Émile Durkheim
Founding Father(1858-1917)
• Division of Labor
• Sociological Method
• Suicide
• Religion
QUOTATION
“The principal objective [of sociology is] to extend scientific rationalism to human behavior.” - Émile Durkheim [2]
One of Durkheim’s greatest hopes was for sociology to become a “hard” science, allowing sociologists to examine scientifically using empirical evidence. He wanted to prove that human rational being is fundamentally a creation of social relations, and that problems of lost solidarity can be rediscovered and founded scientifically. [5]
CONTEXT
Émile Durkheim born April 15, 1858 at Épinal in Lorraine, France. Durkheim came from a family line of rabbis. His grandfather and father were rabbis; however, he decided not to follow his family’s footsteps and chose to pursue academics rather than religion. He studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a training ground for the intellectual elite of France, yet would have preferred to study moral doctrines and scientific instruction. [2] One of Durkheim’s main concerns was the moral breakdown of French society that stemmed from the Paris Commune of 1871, the Dreyfus affair, and relations between church and state. [5] In 1887, Durkheim married Louise Julie Dreyfus and had two children: Marie and Andri. Also in 1887, Durkheim began his long and illustrious career as a teacher at the University of Bordeaux, where he taught sociology and education. In 1902, he became the first professor of sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. [12] He published four major works, and also helped to found L’Aneée Sociologique, a scholarly journal focusing on sociology. Always searching for new ways to bind French society together, he used his role as Minister of Education to express the idea of moral education to teachers, hoping they might implement these morals in their classrooms. Durkheim passed away November 15, 1917, soon after many young sociologists he trained, including his son, were killed in World War I. [11]
CONNECTIONS
One of Durkheim’s earliest influences was Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. Durkheim credits Montesquieu with inspiring his emphasis on the social origin of the individual, and took from him the idea that society exists as an empirical object. [7] Durkheim was also influenced by Herbert Spencer and his evolutionary views of society; he used them to form his own ideas on mechanical solidarity, organic solidarity, and the division of labor. He was also impressed by the scientific work of Wilhelm Wundt and his approach to scientific research. [2] Finally, Durkheim’s greatest influence was Auguste Comte; Durkheim’s collective consciousness is a variation of Comte’s consensus. Although he criticized Comte’s deductive approach to research, he was influenced by his concept of sociology as a scientific study of the social world. [6] Some of Durkheim’s disciples include his nephew Marcel Mauss, known for his work on cognitive categories of the collective consciousness, Robert Merton, who took Durkheim’s ability to transcend descriptions of social phenomena and fill in the blanks between raw empirical data, and Talcott Parsons, whose major work The Structure of Social Action (1937) was the first to highlight Durkheim’s views in the United States. [9]
PERSPECTIVE
Durkheimian Tradition. As Durkheim is one of the major founding fathers of sociology, it is difficult to place him into one specific theoretical perspective. He was politically liberal, yet sociologically conservative, as he grounded his sociology in his concerns for the maintenance of social order. He was a functional analyst writing from a positivist perspective, claiming that determining the function is necessary to completely explain the phenomena; it is not enough to simply trace historical origins. [2] He believed that society was more than just the sum of its parts; it is an entity unto itself.10 He was also a social realist, giving ultimate social reality to the group, as opposed to the individual. [11] Durkheim was one of the first to use statistical data to support his empirical findings in his studies on suicide, and used qualitative ethnographic material in his analysis of primitive religions. [6]
THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Social Facts. Durkheim believes that sociology must focus on social facts, effective guides and controls of social conduct that are internalized in the individual’s consciousness, as opposed to biological or psychological facts. [6] Social facts are external to the individual, have the ability to endure over time, and have a coercive power. [2] Studying social facts allows us to observe how the group impacts the individual, rather than examining the effect the individual has on the group. Social facts can be material or nonmaterial; material social facts are directly observable, whereas nonmaterial social facts are internalized norms and values. [9]
In other words, social facts exist outside of us and they compel us to behave according to social norms that are not controlled by us. For instance, when students enter into a classroom they know they should sit down at a desk, take out a pen and paper, and be ready for the teacher to start class. This fact is collectively known by all students. If a student comes to class and doesn’t do this the teacher might correct their behavior and in some cases students might be ridiculed for being disrespectful. [7]
Collective Conscience. Norms and values are established and shared among members of society, thus forming a collective moral conscience. The collective conscience evolves from the continuous interaction of a group of people who form a distinct group culture. Similar to Freud, Durkheim assumes individuals are self-centered and driven by insatiable desires; therefore, they need something to bring them together to form a society. [1] The collective conscience allows individuals to internalize similar understandings, bring societies together, it leaves very little opportunity for individuality and freedom within that society. Society is seen as an external force because it brings about the need to conform, however it is an internal force because it forms the collective moral conscience. Once the collective conscience begins to break down, the social phenomenon known as anomie begins to appear. Nonetheless, Durkheim “argued that collective conscience was stronger in traditional societies, where the division of labor was less striking. It is the metaphysical and moral glue holding society together”. [7]
Anomie. Anomie occurs when the controlling influence of society is no longer effective and individuals are left to their own devices. [2] It describes the feelings of anonymity felt by individuals amid the masses of modern industrial society. This state of relative normlessness can lead to anomic suicide, as examined in Durkheim’s study on suicide, as well as the anomic division of labor. Society sees the anomic division of labor as the differentiation of functions in a society accompanied by conflict. [8] According to Durkheim, the only way to counter this is to organize members of society into occupational groups and integrate each group to itself and to others in a larger society. [8]
Division of Labor. During Durkheim’s lifetime many people, including Auguste Comte, blamed the moral crisis and revolutions of France on the division of labor in modern society. [9] Since everyone has a different job, they no longer share common experiences and therefore lack the shared moral beliefs necessary for a society to survive. Since they no longer share moral beliefs, Comte claims that people will not sacrifice in terms of social need. However, Durkheim argues in The Division of Labor in Society. that the division of labor does not necessarily represent the disappearance of social morality; it simply is creating a new kind of social morality. [9] The division of labor forces people to become dependent on each other, thus holding the society together in a different way, as opposed to a collective conscience.
