Paul Fauconnet

Paul Fauconnet (1874 to 1938) was a French sociologist, best known as a contributor to L'Année Sociologique, the journal of Émile Durkheim's school. Born in Saint-Denis, he qualified in philosophy in 1892 and took a doctorate in philosophy in 1895, adding a further doctorate in law in 1920, although his interest in law was purely scholarly and he never practiced as a lawyer. He became a professor at the faculty of letters of the University of Toulouse in 1907, a lecturer in Paris in 1921 and held a chair there from 1932. His dissertation, La responsabilité: Étude de sociologie (1920), adopted and developed Durkheim's teaching on the nature of criminal justice and punishment. His contribution on sociology to La Grande Encyclopédie in 1901, written with Marcel Mauss, is the source from which Durkheim derived his definition of sociology as the science of institutions, of their genesis and functioning.