Durkheim and Leisure

Durkheim dominated sociological thought of his time and its development and became one of the pillars of the international literature on functionalist thought in general and on leisure in particular with direct or indirect effect on numerous theoretical or research works in this cognitive field. Nevertheless, reading Durkheim’s work only through the perspective of functionalism is a narrow approach to the study of leisure and society. In the present text, we leave an “open window” in a reading of Durkheim’s theoretical view, as a radical critique of industrialization and a complex (potentially non-positivist and certainly not static) image of modern humans and how they participate in social phenomena.