LÉVY-BRUHL, Lucien. – Philosopher and sociologist, born in Paris on 10 April 1857, died there on 13 March 1939. Professor at the Sorbonne, where he succeeded E. Boutroux, member of the Institute, a student of sociology according to the system of A. Comte, he later approached that of the sociological school founded by E. Durkheim, whose vast ethnological documentation he appreciated, but rejected the rigorous schematism that sacrificed the individual element to the exclusive benefit of the social.
Of his philosophical works, the most notable is: *La morale et la science des moeurs* (Paris 1903). All his other volumes, six in number, are directed toward investigating the mentality of primitives in their manner (which he, with a term he later repudiated, called «prelogical» insofar as it is independent of our logical schemes) of intuiting reality, a manner he described as characterized by a particular «participation» that the primitive feels between himself and the world surrounding him, and which determines his thought and action. To this idea of participation (though later excluding that it has the value of a law) he remained always faithful. Other works: *Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures* (Paris 1910, 2nd ed., 1923), in which he analyzes this mentality and illustrates the concept of «participation»; *La mentalité primitive* (ibid. 1924), devoted in particular to the concept of causality among primitives; *L'âme primitive* (ibid. 1927), in which the primitive is said to conceive the soul as a «mystical» force present in all beings; *Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalité primitive* (ibid. 1931), on the manner in which the primitive conceives the supernatural world; *La mythologie primitive* (ibid. 1935), on the particular truth proper to myth and its consequent capacity to revive reality when recalled or reconsidered; *L'expérience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs* (ibid. 1938), which crowns all of L.-B.’s work in this field, with particular regard to the function of the symbol. M. Leenhardet published posthumously the *Carnets de L. L.-B.* (Paris 1949), in which this diligent scholar reconsidered and noted, with an ever-vigilant intellectual fervor, the subject matter of his work.
Lévy-Bruhl’s work is notable for the abundance of material utilized, which, within the framework of the six cited volumes, examines all aspects of the life and thought of primitives. It represents a mitigation of the sociological exclusivism of Durkheim’s school, from which the mental activity of the individual remains alien. However, the idea of mystical-magical participation, on the basis of which he reconstructs the mentality of the primitive, ends up reducing the concept of normal causality to nothing. Hence objections have been raised against him not only by philosophers but also by ethnologists of the historical-cultural school, the latter of whom have also reproached him for using ethnographic material from distant and diverse ethnic groups, contrary to one of the fundamental canons of that school.