Robert Hertz

Robert Hertz (1881 to 1915) was a French sociologist, born at Saint-Cloud, who was killed in active service during World War I. A student at the École Normale Supérieure, he passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1904, finishing first in his class, and after a brief period of study at the British Museum in England he began doctoral work with Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. He was an important member of the Année Sociologique team, and his specialty was the sociology of religion. He is most known for two early papers, A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death (1907) and The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: a Study in Religious Polarity (1909), later translated into English together as Death and the Right Hand. His work influenced Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and many consider it a precursor to Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism. His doctoral dissertation, Sin and Expiation in Primitive Societies, was left uncompleted, and an article of 1913 on the festival of Saint Besse is considered by some the first anthropological contribution to the study of the Alps. He was posthumously made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.