Emile Durkheim developed his sociology in part by pointing to the insufficiency of contractual explanations of society. This article examines several iterations of ‘the contract’ in light of the rediscovery of Durkheim’s (2011 [1894–1895]) lectures on Hobbes’ De Cive. By viewing these recovered lectures alongside his canonical texts, we find three ways in which Durkheim distinguished his sociology from political and economic understandings of the social, in contrast with the contractarianism of Hobbes, the contractualism of Rousseau and the ‘contractual solidarity’ of Spencer. In his accounts of these thinkers, Durkheim explicates both his philosophical anthropology and his ontology of the social. Whereas contractual explanations of society treat the social as artificial and/or a mere aggregate formation, the social for Durkheim arises spontaneously and exists as a sui generis formation. Through the clarification of these conceptual coordinates, the nature of the social and its relationship with the political for each of these four thinkers come more fully into view. The article concludes with a consideration of the problem of the dissolution of society, pointing to a limit point or horizon for what is thinkable within Durkheimian sociology.

中文翻译：

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契约思想和涂尔干的社会理论：再评价

埃米尔·涂尔干 (Emile Durkheim) 部分地通过指出社会契约解释的不足而发展了他的社会学。本文根据涂尔干（2011 [1894-1895]）关于霍布斯的《De Cive》的讲座的重新发现，考察了“契约”的几次迭代。通过查看这些恢复的讲座以及他的经典文本，我们发现涂尔干将他的社会学与对社会的政治和经济理解区分开来的三种方式，与霍布斯的契约主义、卢梭的契约主义和斯宾塞的“契约团结”形成对比。在他对这些思想家的描述中，涂尔干解释了他的哲学人类学和他的社会本体论。鉴于社会的契约解释将社会视为人为的和/或纯粹的集合形式，涂尔干的社会性是自发产生的，并作为一种独特的形式存在。通过对这些概念坐标的澄清，对于这四位思想家中的每一个来说，社会的本质及其与政治的关系都得到了更充分的认识。文章最后考虑了社会解体的问题，指出了涂尔干社会学中可以思考的东西的极限点或视野。