” (la totalité)and “social fact” (fait social), but leaves behind his encumbering social realism—the idea that society is a thing in its own right, apart from the individuals who make it up.

Erhard Schüttpelz offers a fascinating discussion of Mauss’s multifaceted and tangled views: on the gift and its role as an emblem of the total social fact; on how the notion of mana among Oceanic cultures remains “the first form that other categories still working in our minds have taken: those of substance and cause” (quoted on 143); and on how substance/food is a further manifestation of mana. He also takes up the idea of the totality, “the concept of society in abstract form” (quoted on 137), which makes some social facts into total social facts. Nick Allen’s essay extends the point, drawing on the idea of totality to understand kinship structure, social division, and Indo-European social classificatory ideology. His exposition, however, is too terse and hurried for an introductory reader to fully grasp the arguments made.

Essays by William Watts Miller and Mario Schmidt address what may be Durkheim’s most enduring insight, one that resonates strongly in ethnomethodology and, more recently, affect theory. Schmidt’s reading of the category project as being interested in “finding an answer to the question of how people acquire an experience of categories as universally valid” (115), if correct, salvages its theoretical and empirical purchase. People acquire this experience during the phases of collective effervescence that a society, as “social matter,” undergoes, when its categories are enacted and later systematized. Durkheim does say as much, and it is a most perceptive conclusion from Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. But to take this as Durkheim’s central claim turns a blind eye to everything else he assertively espoused. Much of his thought, in Formes and elsewhere, renders this reading marginal, if only because the occasions of collective effervescence reveal less about the phenomenon of social gathering itself than about the psychic predispositions it activates. More importantly, as Miller notes, it is not clear what led to the constitution of the social realm itself:

Durkheim’s account of effervescence entails key roles for the power of assembly, the power of ritual and symbolism, and the power of art. Yet the assemblies he describes not only involve an already constituted social organization, but, together with their ritual, symbolism, and art come laden with a pre-existing sense of the sacred. Accordingly, a central idea of Les formes can appear dependent on a circularity in which the social is already part of the dynamics that create and recreate the social itself—or in which, to be more exact, it is the socioreligious that creates and recreates itself in this way. (173)

It is on this question of how society is constituted in the first place that Durkheim is criticized by Henri Bergson and the structuralists, chiefly Claude Lévi-Strauss, as essays by Miller and Heike Delitz discuss. Lévi-Strauss’s reading of Bergson took difference, and the classifications it generates, to be more essential than Durkheim allowed to the formation of totems and clans. Bergson also questioned whether a clan’s identification with its totem is really an identification with society itself, arguing that society as a collective entity is imagined; totems cannot simply express a collective that already exists. Yet Bergson’s own alternative, as Miller notes, has its shortcomings: grounding society in the élan vital—the vital impulse of life itself—does not so much solve the problem of constitution as relocate it.

Besides Bergson, the French philosopher-sociologist Louis Weber was a prominent critic of Durkheim and the category project. Clearer and more sober than the rather knotty Bergson, Weber argued that man’s technical ability—activated in interaction with matter—together with his ability for gesture and speech, is more fundamental than magic and social force that Durkheim, Mauss, and Henri Hubert took to be primordial. The latter phenomena, Weber argued, presuppose the former. As Johannes Schick notes in his essay, Weber’s emphasis on the faculties of intelligence and speech and on ecological interaction presented an ontogenetic argument, one that exposes how the Durkheim School took for granted the existence of society (as found among the Australian Aborigines, for example), bypassing the foraging and nomadic life out of which social groups, in their varied morphologies, first formed. Schick also notes that Weber locates the genesis of thought not in technical knowhow but in a “form of thought that is detached from action” which leads “to Weber’s paradoxical argument that reflexive thinking began in the illogical, namely religious, social thought, where the importance of ideation is reversed: as soon as man entertains ‘immaterial relations with things, beings and gods, . . . ideation is no longer accidental, but becomes essential’” (211). Against the homo duplex of Mauss and Durkheim—the individual as simultaneously individual and social being—Weber held we are duplex in intellectu: technical and ideational.

The essays in the third part of the anthology, “Forgotten allies and secret students,” highlight the innovative work of the project’s other affiliates and auxiliaries. Stefan Czarnowski, the subject of Martin Zillinger’s essay, analyzed the religious topography of Rome to complicate the view of space and the sacred that Mauss and Hubert had offered, treating both categories as relational. In his reconception, the sacred is territorially organized: divine power is divided across bounded spaces, each god’s influence ending at specific borders, and mana itself varies from place to place depending on the qualities and limits of each territory. Marcel Granet, the subject of Robet André LaFleur’s essay, transformed the project’s idea of classificatory systems by emphasizing movement over static structure. In Granet’s account of Chinese thought, categories like yin–yang and the five phases are dynamic, constantly transforming into one another in cyclical processes. His key contribution, on LaFleur’s reading, is to show classification as fluid, relational, and perpetually in motion, rather than fixed and rigid.

