Émile Durkheim was among the principal architects of modern sociology, and he did more than any of his contemporaries to secure the discipline a place within the university. Where earlier writers had described society in broad philosophical strokes, Durkheim insisted that social life could be studied with the same rigour as the natural sciences — through observation, comparison and the patient testing of hypotheses against evidence. His conviction that society is a reality of its own kind, irreducible to the individuals who compose it, remains the founding premise of much sociological thought.
Life and project
Durkheim was born in Épinal, in the Lorraine region of France, into a family of rabbis. Although he turned away from a religious vocation, the moral seriousness of that upbringing marked his lifelong concern with solidarity, obligation and the sources of social cohesion. He trained at the École Normale Supérieure, taught at Bordeaux — where in 1887 he took up one of the first posts devoted to social science in France — and later moved to the Sorbonne. In 1898 he founded the journal L'Année sociologique, which gathered a school of talented collaborators and gave French sociology an institutional base. His overriding project was to demonstrate that sociology possessed a distinctive subject matter and method, and thereby to justify its independence from psychology and philosophy alike.
Social facts
The cornerstone of Durkheim's programme is the concept of the social fact. A social fact is any way of acting, thinking or feeling that is general across a society, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of constraint by which it imposes itself upon conduct. Language, law, currency, religious belief and moral rule are all social facts: the individual is born into them, encounters them as given, and feels their pressure whenever they are resisted. Because such phenomena exist beyond any single mind and cannot be explained by individual psychology, they demand a specifically sociological explanation. Durkheim's celebrated methodological injunction follows from this — that the sociologist must treat social facts as things, that is, as objective realities to be studied from the outside rather than through introspection.
The division of labour and solidarity
In The Division of Labour in Society, his doctoral thesis, Durkheim asked what holds societies together as they grow larger and more complex. He distinguished two forms of social solidarity. In simpler, small-scale societies, cohesion rests on mechanical solidarity — members resemble one another, share a strong common consciousness, and are bound by likeness. Deviation from shared norms provokes intense, repressive punishment. As populations grow denser and labour becomes specialised, societies shift towards organic solidarity, in which cohesion arises precisely from difference: individuals perform distinct functions and depend on one another as the organs of a body depend on the whole. Here law becomes increasingly restitutive, aiming to restore relations rather than to punish. Durkheim recognised, however, that the division of labour could develop in pathological ways. Where economic change outpaces moral regulation, the result is a state of anomie — a normlessness explored further under anomie — in which the rules governing cooperation and desire break down.
Suicide
Durkheim's Suicide is often regarded as the first major work of empirical sociology, and it was designed as a demonstration of his method. By choosing an act that appears intensely personal, he sought to prove that even suicide has social causes, visible in the stable rates that differ between groups. Comparing statistics across religions, marital states and periods of crisis, he argued that suicide rates vary with two social currents — the degree of integration into groups and the degree of regulation of desires. From these he derived four types. Egoistic suicide results from insufficient integration, as when individuals are weakly attached to family or community. Altruistic suicide arises from excessive integration, where the self is submerged in the group. Anomic suicide follows the collapse of regulation during sudden social or economic upheaval. Fatalistic suicide, mentioned more briefly, springs from oppressive over-regulation. The argument was that social forces, not individual temperament, govern the pattern.
Religion and society
In his final major work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim turned to religion, which he regarded as the source of society's deepest categories of thought. Studying accounts of totemism among Aboriginal Australians, he argued that all religion rests on a division of the world into the sacred and the profane — things set apart and forbidden, and the ordinary matters of daily life. What worshippers revere as the sacred, he contended, is society itself in symbolic form. In moments of assembly and ritual, individuals experience a heightened collective energy that Durkheim called collective effervescence, and it is this shared exaltation that renews their sense of belonging and regenerates the moral order.
Method and functionalism
Across these studies Durkheim developed a distinctive method and a distinctive style of explanation. He insisted on the objective study of social facts, on the use of comparison and correlation in place of speculation, and on the careful separation of a phenomenon's causes from its social functions. To explain a practice functionally is to show the need it satisfies for the wider social order — as punishment reinforces shared morality. This functionalist reasoning, together with his emphasis on integration and equilibrium, made Durkheim the intellectual forebear of twentieth-century structural functionalism.
Criticisms
Durkheim has attracted sustained criticism. Critics charge him with reification — treating society as an entity existing above and independent of individuals — and with a functionalism that too readily assumes social phenomena serve useful ends, neglecting conflict, power and change. His reliance on official statistics in Suicide has been questioned, notably by interpretivists who argue that such figures reflect the classificatory decisions of coroners rather than objective rates. Others find his account of religion too quick to reduce the sacred to society. His conservative preoccupation with order and consensus has been contrasted unfavourably with the concerns of Marxist and interactionist traditions.
Legacy
Despite these objections, Durkheim's influence is immense. He gave sociology a clear object of study, a rigorous method and a body of exemplary research. His concepts of the social fact, solidarity, anomie and the sacred remain in constant use, and his work shaped functionalism, the sociology of religion, the study of deviance and much besides. For aspirants, Durkheim stands with Karl Marx and Max Weber as one of the founding figures whose ideas frame the discipline and its enduring debate over whether sociology is a science.
References & further reading
- Durkheim, É. (1893). The Division of Labour in Society.
- Durkheim, É. (1895). The Rules of Sociological Method.
- Durkheim, É. (1897). Suicide: A Study in Sociology.
- Durkheim, É. (1912). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.