Egyptian intellectuals chose Le Bon over Durkheim despite hearing both

Evidence

A number of Egyptians attended Durkheim’s lectures on education and social theory at the Sorbonne, including the writer and future education minister Taha Husayn. But the works on education and social theory that Taha Husayn and others chose to translate into Arabic were not those of Durkheim. They chose instead the writings of a better known contemporary, who in 1895, the same year as The Rules of Sociological Method appeared, published a famous work on The Crowd. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 391

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did Le Bon win out over Durkheim among Egyptian translators? The answer likely involves Le Bon’s explanatory simplicity versus Durkheim’s more complex methodological demands.
• SEED: A comparative intellectual-history angle on how colonized elites select from the metropole’s canon — which theorists get translated and why.