The social fact is the concept with which Émile Durkheim defined the very subject matter of sociology. Set out in The Rules of Sociological Method, it was designed to mark off a domain of reality that belonged to sociology alone — one that could not be captured by psychology or biology. If sociology was to be a genuine science, Durkheim argued, it needed its own kind of object, and the social fact supplied it.

Definition

Durkheim defined a social fact as any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exercising over the individual an external constraint; or, more broadly, as any way of acting that is general throughout a given society while existing in its own right, independent of any individual manifestation. Social facts are therefore not the properties of persons but of the collectivity. Examples include legal codes, moral rules, religious dogmas, systems of currency, language and customary practice. Each of these confronts the individual as something already made, encountered rather than invented.

The three characteristics

Three features together identify a phenomenon as a social fact.

  • Externality. The social fact exists outside individual consciousness. Laws, beliefs and conventions precede our birth and outlast our death; we inherit them ready-formed rather than creating them ourselves.
  • Constraint. The social fact exercises a power of coercion over conduct. This constraint may be visible, as in the sanctions of law, or subtle, as in the disapproval that meets a breach of custom. Its presence is felt most sharply when one attempts to resist it.
  • Generality. The social fact is diffused widely across the society, shared by its members in general rather than being peculiar to any one of them. Its collective character is what distinguishes it from a merely individual habit.

Study social facts as things

From this definition Durkheim drew his most famous methodological rule — that social facts must be treated as things. To treat them as things is to approach them objectively, from the outside, as realities whose properties are to be discovered through observation rather than assumed through introspection. The sociologist must set aside preconceptions and personal sentiment, define phenomena by their external characteristics, and seek the causes of a social fact in other social facts rather than in individual states of mind. This rule of objectivity was Durkheim's guarantee that sociology could proceed scientifically.

Types of social facts

Durkheim distinguished between different kinds of social fact. Normal social facts are those found generally throughout a society at a given stage of its development and bound up with the conditions of collective life; a certain rate of crime, he provocatively argued, is normal in this sense. Pathological facts depart from this general type and signal disorder. He also separated more crystallised, institutional facts — codified in law, structure and organisation — from what he called social currents, the freer collective feelings, such as waves of enthusiasm or indignation, that sweep through an assembled crowd and reveal the constraining force of society in action.

Criticisms

The concept has drawn objections. Critics accuse Durkheim of reification — of treating society as a thing existing above individuals and endowed with a life of its own. Interpretive sociologists argue that social reality is constituted through meaning and interaction, so that facts cannot be treated as external objects without losing sight of how actors understand them. Others note a tension in Durkheim's own work between the external constraint he emphasised and the internalised moral commitment through which norms actually operate.

Relevance

Despite these criticisms, the social fact remains foundational. It established that society is a level of reality in its own right, deserving of independent study, and it justified the sociological method of explaining collective phenomena by collective causes. The concept underpins later structural and functionalist analysis, and it continues to anchor debates over whether and how sociology is a science. For the student, it is the clearest single statement of what makes an explanation sociological.

References & further reading

  1. Durkheim, É. (1895). The Rules of Sociological Method.