Émile Durkheim

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The French philosopher and sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) was one of the founders of 20th-century sociology.

Emile Durkheim was born at Épinal, Lorraine, on April 15, 1858. Following a long family tradition, he began as a young man to prepare himself for the rabbinate. While still in secondary school, however, he discovered his vocation for teaching and left Épinal for Paris to prepare for theÉcole Normale, which he entered in 1879. Although Durkheim found the literary nature of instruction there a great disappointment, he was lastingly inspired by two of his teachers: the classicist Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and the philosopher Émile Boutroux. From Fustel he learned the importance of religion in the formation of social institutions and discovered that the sacred could be studied rationally and objectively. From Boutroux he learned that atomism, the reduction of phenomena to their smallest constituent parts, was a fallacious methodological procedure and that each science must explain phenomena in terms of its own specific principles. These ideas eventually formed the philosophical foundations of Durkheim's sociological method.

From 1882 to 1885 Durkheim taught philosophy in several provincial lycées. A leave of absence in 1885-1886 allowed him to study under the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in Germany. In 1887 he was named lecturer in education and sociology at the University of Bordeaux, a position raised to a professorship in 1896, the first professorship of sociology in France.

On his return from Germany, Durkheim had begun to prepare review articles for the Revue philosophique on current work in sociology. In 1896, realizing that the task was too much for a single person to do adequately, he founded the Année sociologique. His purpose, he announced, was to bring the social sciences together, to promote specialization within the field of sociology, and to the E make evident that sociology was a collective, not a personal, enterprise. In 1902 Durkheim was named to a professorship in sociology and education at the Sorbonne. There he remained for the rest of his career.

Achieving Consensus

The Division of Labor, Durkheim's doctoral thesis, appeared in 1893. The theme of the book was how individuals achieve the prerequisite of all social existence: consensus. Durkheim began by distinguishing two types of "solidarities," mechanical and organic. In the first, individuals differ little from each other; they harbor the same emotions, hold the same values, and believe the same religion. Society draws its coherence from this similarity. In the second, coherence is achieved by differentiation. Free individuals pursuing different functions are united by their complementary roles. For Durkheim these were both conceptual and historical distinctions. Primitive societies and European society in earlier periods were mechanical solidarities; modern European society was organic. In analyzing the nature of contractual relationships, however, Durkheim came to realize that organic solidarity could be maintained only if certain aspects of mechanical solidarity remained, only if the members of society held certain beliefs and sentiments in common. Without such collective beliefs, he argued, no contractual relationship based purely on self-interest could have any force.

Collective Beliefs

At the end of the 19th century, social theory was dominated by methodological individualism, the belief that all social phenomena should be reduced to individual psychological or biological phenomena in order to be explained. Durkheim therefore had to explain and justify his emphasis on collective beliefs, on "collective consciousness" and "collective representations." This he did theoretically in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) and empirically in Suicide (1897). In the first, he argued that the social environment was a reality and therefore an object of study in its own right. "Sociological method," he wrote, "rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things; that is, as realities external to the individual." The central methodological problem was therefore the nature of these realities and their relationship to the individuals who compose society.

In Suicide Durkheim demonstrated his sociological method by applying it to a phenomenon that appeared quintessentially individual. How does society cause individuals to commit suicide? To answer this question, he analyzed statistical data on suicide rates, comparing them to religious beliefs, age, sex, marital status, and economic changes, and then sought to explain the systematic differences he had discovered. The suicide rate, he argued, depends upon the social context. More frequently than others, those who are ill-integrated into social groups and those whose individuality has disappeared in the social group will kill themselves. Likewise, when social values break down, when men find themselves without norms, in a state of "anomie" as Durkheim called it, suicide increases.

From what source do collective beliefs draw their force? In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) Durkheim argued that the binding character of the social bond, indeed the very categories of the human mind, are to be found in religion. Behind religion, however, is society itself, for religion is communal participation, and its authority is the authority of society intensified by being endowed with sacredness. It is the transcendent image of the collective consciousness.

During his lifetime Durkheim was severely criticized for claiming that social facts were irreducible, that they had a reality of their own. His ideas, however, are now accepted as the common foundations for empirical work in sociology. His concept of the collective consciousness, renamed "culture," has become part of the theoretical foundations of modern ethnography. His voice was one of the most powerful in breaking the hold of Enlightenment ideas of individualism on modern social sciences.

Durkheim died in Paris on Nov. 15, 1917.

Further Reading

Robert A. Nisbet presents a comprehensive analysis ofDurkheim's ideas in Émile Durkheim (1965). A collection of essays on various aspects of Durkheim's work appears in Kurt Wolff, ed., Émile Durkheim, 1858-1917: A Collection of Essays with Translations and a Bibliography (1960). See also Charles Elmer Gehlke, Émile Durkheim's Contribution to Sociological Theory (1915), and Harry Alpert, Émile Durkheim and His Sociology (1939). A more general study is Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (1937; 2d ed. 1964).

Additional Sources

Giddens, Anthony, Emile Durkheim, New York: Penguin Books, 1979.

Lukes, Steven, Emile Durkheim, his life and work: a historical and critical study, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985.

Mestrovic, Stjepan Gabriel, Emile Durkheim and the reformation of sociology, Totawa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988.

