David Émile Durkheim (French pronunciation: [emil dyʁkɛm]) (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French France (pronounced /ˈfrænts/ frantss or /ˈfrɑːnts/ frahnts; French pronunciation (help·info): [fʁɑ̃s]), officially the French Republic (French: République française, pronounced: [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a state in Western Europe with several of its overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, sociologist Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social activity, often with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare. Subject matter. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, self-taught political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism and socialism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 184 and Max Weber Maximilian Carl Emil "Max" Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist and political economist, who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the remit of sociology itself. Weber's major works dealt with the rationalization and so-called "disenchantment" which he associated with the rise of, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science The social sciences are the fields of academic scholarship that explore aspects of human society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences. These include: anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, political science, international.[1]

Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method Rules of the Sociological Method , is a book by Émile Durkheim, first published in 1895. It is recognized for being the direct result of Durkheim's own project of establishing sociology as a positivist social science. It thus suggests two central theses, without which sociology would not be a science:. In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide Suicide was one of the groundbreaking books in the field of sociology. Written by French sociologist Émile Durkheim and published in 1897 it was a case study of suicide, a publication unique for its time which provided an example of what the sociological monograph should look like (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic The word catholic is derived from the Greek adjective καθολικός (katholikos), meaning "universal". The word derives from the Greek phrase καθόλο (kath'holou) meaning "on the whole" or "in general" and is a combination of the Greek words κατά meaning "about" and όλος meaning "whole and Protestant Protestantism is one of the four major divisions within Christianity together with the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Roman Catholic Church. The term is most closely tied to those groups that separated from the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology Psychology is the scientific study of human or other animal mental functions and behaviors. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist. Psychologists are classified as social or behavioral scientists. Psychological research can be considered either basic or applied. Psychologists attempt to understand the or political philosophy Political philosophy is the study of such as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should take and why, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a.[2]

Durkheim refined the sociological positivism Positivism is an epistemological perspective and philosophy of science which holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on sense experience and positive verification. Though the positivist approach has been a 'recurrent theme in the history of western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day' and appears in Ibn al- originally set forth by Auguste Comte Auguste Comte was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term, promoting epistemological realism Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief in a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Philosophers who profess realism also typically believe that truth consists in a belief's correspondence to reality. We may speak of realism with respect to other minds, the past, and the hypothetico-deductive The hypothetico-deductive model or method, first so-named by William Whewell, is a proposed description of scientific method. It was popularized after Karl Popper's citation of the term. According to it, scientific inquiry proceeds by formulating a hypothesis in a form that could conceivably be falsified by a test on observable data. A test that methodology in social research Social research refers to research conducted by social scientists. Social research methods may be divided into two broad categories:. For him, sociology was the science of "social facts In sociology, social facts are the values, cultural norms, and social structures external to the individual. For French sociologist Émile Durkheim, sociology was 'the science of social facts'. The task of the sociologist, then, was to search for correlations between social facts to reveal laws. Having discovered the laws of social structure, it":

"A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations."[3]

Durkheim acknowledged in detail the limitations of sociology, emphasising the necessity in social science to form theoretical concepts in the abstract:

"Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description."[4]

