Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Born Apr. 10, 1857, in Paris; died there Mar. 13, 1939. French philosopher and positivist psychologist whose views were close to those of the sociological school of E. Durkheim.

Lévy-Bruhl is best known for his theory of primitive “prelogical” thinking. He opposed the views of E. Tylor and other evolutionists who held that primitive human beings (”the philosophizing savage”) thought just as logically as modern-day people. Lévy-Bruhl maintained that in primitive societies, “collective representations” (a concept developed by the Durkheim school), differing in principle from individual ideas, predominate.

According to Lévy-Bruhl, prelogical thinking, which is related to collective representations, is governed not by logical laws of identity, contradiction, and so forth, but by the law of participation. Although Lévy-Bruhl thought that different types of thinking are characteristic of different social structures, he did not feel that prelogical thinking was characteristic of backward peoples alone: in his personal experience, “primitive man” acts and thinks like modern man. On the other hand, even in contemporary life there are phenomena (religion and ethics) that reflect collective representations, which are characterized by the principle of participation, and the inapplicability of logical laws.

Although somewhat sketchy and one-sided, Lévy-Bruhl’s views are of interest as an attempt to study historical changes in the psychology of thinking.