The idea of value neutrality was hotly contested by social thinkers throughout the 1920s and 1930s with Talcott Parsons (1937) championing the positions of both
Durkheim and Weber against the idea.
Durkheim had asked people to picture a tall and handsome prince riding through the countryside on a beautiful horse, wearing his finest and looking for a lovely maiden.
I quoted extensively from
Durkheim to document his model of binding social classifications, and his account of the 'internal relationships', such as kinship systems, which are the basis for the elementary categories of religious life (p172).
In addition to numerous scholarly articles on
Durkheim and his era, Fournier has published two works on Marcel Mauss,
Durkheim's nephew and one of his closest disciples.
Durkheim and the Internet: Sociolinguistics and the Sociological Imagination