Also influential in anthropology Anthropology is the study of humanity. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. The term "anthropology", pronounced /ænθrɵˈpɒlədʒi/, is from the Greek ἄνθρωπος, anthrōpos, "human", and -λογία, -logia, "discourse" or "study", and was first, Durkheim was as a structural functionalist Structural functionalism is a broad perspective in the social sciences which addresses social structure in terms of the function of its constituent elements, namely norms, customs, traditions and institutions. It studies society as a structure with interrelated parts. A common analogy, popularized by Herbert Spencer, regards these interrelated and an early proponent of solidarism.[5][6] He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including social stratification In sociology and other social sciences, social stratification refers to the hierarchical arrangement of individuals into divisions of power and wealth within a society. The term most commonly relates to the socio-economic concept of class, involving the "classification of persons into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions ... a, religion The sociology of religion concerns the role of religion in society; the practices, historical backgrounds, developments and universal themes of religion in society. There is particular emphasis on the recurring role of religion in all societies and throughout recorded history. The sociology of religion is distinguished from the philosophy of, law The sociology of law is a sub-discipline of sociology and an interdisciplinary approach within the field of legal studies. As a field of research, it is intellectually dependent on mainstream sociology, i.e. it borrows theories and methods from sociology to study law, legal institutions and legal behaviour. It consists of various sociological, education The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It is most concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education, and deviance Deviance in a sociological context describes actions or behaviours that violate cultural norms including formally-enacted rules as well as informal violations of social norms (e.g., rejecting folkways). It is the purview of sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists and criminologists to study how these norms are created, how they change over time. Durkheimian terms such as "collective conscience" have since entered the popular discourse.[7]

Contents

Biography

Childhood and education

Durkheim was born in Épinal Épinal is a commune in northeastern France and the capital of the Vosges department. Inhabitants are known as Spinaliens in Lorraine Lorraine is one of the 26 régions of France. The administrative region has two cities of equal importance, Metz and Nancy. Metz is considered to be the official capital since that is where the regional parliament is situated. The region's name is derived from the medieval Lotharingia, coming from a long line of devout French Jews; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been rabbis The basic form of the rabbi developed in the Pharisaic and Talmudic era, when learned teachers assembled to codify Judaism's written and oral laws. In more recent centuries, the duties of the rabbi became increasingly influenced by the duties of the Protestant Christian Minister, hence the title "pulpit rabbis", and in 19th century.[8] At an early age, he decided not to follow in his family's rabbinical footsteps.[8] Durkheim himself would lead a completely secular life. Much of his work, in fact, was dedicated to demonstrating that religious phenomena stemmed from social rather than divine factors. While Durkheim chose not to follow in the family tradition, he did not sever ties with his family or with the Jewish community.[8] Many of his most prominent collaborators and students were Jewish, and some were blood relations. The exact influence of Jewish thought on Durkheim's work remains uncertain; some scholars have argued that Durkheim's thought is in fact a form of secularized Jewish thought Secular Jewish culture embraces several related phenomena; above all, it is the culture of secular communities of Jewish people, but it can also include the cultural contributions of individuals who identify as secular Jews,[9][10] while others argue that proving the existence of a direct influence of Jewish thought on Durkheim's achievements is difficult or impossible.[11]

A precocious student, Durkheim entered the École Normale Supérieure The École Normale Supérieure is a French grande école (higher education establishment outside the mainstream framework of the public universities system). The ENS was initially conceived during the Revolution, and intended to provide the Republic with a new body of teachers, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the Enlightenment (ENS) in 1879.[12] The entering class that year was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his classmates, such as Jean Jaurès Jean Léon Jaurès was a French Socialist leader. Initially an Opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats, becoming the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. Both parties merged in 1905 in the French Section of the Workers' International ( and Henri Bergson Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century would go on to become major figures in France's intellectual history. At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for a degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings. In some countries/universities, the word thesis or a cognate is used as part of a bachelor's or master's course, while dissertation is normally applied to a doctorate, whilst, on Montesquieu Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu , was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Era of the Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout the.[13] At the same time, he read Auguste Comte Auguste Comte was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term and Herbert Spencer Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, prominent classical liberal political theorist, and sociological theorist of the Victorian era. Thus Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his career. This meant the first of many conflicts with the French academic system, which had no social science The social sciences are the fields of academic scholarship that explore aspects of human society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences. These include: anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, political science, international curriculum at the time. Durkheim found humanistic studies The humanities are academic disciplines which study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences uninteresting, and he finished second to last in his graduating class when he aggregated In France, the agrégation is a civil service competitive examination for some positions in the public education system. The laureates are known as agrégés. A similar system exists in other countries in philosophy in 1882.

