LÉVY-BRUHL, LUCIEN

LÉVY-BRUHL, LUCIEN (1857–1939), French anthropologist, philosopher, and psychologist. Born and educated in Paris, Lévy-Bruhl taught philosophy at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1885–95), and later at the Sorbonne where he was appointed to the chair of history of modern philosophy. Here he was a colleague of emile durkheim , and wrote a series of anthropological works on various aspects of preliterate culture to demonstrate the nature of primitive mentality. Lévy-Bruhl endeavored to show that the primitives' thought was indifferent to the laws of logic and was essentially mystical. Later in his notebooks published posthumously he retracted this idea and stated that prelogical and preliterate societies would employ logical thought to meet the practical demands of natural environment. Lévy-Bruhl's works on this subject evoked criticism from Durkheim in Les formes elémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912; The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1947) and from franz boas . Lévy-Bruhl revised this idea in later books but further developed the idea of a "special sense" or mysticism. Although his views on primitive mentality are not accepted, Lévy-Bruhl's theories have had diverse influence on some Jungian psychologists in their interpretations of the relation of archetypes of the unconscious to primitive mentality, and of the phenomenon of "participation." (Ephraim Fischoff) His son HENRI (1884–1964), born in Paris, taught law successively at Grenoble, Lille, and Paris until he was deposed   during the German occupation of France in World War II. After 1945, he founded with G. Gurvitch and G. Le-Bres the Centre d'Etudes Sociologiques, recreated the Année Sociologique, and became one of the directors of the Division of Social Sciences at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Henri Lévy-Bruhl belonged to the Durkheimian School in French sociology; he specialized in the sociology of law, particularly Roman law and the ethnology of law, and he also worked in the field of criminology. Among his major works are Le témoignage instrumentaire en droit romain (1910), Histoire de la lettre de change en France (1933), Quelques problèmes du très ancien droit romain (1934), Initiation aux recherches de sociologie juridique (1947), and Aspects sociologiques du droit (1955). (Werner J. Cahnman) -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Les carnets de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1949), preface; J. Cazeneuve, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, sa vie, son oeuvre, avec un exposé de sa philosophie (1963), incl. bibl.; idem, in: IESS, 9 (1968), 263–6; Mélanges Henri Lévy-Bruhl (1959), incl. bibl.