Ulrich van Loyen offers an intriguing discussion of Robert Hertz’s essay on the preeminence of the right hand across cultures. Hertz argued that the dominance of the right hand is not natural but socially produced through symbolic classification as well as practical and economic activities, wherein coordinated, efficient labor favors the privileging of one hand. The right/left opposition encodes a broader moral dualism—sacred/pure versus profane/impure—rooted in the condition of homo duplex and reinforced through everyday practices and labor. Van Loyen carries his argument into the present: although modern developments seemed to promise liberation from such constraints (an ambidextrous future), society has instead multiplied forms of individuality without abandoning the underlying dualisms. “[I]t seems as if homo duplex were constantly in need of re-establishing polar orders: even if queer, they want a marriage, and also a wedding ceremony; even if they want to step out of traditional role models, they welcome the dichotomous symbolism associated with them” (269). Van Loyen concludes that “the ongoing translation and connection of oppositions and analogies seems to be a tangible necessity, and as such situates itself at the core of any culture and any person embedded in it” (269).

Jean-François Bert’s essay highlights the tensions within the Durkheimian tradition regarding the relation between structure, experience, and social totality. Lévi-Strauss interpreted Mauss as moving beyond empiricism toward deeper structural realities, aligning with a Durkheimian search for underlying forms of social life. However, critics such as Georges Gurvitch emphasized Mauss’s pluralism and insisted that total social facts are inherently multidimensional and embedded within broader social contexts, rather than reducible to formal structures. From a Durkheimian perspective, the debate centers on how collective representations mediate between objective structures and lived experience. Bert positions later work by Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault as critiquing but extending this framework by foregrounding practice, contingency, and the historical variability of symbolic systems, while retaining the Durkheimian concern with how social forms persist and organize knowledge. Overall, the discussion underscores the enduring Durkheimian problem: how to reconcile collective structures with the fluid, contingent, and historically situated nature of social life.

Jean-Christophe Marcel’s essay focuses on Maurice Halbwachs, whose work on collective memory has received increasing attention in recent decades. For Halbwachs, the stability of collective representations is grounded in their spatial inscription, as social groups anchor their identity in material environments. Collective memory, as socially framed and cumulatively transmitted knowledge, is continuously reconstructed in relation to present concerns. Although Halbwachs’s account can tend toward a metaphysical and organic view of society when he describes how memories are sustained and reshaped so a society may “survive,” he highlights how memory’s localization in space lends it coherence and durability, while processes such as concentration, fragmentation, and mythologization enable its adaptation. Through these dynamics, collective memory both reflects and sustains the group’s ongoing effort at self-definition and persistence.

The Social Origins of Thought sketches a many-sided profile of the category project. One failing of the project, and of Durkheim especially, is apparent throughout the essays: a tugging toward the social pole of homo duplex while letting go of the individual pole completely. But this is not the reason, or at least not the main one, that the Durkheimian strain of sociology declined in the post-war social sciences, despite periodic revivals. After all, social constructionism reached its height during the same time. Durkheimian social constructionism remained marked by a tendency to hypostatize—to treat the social as a thing—that it inherited from the positivism that Durkheim was immersed in and generally advocated for. Despite being a humanist, ironically, his holism and social realism left little of the human in his otherwise original and astute analyses. The exaggerated focus on the social is not, in itself, the problem of the category project; the problem is the ready slippage from emphasis into hypostatization. Reasons for that slippage are as much historical and biographical as they are theoretical, lying in the social and intellectual milieux of Durkheim and his collaborators in the category project. It is unfortunate that none of the essays offer such a historicization of the School and the project’s particular brand of social theory.

Finally, it is plain that the category project has not stimulated, or at least not sustained, interest among mainstream epistemologists. The reasons are many—not least, as Wendy James’s concluding essay suggests, the blinkered view of academic (mainly analytic) philosophers—but one stands out, and its omission from the volume is conspicuous: the scale at which Durkheimian epistemology operates. In eschewing the site of cognition, the individual, and with it the significance of subjective reflection, Durkheim erased from epistemology the very processes that are unquestioningly part of the thinking subject. Various anthropologists working in cognitive and psychological anthropology, from Roy D’Andrade through Maurice Bloch to Dan Sperber, to name a few, have fared better than Durkheim in their exchanges with social psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists. Part of the reason—besides the privilege of writing a century later—is that they do not render thinking and subjectivity themselves external, even as they show how deeply social, cultural, and evolutionary forces imprint upon them and they in turn upon those larger forces.

Works Cited

Lukes, Steven. 1985. Emile Durkheim, His life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study. Stanford University Press.