There was no way that a man of Durkheim's views could receive a major academic appointment in Paris Paris ([paʁi] in French, pronounced /ˈpærɪs/ in English) is the capital and largest city of France. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region (or Paris Region, French: Région parisienne). The city of Paris, within its administrative limits largely unchanged since 1860, has an estimated. Thus in 1885 he decided to leave for Germany A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, has been known and documented before AD 100. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted until 1806. During the 16th century, northern Germany became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. As a modern nation-state,, where he studied sociology in Marburg Marburg is a city in Hessen, Germany, on the River Lahn. It is the main town of the Marburg-Biedenkopf district and its population, as of September 2009, is 79,454, Berlin Berlin (English pronunciation: /bɜrˈlɪn/; German pronunciation: [bɛɐ̯ˈliːn] ) is the capital city and one of 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern and Leipzig Leipzig (German pronunciation: [ˈlaɪptsɪç] , also called Leipsic in English; Upper Sorbian: Lipsk) is, with a population of 515,459, the largest city in the federal state of Saxony, Germany and in the new states of Germany. In the 17th century, Leipzig was one of the major European city-centres of learning and culture in fields such as music,. As Durkheim indicated in several essays, it was in Leipzig that he learned to appreciate the value of empiricism In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge arises from evidence gathered via sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge, known as epistemology. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the and its language of concrete, complex things, in sharp contrast to the more abstract, clear and simple ideas of the Cartesian method The Discourse on the Method is a philosophical and mathematical treatise published by René Descartes in 1637. Its full name is Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences . The Discourse on Method is best known as the source of the famous quotation "Je pense, donc je suis" ("I.[14]

Academic career

A collection of Durkheim's courses on the origins of socialism Socialism is an economic and political theory based on public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources (1896), edited and published by his nephew, Marcel Mauss Mauss was born in Épinal, Vosges to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time and agregated in 1893. Instead of taking the usual route of teaching at a lycée, however, Mauss moved to Paris and took up the study of comparative religion and the Sanskrit language. His first, in 1928.

Durkheim traveled to Bordeaux Bordeaux (French pronunciation: [bɔʁdo] ; Gascon: Bordèu) is a port city on the Garonne River in southwest France, with one million inhabitants in its metropolitan area at a 2008 estimate. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture of the Gironde department. Its inhabitants are called Bordelais in 1887, which had just started France's first teacher's training center. There he taught both pedagogy Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction and sociology (the latter had never been taught in France before).[15] From this position Durkheim helped reform the French school system Primary and secondary education are predominantly public . Education has both public and private elements. The Programme for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks France's education as the 25th best in the world, being neither significantly higher nor lower than the OECD average and introduced the study of social science in its curriculum. However, his controversial beliefs that religion and morality could be explained in terms purely of social interaction earned him many critics.

The 1890s were a period of remarkable creative output for Durkheim. In 1892 he published The Division of Labour in Society, his doctoral dissertation and fundamental statement of the nature of human society and its development.[16] Durkheim's interest in social phenomena was spurred on by politics. France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led to the fall of the regime of Napoleon III, which was then replaced by the Third Republic. This in turn resulted in a backlash against the new secular and republican rule, as many people considered a vigorously nationalistic approach necessary to rejuvenate France's fading power. Durkheim, a Jew and a staunch supporter of the Third Republic with a sympathy towards socialism, was thus in the political minority, a situation which galvanized him politically. The Dreyfus affair of 1894 only strengthened his activist stance.

In 1895 he published Rules of the Sociological Method, a manifesto stating what sociology is and how it ought to be done, and founded the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux. In 1898 he founded the journal L'Année Sociologique to publish and publicize the work of what was, by then, a growing number of students and collaborators (this is also the name used to refer to the group of students who developed his sociological program). And finally, in 1897, he published Suicide, a case study which provided an example of what the sociological monograph might look like. Durkheim was one of the founders in using quantitative methods in criminology during his suicide case study.

