The early 1870s had brought a flood of works in France whose very titles evoked the sense of political impotence and national catastrophe: La Fin du monde latin, 1871! Les Premières Phases d'une décadence, Des Causes de la décadence française, La Chute de la France, République ou décadence?, La France dégénérée. The defeat of the Second Empire had not even involved a coalition of European powers, as had been the case in 1815. War in 1870 had been followed by the Commune. To writers like Taine and Le Bon in the last quarter of the century, that demise was only comprehensible through the optic of racial-historical degeneration. Durkheim, a very different writer, was also captivated by the medical analogy of sickness and health, and indeed by scientific models in general. As Stephen Lukes tells us, he was attracted ‘far more than any of his interpreters have realized by the language of “collective forces” and “social currents” and in general, the analogy of thermodynamics and electricity’. Durkheim perceived 1870, year of defeat, as the moment of inception of a sociology in which certain pathologies of ‘hypercivilisation’ were opened up to investigation.

Durkheim used new categories of heredity, pathology and nervousness such as neurasthenia to explain social phenomena, and above all the vexed question of the forces and limits of social solidarity.