(1858-1917) French sociologist. Durkheim dominated the French educational system at all levels between 1906 and 1917 when he held the chair of education (renamed the chair of sociology in 1913) at the Sorbonne. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), he attempted to establish sociology as a science with its own particular method, explaining a distinct reality separate from individuals, and restraining their behaviour. His most famous methodological proposition was that social facts must be considered as things. Throughout his career, Durkheim applied this view to the problem of social integration which he examined in all his principal works. In The Division of Social Labour (1893), he proposed a general theory to explain the evolution of societies from primitive, held together by mechanical solidarity (based on similarity between different individuals), to modern, held together by organic solidarity (based upon complementary differences between individuals). Unlike economists, whom he accused of tautology, Durkheim based this evolution towards greater division of labour on the social fact of increasing density of populations, which led to reduction in the level of mechanical solidarity, and therefore to consciousness of the change. Following their method, economists posited a deliberate choice of increased division of labour as the cause although it was also the effect. In Suicide (1897), less under the influence of Comte than previously, he tried to find sociological explanations for what is apparently the most isolated action possible. He divided suicide into three (or perhaps even four) main types, one of which is the most important for his analysis. This is based on his concept of anomie, the breakdown of the individual's connection with society. He rejected what he saw as simplistic positivist explanations, as for example the thesis that suicide can be explained by differences in climate at different seasons. Social facts can only be explained by other social facts, not determined from outside. He saw anomie as a result of the rapidity of industrialization which was breaking down the existing moral order. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim again chose a particular problem to discover its general implications. He examined primitive Australian religion, and proposed that the general form of religion, repeated in all other examples, was as a system of collective beliefs separating sacred from profane. Whatever the particular forms asserted by different religions, the sacred was always society in general, the external force that imposed much of their behaviour on individuals. Durkheim attempted to turn morality into a science, and he always believed that sociology should be used to improve society rather than simply to explain it. The most important way in which this could be done was through education, a view he shared with the founders of the Third Republic. In a political sense, he was a liberal, but not an individualist. He examined socialism in 1893, and decided that while it was certainly a proper reaction to the evils of industrial society, its proposed solution would not improve human life. He was one of the chief proponents of the doctrine of solidarism which, as one of his followers asserted in 1907, became ‘a sort of official philosophy for the Third Republic’. This formed the ideological basis of the Radical Party which was founded 1905 and became the most important in the Republic.

— Carl Slevin

Durkheim, Émile (1858-1917). A founding father of modern sociology, Durkheim believed that the social cannot be reduced to the psychological, that man becomes distinctively human only within society, and that society is the source of morality, exercising constraint upon individual behaviour through a collective system of beliefs and values. He referred to social factors as ‘things’ which, being unavailable to introspection, should be studied scientifically. His concern with establishing objective indices of social solidarity or disequilibrium led to his pioneering statistical analysis of suicide rates (Le Suicide, 1897) and to his study of religion as a source of social cohesion (Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, 1912).

[Rhiannon Goldthorpe]

Durkheim, Émile (1858-1917) French sociologist. Durkheim was educated in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and gained his first university post at Bordeaux in 1887. He held a chair at the Sorbonne from 1902 until his death. Although his writings concern sociology and its practice rather than philosophy, they are philosophically important through their resolute hostility to methodological individualism. Durkheim mounted a sustained campaign for a distinct, proper, self-contained level of analysis in which social facts are conceived as having their own power and their own identity, and therefore make proper objects of study in their own right: ‘social facts are to be explained by other social facts.’ Any association of individuals creates its own level of fact, irreducible to a mere aggregate of individual psychological facts. His most famous work, Le Suicide (1897, trs. as Suicide, 1952), shows that this apparently personal and psychologically subjective act is in fact sociologically determined and a reflection of social pressures and currents. Durkheim also believed that awareness of this would create the scientific basis for proper social intervention and improvement. His work on the prohibition of incest and on totemism is sometimes hailed as an ancestor of structuralism, although his assumption that some forms of human life are primitive or ‘elementary’ compared with our own has occasioned substantial criticism. In his later years he studied religion as the most characteristic manifestation of social life; this work culminated in Les Formes élémentaires de la vie réligieuse (1912, trs. as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1915).

Durkheim, Émile (dûrk'hīm, Fr. āmēl' dürkĕm'), 1858-1917, French sociologist. Along with Max Weber he is considered one of the chief founders of modern sociology. Educated in France and Germany, Durkheim taught social science at the Univ. of Bordeaux and the Sorbonne. His view that the methods of natural science can be applied to the study of society was influenced by the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte. Durkheim held that the collective mind of society was the source of religion and morality and that the common values developed in society, particularly in primitive societies, are the cohesive bonds of social order. In more complex societies, he suggests, the division of labor makes for cohesiveness, but the loss of commonly held values leads to social instability and disorientation of the individual. Durkheim studied suicide to show the importance of anomie, the loss of morale that accompanies decline in social identity. To support his theories he drew extensively on anthropological and statistical materials. His important works include The Division of Labor in Society (1893, tr. 1933), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895, tr. 1938), Le Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912, tr. 1915).

Bibliography

See biography by S. Lukes (1985); studies by S. Lukes (1972), R. A. Nisbet (1965 and 1974), N. Smelser (1963), and D. La Capra (1985).

Quotes:

"The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present's afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon."

"From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned."

"The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. If he loves, it is not to give himself, to blend in fecund union with another being, but to meditate on his love. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves."

"It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh."

"Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them."

"It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear."

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