By 1902 Durkheim had finally achieved his goal of attaining a prominent position in Paris when he became the chair of education at the Sorbonne. Because French universities are technically institutions for training secondary school teachers, this position gave Durkheim considerable influence — his lectures were the only ones that were mandatory for the entire student body. Despite what some considered, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, to be a political appointment, Durkheim consolidated his institutional power by 1912 when he was permanently assigned the chair and renamed it the chair of education and sociology. It was also in this year that he published his last major work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

The outbreak of World War I was to have a tragic effect on Durkheim's life. His leftism was always patriotic rather than internationalist — he sought a secular, rational form of French life. But the coming of the war and the inevitable nationalist propaganda that followed made it difficult to sustain this already nuanced position. While Durkheim actively worked to support his country in the war, his reluctance to give in to simplistic nationalist fervor (combined with his Jewish background) made him a natural target of the now-ascendant French Right. Even more seriously, the generation of students that Durkheim had trained were now being drafted to serve in the army, and many of them perished in the trenches. Finally, Durkheim's own son, André, died on the war front in December 1915 — a psychological blow from which Durkheim never recovered. Emotionally devastated and overworked, Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in Paris in 1917 and now lies buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Achievements

Durkheim was familiar with several foreign languages and reviewed academic papers in German, English, and Italian at length for L'Année Sociologique. It has been noted, however, at times with disapproval and amazement by non-French social scientists, that Durkheim traveled little and that, like many French scholars and the notable British anthropologist Sir James Frazer, he never undertook any fieldwork. The vast information Durkheim studied on the aboriginal tribes of Australia and New Guinea and on the Inuit was all collected by other anthropologists, travelers, or missionaries.[17]

This was not due to provincialism or lack of attention to the concrete. Durkheim did not intend to make venturesome and dogmatic generalizations while disregarding empirical observation. He did, however, maintain that concrete observation in remote parts of the world does not always lead to illuminating views on the past or even on the present. For him, facts had no intellectual meaning unless they were grouped into types and laws. He claimed repeatedly that it is from a construction erected on the inner nature of the real that knowledge of concrete reality is obtained, a knowledge not perceived by observation of the facts from the outside. He thus constructed concepts such as the sacred and totemism exactly in the same way that Karl Marx developed the concept of class.[17]

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Theoretical foundations of sociology

A fundamental influence on Durkheim's thought was the sociological positivism of Auguste Comte, who effectively sought to extend and apply the scientific method found in the natural sciences to the social sciences. According to Comte, a true social science should stress for empirical facts, as well as induce general scientific laws from the relationship among these facts. There were many points on which Durkheim agreed with the positivist thesis. First, he accepted that the study of society was to be founded on an examination of facts. Second, like Comte, he acknowledged that the only valid guide to objective knowledge was the scientific method. Third, he agreed with Comte that the social sciences could become scientific only when they were stripped of their metaphysical abstractions and philosophical speculation.[18]

A second influence on Durkheim's view of society beyond Comte's positivism was the epistemological outlook called social realism. Although he never explicitly exposed it, Durkheim adopted a realist perspective in order to demonstrate the existence of social realities outside the individual and to show that these realities existed in the form of the objective relations of society.[19] As an epistemology of science, realism can be defined as a perspective which takes as its central point of departure the view that external social realities exist in the outer world and that these realities are independent of the individual's perception of them. This view opposes other predominant philosophical perspectives such as empiricism and positivism. Empiricists such as David Hume had argued that all realities in the outside world are products of human sense perception. According to empiricists, all realities are thus merely perceived: they do not exist independently of our perceptions, and have no causal power in themselves.[20] Comte's positivism went a step further by claiming that scientific laws could be deduced from empirical observations. Going beyond this, Durkheim claimed that sociology would not only discover "apparent" laws, but would be able to discover the inherent nature of society.

