Émile Durkheim set out to establish sociology as an autonomous science with a subject matter of its own. Psychology explained the individual, biology the organism — but Durkheim insisted there was a distinct order of reality, the social, that could not be reduced to either. His achievement was to define that reality precisely, to lay down rules for studying it, and then to prove the method in action through his celebrated study of suicide.
The social fact
The building block of Durkheim's science is the social fact. Émile Durkheim defined it as any way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising an external constraint over the individual. Social facts have three marks.
- External: they exist beyond any single individual and pre-date each of us — the language we inherit, the laws we are born under, the currency we spend.
- Constraining: they press upon us with a coercive power that becomes visible the moment we resist, whether through legal penalty, ridicule, or simple failure to be understood.
- General: they are diffused throughout the group because they are collective, belonging to the society rather than to its particular members.
Moral rules, religious beliefs, legal codes and even currents of opinion are social facts. Because they are sui generis — of their own kind — they must be explained by other social facts, never by individual psychology.
The rules of sociological method
To study such facts scientifically, Durkheim laid down his famous first rule: treat social facts as things. This does not claim they are material objects; it is a methodological stance. The sociologist must approach social facts from the outside, as an observer confronting external data, setting aside preconceptions and studying them through their objective, measurable indicators rather than through introspection.
From this follow further principles — define phenomena clearly at the outset, seek the causes of a social fact separately from its functions, and explain the social by the social. The aim throughout is objectivity: sociology earns the title of science only if it disciplines itself to observe before it interprets.
Suicide as a method demonstration
Suicide (1897) was Durkheim's proof of concept. He took the most seemingly individual and private of acts and showed that its rate is a social fact, stable across a society and explicable by social conditions rather than by personal despair alone. Working from official statistics, he identified four types.
- Egoistic suicide: arising from too little social integration, where the individual is insufficiently bound to the group.
- Altruistic suicide: arising from excessive integration, where the individual is absorbed by the group and sacrifices the self.
- Anomic suicide: arising from a breakdown of regulation, when norms lose their grip during rapid social or economic change — an expression of anomie.
- Fatalistic suicide: arising from excessive regulation, where lives are so oppressively controlled that the future is blocked.
The scheme turns on two axes — social integration and social regulation. Suicide rates rise when either is too weak or too strong. By explaining variations in rates through these social currents, Durkheim showed that a genuinely sociological explanation was possible where common sense saw only individual pathology.
Division of labour and solidarity
Durkheim's concern with social cohesion runs through his earlier work on the division of labour. He distinguished two forms of solidarity. Mechanical solidarity characterises simple, traditional societies: people are alike, share a strong collective conscience, and cohesion rests on resemblance, upheld by repressive law that punishes deviation. Organic solidarity characterises complex modern societies: the division of labour makes people different but mutually dependent, like the organs of a body, and cohesion rests on interdependence, upheld by restitutive law that restores relations rather than merely punishing. The transition is not automatic, however; where the division of labour develops without adequate moral regulation, an anomic or forced division of labour results — a pathology, not a healthy state.
How to use this in the exam
Durkheim is indispensable for questions on scientific method, positivism and social solidarity. On whether sociology is a science, cite Suicide as the classic demonstration that even intimate acts yield to social explanation. On method, explain the rule to treat social facts as things and the demand for objectivity. On social change, use the shift from mechanical to organic solidarity, and flag anomie as the disorder of rapid transition. Ground every point in his own examples — collective conscience, suicide rates, forms of law — to show command of the argument rather than the label.