Halbwachs, Maurice (1877–1945)

Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist in the Durkheimian tradition, conducted a variety of sociological projects. His most important contribution to sociological thought was his work on memory and knowledge, including Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925, Social Frameworks of Memory) and the posthumously published work La mémoire collective (1950, On Collective Memory). The latter book, despite its skeletal character, contains Halbwachs's thoughts on the relation between time, space, and collective memory, along with crucial definitions and applications of distinctions between individual, historical, and collective memories. It also includes a sketch on relations between legal institutions and collective memory. Scholars have recently rediscovered Halbwachs's works on the sociology of knowledge, but they still have not received the recognition they deserve.

Halbwachs was born in Reims, France. He was from a Catholic Alsatian family that left Alsace after Prussia annexed it following the Franco-Prussian War. He studied philosophy at the elitist Ecole normale supérieure with Henri Bergson (1859–1941), which left its mark. Halbwachs became a lifelong reformist socialist in the tradition of Jean Jaures (1859–1914).

Halbwachs decided to switch to the emerging field of sociology as he moved from a Bergsonian individualistic position to a Durkheimian collectivist view of society. He acquired doctoral degrees in law and letters and accepted a chair in sociology andpedagogy in Strasbourg, where he worked with the historians Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944), the founders of the Annales School of social and intellectual history, and the psychologist Charles Blondel (1876–1939). In 1935, at the age of fifty-eight, he took a chair at the Sorbonne and was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Shortly before his death, he accepted a chair of collective psychology at the Collège de France. He died in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.

Three themes underline Halbwachs's work. The first is the problem of time, which he took from Bergson and developed in Durkheimian terms. The second is the relation between sociology and psychology, and the third, the relation between sociology and history. All three themes are present in his pioneering studies on collective memory.

According to Halbwachs, collective memory is neither a mystical collective mind nor a preordained phenomenon; rather, it is a socially constructed phenomenon. There are as many collective memories as there are groups and institutions in society. Collective memory resides in a coherent social group, but the individuals who are members of the group do the remembering. Every collective memory depends on a social group delineated in time and space. Halbwachs's work is still waiting for sociolegal scholars to discover it.