Throughout his career, Durkheim was concerned primarily with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era, when things such as shared religious and ethnic background could no longer be assumed. To study social life in modern societies, he hence sought to create one of the first rigorous scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, he was one of the first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to what function they served in maintaining the quotidian (i.e. by how they make society "work"), and is thus sometimes seen as a precursor to functionalism. Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts. Thus unlike his contemporaries Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, he focused not on what motivates the actions of individuals (an approach associated with methodological individualism), but rather on the study of social facts.

Social facts

Main article: Social fact

Durkheim's work revolved around the study of social facts, a term he coined to describe phenomena that have an existence in and of themselves and are not bound to the actions of individuals. Durkheim argued that social facts have, sui generis, an independent existence greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that compose society. Being exterior to the individual person, social facts may thus also exercise coercive power on the various people composing society, as it can sometimes be observed in the case of formal laws and regulations, but also in phenomena such as church practices or family norms.[21] Unlike the facts studied in natural sciences, a "social" fact thus refers to a specific category of phenomena: it consists of ways of acting, thinking, feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him. According to Durkheim, these phenomena cannot be reduced to biological or psychological grounds.[22]

Hence even the most "individualistic" or "subjective" phenomena, such as suicide, would be regarded by Durkheim as an objective social facts. Individuals composing society do not directly cause suicide: suicide, as a social fact, exists independently in society, whether an individual person wants it or not. Whether a person "leaves" a society does not change anything to the fact that this society will still contain suicides. Sociology's task thus consists of discovering the qualities and characteristics of such social facts, which can be discovered through a quantitative or experimental approach (Durkheim extensively relied on statistics).[23]

Method and objectivity

In his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Durkheim expressed his will to establish a method that would guarantee sociology's truly scientific character. One of the questions raised by the author concerns the objectivity of the sociologist: how may one study an object that, from the very beginning, conditions and relates to the observer? According to Durkheim, observation must be as impartial and impersonal as possible, even though a "perfectly objective observation" in this sense may never be attained. Sociology should therefore privilege comparison rather than the study of singular independent facts.[24] Consequently, a social fact must always be studied according to its relation with other social facts, never according to the individual who studies it.

Sociological studies

Education

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Durkheim was also interested in education. Partially this was because he was professionally employed to train teachers, and he used his ability to shape curriculum to further his own goals of having sociology taught as widely as possible. More broadly, though, Durkheim was interested in the way that education could be used to provide French citizens the sort of shared, secular background that would be necessary to prevent anomie in modern societies. It was to this end that he also proposed the formation of professional groups to serve as a source of solidarity for adults.

Durkheim argued that education has many functions:

  1. To reinforce social solidarity
    • History: Learning about individuals who have done good things for the many makes an individual feel insignificant.
    • Pledging allegiance: Makes individuals feel part of a group and therefore less likely to break rules.
  2. To maintain social role
    • School is a society in miniature. It has a similar hierarchy, rules, expectations to the "outside world." It trains young people to fulfill roles.
  3. To maintain division of labour.
    • School sorts students into skill groups, encouraging students to take up employment in fields best suited to their abilities.

Crime

Durkheim's views on crime were a departure from conventional notions. He believed that crime is "bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life" and serves a social function. He stated that crime implies, "not only that the way remains open to necessary change, but that in certain cases it directly proposes these changes... crime [can thus be] a useful prelude to reforms." In this sense he saw crime as being able to release certain social tensions and so have a cleansing or purging effect in society. He further stated that "the authority which the moral conscience enjoys must not be excessive; otherwise, no-one would dare to criticize it, and it would too easily congeal into an immutable form. To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself...[even] the originality of the criminal... shall also be possible" (Durkheim, 1895).

