Abstract
Émile Durkheim’s sociology founding watches the comeback of the Thomistic philosophy in France, resulting from an “awkward alliance” between the Catholic church and the intellectuals. This project intended to thwart the spread of social sciences, especially Durkheim’s sociology, and stablish the catholic sociology, in order to allow the Catholic church to recover its prestigiousness in the modern society. The “catholic sociology” is substantiated by the Thomistic philosophy and Leo xiii’s social teaching. After pointing out the conflict between the catholic sociology and Durkheim’s sociology in France, the article aims to analyze the mechanisms that spread the French neo-Thomism in Brazil and its influences on the founding of the Brazilian catholic sociology, afterwards, it is intended to identify the social agents and the institutions that contributed to the professionalization of the sociology’s teaching. Historically and bibliographically, the article is located on an intellectual’s sociology, reserving a special place to Alceu Amoroso Lima, main author in the corpus of the Brazilian intellectual catholic tradition. The research shows that Amoroso Lima is aligned to the French social Catholics for his social origin, his academic path, which combines university failures and reconversion of the social and symbolic capitals; his position on the philosophic field, linked to Bergson’s spiritualism in the beginning, and to Jacques Maritain’s neo-Thomism later, are prerogatives that give him the right to enter on the social science being opposite to the academic sociology through the institutionalization.
Keywords:
Catholic sociology; Durkheim’s sociology; Social fact; Neo-Thomism