S. Romi Mukherjee is General Secretary of the French Society for Durkheimian Studies; he is also Maître de conferences in Political Theory and the History of Religions at L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and Adjunct Professor in Global Studies at the University of Chicago-Paris Center. In addition to writing on the Durkheimian and Post-Durkheimian traditions, he has also published articles on cannibalism, the crisis of French Republicanism, anomie and political depression, and Deleuze and Guattari. He is currently writing a book on the sacred.

• Abstracts. 1. Introduction: On violence as the negativity of the Durkheimian: between anomie, sacrifice, and effervescence (S. Romi Mukherjee).2. Durkheim’s theory of violence (Mike Gane).3. Durkheimism: a model for external constraint without a theory of violence (Jacques Plouin).4. Durkheim, the question of violence and the Paris Commune of 1871 (Susan Stedman Jones).5. Durkheimian sociology, biology and the theory of social conflict (Jean-Christophe Marcel and Dominique Guillo).6. ‘‘Change only for the benefit of society as a whole’’: pragmatism, knowledge and regimes of violence (Ivan Strenski).7. Festival, vacation, war: Roger Caillois and the politics of paroxysm (S. Romi Mukherjee).8. Durkheim’s concept of de´re`glement retranslated, Parsons’s reading of Durkheim re-parsed: an examination of post-emotional displacement, scapegoating and responsibility at Abu Ghraib (Stjepan G. Mestrovic and Ryan Ashley Caldwell).9. ‘‘A new kind of fear’’: Jean Baudrillard’s neo-Durkheimian theory of mass-mediated suicide (Alexander Riley).From political emergencies and states of exception to exceptional states and emergent politics: a neo-Durkheimian alternative to Agamben (Ronjon Paul Datta).References.Index.