Law

Beyond the specific study of crime, criminal law and punishment, Durkheim was deeply interested in the study of law and its social effects in general. Among classical social theorists he is one of the founders of the field of sociology of law. In his early work he saw types of law, distinguished as repressive versus restitutive law (characterised by their sanctions), as a direct reflection of types of social solidarity. The study of law was therefore of interest to sociology for what it could reveal about the nature of solidarity. Later, however, he emphasised the significance of law as a sociological field of study in its own right. In the later Durkheimian view, law (both civil and criminal) is an expression and guarantee of society's fundamental values. Durkheim emphasised the way that modern law increasingly expresses a form of moral individualism - a value system that is, in his view, probably the only one universally appropriate to modern conditions of social solidarity.[25] Individualism, in this sense, is the basis of human rights and of the values of individual human dignity and individual autonomy. It is to be sharply distinguished from selfishness and egoism, which for Durkheim are not moral stances at all. Many of Durkheim's closest followers, such as Marcel Mauss, Paul Fauconnet and Paul Huvelin also specialised in or contributed to the sociological study of law.

Suicide

In Suicide (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. There are at least two problems with this interpretation. First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli,[26] who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers found that the Protestant-Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-speaking Europe and thus may always have been the spurious reflection of other factors.[27] Despite its limitations, Durkheim's work on suicide has influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study.

Durkheim's study of suicide has been criticized as an example of the logical error termed the ecological fallacy.[28][29] Indeed, Durkheim's conclusions about individual behaviour (e.g. suicide) are based on aggregate statistics (the suicide rate among Protestants and Catholics). This type of inference, explaining micro events in terms of macro properties, is often misleading, as is shown by examples of Simpson's paradox.[30]

However, diverging views have contested whether Durkheim's work really contained an ecological fallacy. Van Poppel and Day (1996) have advanced that differences in suicide rates between Catholics and Protestants were explicable entirely in terms of how deaths were categorized between the two social groups. For instance, while "sudden deaths" or "deaths from ill-defined or unspecified cause" would often be recorded as suicides among Protestants, this would not be the case for Catholics. Hence Durkheim would have committed an empirical rather than logical error.[31] Some, such as Inkeles (1959),[32] Johnson (1965)[33] and Gibbs (1968),[34] have claimed that Durkheim's only intent was to explain suicide sociologically within a holistic perspective, emphasizing that "he intended his theory to explain variation among social environments in the incidence of suicide, not the suicides of particular individuals."[35]

More recent authors such as Berk (2006) have also questioned the micro-macro relations underlying Durkheim's work. For instance, Berk notices that

Durkheim speaks of a "collective current" that reflects the collective inclination flowing down the channels of social organization. The intensity of the current determines the volume of suicides (...) Introducing psychological [i.e. individual] variables such as depression, [which could be seen as] an independent [non-social] cause of suicide, overlooks Durkheim's conception that these variables are the ones most likely to be effected by the larger social forces and without these forces suicide may not occur within such individuals.[36]

Durkheim stated that there are four types of suicide:

These four types of suicide are based on the degrees of imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation.[37] Durkheim noted the effects of various crises on social aggregates – war, for example, leading to an increase in altruism, economic boom or disaster contributing to anomie.[38]

Religion

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In classical sociology, the study of religion was primarily concerned with two broad issues:

  1. How did religion contribute to the maintenance of social order?
  2. What was the relationship between religion and capitalist society?

These two issues were typically combined in the argument that industrial capitalism would undermine traditional religious commitment and thereby threaten the cohesion of society. More recently the subject has been narrowly defined as the study of religious institutions. In his article, 'The Origin Of Beliefs' Émile Durkheim placed himself in the positivist tradition, meaning that he thought of his study of society as dispassionate and scientific. He was deeply interested in the problem of what held complex modern societies together. Religion, he argued, was an expression of social cohesion. His underlying interest was to understand the existence of religion in the absence of belief in any religion's actual tenets. Durkheim saw totemism as the most basic form of religion. It is in this belief system that the fundamental separation between the sacred and the profane is most clear. All other religions, he said, are outgrowths of this distinction, adding to it myths, images, and traditions. The totemic animal, Durkheim believed, was the expression of the sacred and the original focus of religious activity because it was the emblem for a social group, the clan. Religion is thus an inevitable, just as society is inevitable when individuals live together as a group.

