Book excerpt: Excerpt from Professional Ethics and Civic Morals His work, brought out by the Faculty of Law in the University of Istanbul, is a collection of some hitherto unpublished lectures of Emile Durkheim. In 1934, in Paris, I had set about the writing of a thesis for a doctorate in law on The Concept of the State held by the Pioneers in the French School of Sociology. It then seemed to me that before all else I must make a study of the precise ideas and thought of Durkheim, as founder of this school, on the problem of the State. As a sociologist, Durkheim had made no special study of this problem and was satisfied in his published works merely to raise certain questions relative to it. On that account I came to the conclusion that relevant and detailed exposition might perhaps be found in his unpublished work, if any such existed. To this end I approached the well-known ethnographer Marcel Mauss, the nephew of Durkheim. He received me most cordially and spoke of his great feeling for Turkey, which he had visited in 1908. He then went on to show me a number of manuscripts with the title The Nature of Morals and of Rights. These, he said, were a course of lectures given by Durkheim between the years 1890 and 1900 at Bordeaux and repeated at the Sorbonne, first in 1904, and then in 1912, and revived in lectures some years before his death. Mauss had no hesitation in entrusting them to me, a fact which I recall with pleasure, and he handed over to me at my request a typescript copy of part of the manuscripts likely to be of especial interest to me. I take this opportunity of paying tribute to the memory of the late scholar: I owe him a debt for his invaluable help. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.