Maurice Halbwachs


Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory. Halbwachs also contributed to the sociology of knowledge with his La Topographie Legendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte; study of the spatial infrastructure of the New Testament.

Early life and education

Born in Reims, France, Halbwachs attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he studied philosophy with Henri Bergson, who had a big influence on his thought. Halbwachs' early work on memory was all in some measure pursued to coincide with Bergson's view on the subject of memory being a particularly personal and subjective experience. He aggregated 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 and met Émile Durkheim, who sparked his interest in sociology. Initially, when first meeting Durkheim, Halbwachs was looking for advice on how to move from his previous focus on Philosophy to Sociology. Halbwachs also began to focus on scientific objectivism rather than his Bergsonian Individualism. He soon joined the editorial board of L'Année Sociologique, where he worked with François Simiand editing the Economics and Statistics sections. In 1909 he returned to Germany to study Marxism and economics in Berlin.
He also had a son, Pierre Halbwachs, who influenced Deleuze in the 1940s.
From Deleuze ABCedaire :
"Deleuze says that it was there in Deauville, without his parents and his younger brother, where he was completely nil in his studies, until something happened, such that Deleuze ceased being an idiot. Until Deauville, and the year in the lycee there that he spent during the "funny war," he had been null in class, but at Deauville, he met a young teacher, Pierre Halbwachs, with fragile health, only one eye, so deferred from military duty. For Deleuze, this encounter was an awakening, and he became something of a disciple to this young "maître". Halbwachs would take him out to the beach in winter, on the dunes, and introduced him, for example, to Gide's _Les Nourritures terrestres_, to Anatole France, Baudelaire, other works by Gide, and Deleuze was completely transformed. But since they spent so much time together, people began to talk, and the lady in whose pension Deleuze and his brother were staying warned Deleuze about Halbwachs, then wrote to his parents about it. The brothers were to return to Paris, but then the Germans invaded, and so they took off on their bicycles to meet their parents in Rochefort... and en route, they ran into Halbwachs with his father! Later in life, Deleuze met Halbwachs, without the same admiration, but at age 14, Deleuze feels he was completely right."

Teaching

Throughout World War I, Halbwachs worked at the War Ministry. Beginning in 1919, 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. During this time, Halbwachs dedicated his time to in-depth research in the field where sociology and psychology overlap.

Death

A longtime socialist, Halbwachs was detained by the Gestapo in Paris in July, 1944 after protesting the arrest of his Jewish father-in-law. He was deported to the concentration camp, Buchenwald, where he died of dysentery in February 1945.
In 1940, Halbwachs' brother in-law, Georges Basch committed suicide. His parents in-law Victor and Mme Basch aged 84 years old at the time were murdered by Germans.
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.
Towards the end of his life, Halbwachs was recognized for his contributions to sociology. He was elected into the Conservative Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He was also recognized as the Vice President of the French Psychological Society, while also being called to chair at Sorbonne.

Main ideas

Halbwachs' most important contribution to the field of sociology came in his book La Mémoire collective, 1950, 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 a society. Thus, there is not only an individual memory, but also a group memory that exists outside of and lives beyond the individual. Consequently, an individual's understanding of the past is strongly linked to this group consciousness. This idea of memory Halbwachs pursued to prove through peoples expression of commemoration in our culture. Commemoration offers collective memory tie 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. The two laws are called a Law of Fragmentation, and a Law of Concentration.
Halbwachs also wrote an important book on suicide, Les Causes du suicide, 1930. In this book he followed the footsteps of his mentor Émile Durkheim, 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 the significance of the collective memory operating on the systems of family, religion and social communities.

Published works