Durkheim thought that the model for relationships between people and the supernatural was the relationship between individuals and the community. He is famous for suggesting that "God is society, writ large." Durkheim believed that people ordered the physical world, the supernatural world, and the social world according to similar principles.

Durkheim’s first purpose was to identify the social origin of religion as he felt that religion was a source of camaraderie and solidarity. It was the individual’s way of becoming recognizable within an established society. His second purpose was to identify links between certain religions in different cultures, finding a common denominator. Belief in supernatural realms and occurrences may not stem through all religions, yet there is a clear division in different aspects of life, certain behaviours and physical things.

In the past, he argued, religion had been the cement of society—the means by which men had been led to turn from the everyday concerns in which they were variously enmeshed to a common devotion to sacred things. His definition of religion, favoured by anthropologists of religion today, was, "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Book 1, Ch. 1)

Durkheim believed that “society has to be present within the individual.” He saw religion as a mechanism that shored up or protected a threatened social order. He thought that religion had been the cement of society in the past, but that the collapse of religion would not lead to a moral implosion. Durkheim was specifically interested in religion as a communal experience rather than an individual one. He also says that religious phenomena occur when a separation is made between the profane (the realm of everyday activities) and the sacred (the realm of the extraordinary and the transcendent); these are different depending what man chooses them to be. An example of this is wine at communion, as it is not only wine but represents the blood of Christ. Durkheim believed that religion is ‘society divinised’, as he argues that religion occurs in a social context. He also, in lieu of forefathers before who tried to replace the dying religions, urged people to unite in a civic morality on the basis that we are what we are as a result of society.

Durkheim condensed religion into four major functions:

  1. Disciplinary, forcing or administrating discipline
  2. Cohesive, bringing people together, a strong bond
  3. Vitalizing, to make livelier or vigorous, vitalise, boost spirit
  4. Euphoric, a good feeling, happiness, confidence, well-being

See also

Selected works

Published posthumously:

