Maurice Halbwachs
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Maurice Halbwachs (1877 - 1945) was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory in his book La Mémoire collective (1950).
Vita
Born in Reims, Halbwachs attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he studied philosophy with Henri Bergson, who influenced him greatly. He agregated in Philosophy in 1901. He taught at various lycées before traveling to Germany in 1904, where he studied at the University of Göttingen and worked on cataloging Leibniz's papers. He was nominated to co-edit an edition of Leibniz's work which never came to fruition. He returned to France in 1905 where he met Émile Durkheim and became interested in sociology. He soon joined the editorial board of L'Année Sociologique, where he worked with François Simiand editing the Economics and Statistics section. In 1909 he returned to Germany to study Marxism and economics in Berlin.
Throughout World War I, Halbwachs worked at the War Ministry. Shortly after the end of the war, he became professor of sociology and pedagogy at the University of Strasbourg. He remained in this position for over a decade, taking leave for a year as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, when he was called to the Sorbonne in 1935. There he taught sociology and worked closely with Marcel Mauss and served as the editor of Annales de Sociologie, the successor journal to L'Année Sociologique. In 1944 he received one of France's highest honors, a chair at the Collège de France in Social Psychology. A longtime socialist, Halbwachs was detained by the Gestapo after the Nazi occupation of Paris and deported to Buchenwald, where he died of dysentery in 1945.
Part of his books were offered by his widow to the library of the Centre d'études sociologiques and are now held at the Human and Social Sciences Library Paris Descartes-CNRS.
Main ideas
Maurice Halbwachs' most important contribution to the field of sociology came in his book La Mémoire collective, 1950 ("The Collective Memory"), in which he advanced the thesis that a society can have a collective memory and that this memory is dependent upon the "cadre" or framework within which a group is situated in society. Thus, there is not only an individual memory but also a group memory that exists outside of and lives beyond the individual. An individual's understanding of the past is strongly linked to this group consciousness because every person can contribute a different memory or perspective to the collective group memory. Group memory is also different for every group that experiences a certain event, therefore "every group has its own collective memory and that collective memory differs from the collective memory of other groups. This idea of memory being pursued proves people's expression of commemoration in our culture. Commemoration offers collective memory ties to society and its conceptions where physical monuments and rituals fix and affirm collectivity.
Halbwachs Collective Memory includes two laws governing how this form of memory will evolve: a Law of Fragmentation, and a Law of Concentration.
Halbwachs also wrote an important book on suicide, Les Causes du suicide, 1930 ("The Causes of Suicide"). In this book he followed the footsteps of his mentor Émile Durkheim (who was also a French Sociologist) expanding and elaborating upon the former's theories on suicide. Specifically, he focused on ideas such as, the ways in which rural and urban styles of life explain variations in suicide rates. Halbwachs also continued to further Durkheim's conceptualization of how specific family styles and religious backgrounds alter rates of suicide.
Halbwachs included in his Les Cadres Sociaux de la Memoire (1952) the significance of the collective memory operating on the systems of family, religion and social communities.
Halbwachs takes an interesting perspective regarding the relationship between memory and history. He believed that memory and history oppose each other when it comes to reliability. Memory can be transformed based on perspective, which makes it a questionable form of scholarly appreciation for the past. Whereas historians analyze history from a completely unbiased perspective, analyzing it in a critical way from a distance.f
Halbwachs contributed to the world of social psychology as well with his thesis on La Classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie which translates to, "The Working Class and the Standards of Living". This work allowed Halbwachs to analyze and observe how working-class families managed their budgets. He discovered that families and individuals not only plan out their budget for what they need in the moment but what they also need in the future, which forces them to put into perspective what is necessary in the moment. His research is a modification of Durkheim's theory of collective representation.
