The Psychological Character of Social Facts and their Reality (1895)

Abstract

Thank you very much for the kind thought you had of sending me your book. I read it with great interest, or rather re-read it, for I had followed your articles in the Revue de Métaphysique. Moreover, I have had the opportunity to see that it was appreciated by everybody, as it deserves. It is a study which cannot fail to bring great honour to us on the other side of the Rhine; and by showing the Germans with what care and kind feeling we are studying them, it will perhaps bring them to display more interest in what we are doing. For — and I do not know whether I am mistaken — it seems to me that Germany is committing the same error as we did before 1870 by shutting itself off from the outside world.

Reprinted in Revue française de sociologie, 17, 2, 1976, pp. 166–7.