References

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2008)
  1. ^ Kim, Sung Ho (2007). "Max Weber". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (August 24, 2007 entry) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/ (Retrieved 17-02-2010)
  2. ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 1.
  3. ^ Durkheim, Émile [1895] "The Rules of Sociological Method" 8th edition, trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John M. Mueller, ed. George E. G. Catlin (1938, 1964 edition), pp. 13.
  4. ^ Durkheim, Émile [1892] "Montesquieu's Contribution to the Rise of Social Science" in Montesquieu and Rousseau. Forerunners of Sociology, trans. Ralph Manheim (1960), pp.9
  5. ^ Hayward, J.E.S. "Solidarist Syndicalism: Durkheim and DuGuit", Sociological Review, Vol. 8 (1960)
  6. ^ Thompson, Kenneth. 2002. Emile Durkheim. Routledge.
  7. ^ Simpson, George (Trans.) in Durkheim, Emile "The Division of Labour in Society" The Free Press, New York, 1993. pp. ix
  8. ^ a b c Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 1.
  9. ^ Strenski, Ivan. 1997. Durkheim and the Jews of France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Google Print pp. 1-2
  10. ^ "While Durkheim did not become a Rabbi, he may have transformed his father's philosophical and moral concerns into something new, his version of sociology." – Meštrović, Stjepan Gabriel (1993). Émile Durkheim and the reformation of sociology. Rowman & Littlefield, Google Print, p. 37
  11. ^ Pickering, W. S. F. 2001. "The Enigma of Durkheim's Jewishness", in Critical Assessments of Leading Sociologists. British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, v. 1, Google Print, p. 79
  12. ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 2.
  13. ^ Bottomore, Tom, Robert Nisbet (1978). A History of Sociological Analysis. Basic Books. pp. 8.
  14. ^ Jones, Robert Alun and Rand J. Spiro. "Contextualization, cognitive flexibility, and hypertext: the convergence of interpretive theory, cognitive psychology, and advanced information technologies." in Susan Leigh Star (ed.) 1995. The Cultures of Computing. Sociological Review Monograph Series, Google Print p. 149
  15. ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3.
  16. ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. x.
  17. ^ a b "Émile Durkheim." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. (Retrieved 14-06-2009)
  18. ^ Morrison, Ben (2006): Marx, Durkheim, Weber: formations of modern social thought. Second edition. SAGE, p. 151.
  19. ^ Morrison, Ben (2006), p. 152.
  20. ^ Morrison, Ben (2006), p. 152.
  21. ^ Martin, Michael and Lee C. McIntyre. 1994. Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science. Boston: MIT press, Google Print p. 433
  22. ^ Martin, Michael and Lee C. McIntyre. 1994. Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science. Boston: MIT press, Google Print p. 434
  23. ^ "Suicide [...] is indeed the paradigm case of Durkheim's positivism: it remains the exemplar of the sociological application of statistics." Hassard, John. 1995. Sociology and Organization Theory: Positivism, Paradigms and Postmodernity. Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0521484588) Google Print p. 15
  24. ^ "Durkheim was the first to seriously use the comparative method correctly in the scientific sense" Cf. Collins, Randall. 1975. Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science. N.Y.: Academic Press, p. 529
  25. ^ Cotterrell, Roger (1999). Emile Durkheim: Law in A Moral Domain. Stanford University Press. chs. 7–9.
  26. ^ Stark, Rodney and William Sims Bainbridge. 1996. Religion, Deviance and Social Control. Routledge, Google Print p. 32
  27. ^ Pope, Whitney, and Nick Danigelis. 1981. "Sociology's One Law," Social Forces 60:496-514.
  28. ^ Freedman, David A. 2002. The Ecological Fallacy. University of California. [1]
  29. ^ H. C. Selvin. 1965. "Durkheim's Suicide:Further Thoughts on a Methodological Classic", in R. A. Nisbet (ed.) Émile Durkheim pp. 113-136
  30. ^ Irzik, Gurol and Eric Meyer. "Causal Modeling: New Directions for Statistical Explanation", Philosophy of Science, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), p. 509
  31. ^ Van Poppel, Frans, and Lincoln H. Day. "A Test of Durkheim's Theory of Suicide--Without Committing the Ecological Fallacy". American Sociological Review, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Jun., 1996), p. 500
  32. ^ Cf. Inkeles, A. 1959. "Personality and Social Structure." pp. 249-76 in Sociological Today, edited by R. K. Merton, L. Broom, and L. S. Cottrell. New York: Basic Books.
  33. ^ Cf. Johnson, B. D. 1965. "Durkheim's One Cause of Suicide." American Sociological Review, 30:875-86
  34. ^ Cf. Gibbs, J. P. and W. T. Martin. 1958. "A Theory of Status Integration and Its Relationship to Suicide." American Sociological, Review 23:14-147.
  35. ^ Berk, Bernard B. "Macro-Micro Relationships in Durkheim's Analysis of Egoistic Suicide". Sociological Theory, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), p. 60
  36. ^ Berk, Bernard B. "Macro-Micro Relationships in Durkheim's Analysis of Egoistic Suicide". Sociological Theory, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 78-79
  37. ^ a b c Thompson, Kenneth. 1982. Emile Durkheim. London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 109-111
  38. ^ Dohrenwend, Bruce P. "Egoism, Altruism, Anomie, and Fatalism: A Conceptual Analysis of Durkheim's Types", American Sociological Review, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Aug., 1959), p. 473

Further reading

External links

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