Dustin Garlitz

This article presents Durkheim as a Neo-Kantian social thinker and a source of the theory of emotional contagion. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is examined as Durkheim’s paradigm case of Neo-Kantianism. He is first considered among the intellectual context of French Neo-Kantianism and its figures Charles Renouvier, Émile Boutroux, and Octave Hamelin, all whom were influential in his formative years. Durkheim’s Neo-Kantianism in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is then juxtaposed to the Neo-Kantian legal philosophy of Emil Lask and Hans Kelsen. Agued is that Durkheim’s notions of distortion and emotional contagion are his leading contributions to Neo-Kantianism.

The article focuses on the scholarly career of German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno. Examined are his leading publications, his notable teachers and collaborators, and his time in exile in the United States, among other places. Special emphasis is placed on his negative dialectics, including how this perspective formed a method of communication in itself. Adorno's contributions to the Frankfurt School, and to 20th-century Continental philosophy, sociology, and musicology, are also covered.

Surplus labor and crime have complemented one another since the nineteenth century, when social philosopher Karl Marx propounded a now classical theory of surplus labor, exploitation, and crime in the material sense. As illustrated in Volume 1 of Capital (Marx, 1867/1976), Marx's concept of “surplus labor”—a type of unpaid labor—represented a moral injustice, a sort of crime against humanity. In the twentieth century a distinct form of surplus labor was linked to crime in a wider range of studies, which redefined this concept as labor surplus or surplus in labor. As an expression of the twentieth-century neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, first published in 1933, was among the first studies to link surplus labor and crime where the former was meeting the criteria both for a classical theory concept of “surplus labor” and for a revised concept of “surplus in labor” or “labor surplus.” Most studies along a sociological–criminological spectrum were now dedicated to this revised concept.