Solidarity. Durkheim is a strong proponent of the idea of social solidarity; he believed the reasons for members of society coming together lay in collective sentiments and ideas. In other words, solidarity, comes from the similarities in beliefs and the division of labour. He presents two types of solidarity, mechanical and organic, exemplifying the evolution of society. Mechanical solidarity occurs in primitive societies, where individual differences are minimized and members are very much alike in their devotion to common ideas. [3] In this society rigid social norms are enforced, morals are not challenged and values are vividly followed and established. Organic solidarity develops out of the differences between individuals; it occurs in modern societies and is a product of the division of labor. [6] In the case of organic solidarity, the collective consciousness decreases in importance, and interdependence is strongly emphasized. This type of society has interdependence of roles suggesting that “society is no longer just [a] collection of similar atoms mechanically glued together in a primal horde, but [rather] more like a body where each person is part of a group, an organ performing a given function within the overall social organism”. [7]
MAJOR WORKS
The Division of Labor in Society (1893).Durkheim’s first major work was The Division of Labor in Society, which traced the development of the relation between individuals and society. In this work he emphasizes mechanical and organic solidarity, claiming that the division of labor is responsible for the maturation of society. As a society progresses industrially, their collective conscience weakens because individuals are assigned different tasks. He also introduces the ideas of repressive and restitutive law. Repressive law exists in primitive, mechanical societies and punishes those who violate the collective norms, while restitutive law exists in organic societies and allows greater individualism by simply restoring to the harmed individual what was taken by crime. [11] Finally, the idea of a healthy society versus a pathological society is brought up; a healthy society will have similar conditions to other societies, and a pathological society departs from the norm. [9] Two ways a society can be pathological are if they are in a state of anomie, or if class inequality exists. [1]
The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895).His second work, The Rules of the Sociological Method, attempts to establish sociology as an independent science as well as define its method and scope. Here, Durkheim defines sociology and the methods with how to go about studying it, as well as refining the idea of healthy and pathological societies. He also presents a normalized view of crime and deviance; he states that deviance is necessary for society to define its collective consciousness, as criminal acts will arouse collective sentiments against the violation of the norm. [2] Punishment of crimes helps to reinforce these moral boundaries, but by no means eliminates deviance altogether.
Suicide (1897). Durkheim’s study of suicide is one of his greatest contributions to sociology.Suicide (1897) studied the effect that social factors had on suicide, rather than the individual’s personal feelings. This was one of the first studies to be based on statistical evidence; Durkheim examines the rate of suicide in societies and uses that to determine whether or not that society has a structure compelling people towards taking their own lives. [8] He distinguishes four different types of suicide based on the relation of the individual to society: anomic suicide occurs when the collective consciousness weakens and the regulative powers of society are disrupted, fatalistic suicide occurs when regulation is too excessive, egoistic suicide occurs when the individual is detached from society, and altruistic suicide occurs when social integration is too strong. [9] Integration and regulation were proven to have an effect on an individual committing suicide, presenting the new possibility that social factors can affect something as personal as suicide.
Primitive Classification (1903). This was co-authored with Marcel Mauss, which happened to be Durkheim’s nephew. This later became ‘the sociology of knowledge’. This piece demonstrated the different ways societies construct knowledge. Durkheim and Mauss, “highlighted the Australian aboriginals the Zuni, Sioux, and the Chinese—is a direct reflection of their particular forms of social organization” (Sica 2005:291). Primitive classification was an attack on conventional epistemology, which stated that everyone learned and processed their environment in the same way.
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).The Elementary Forms of Religious Life(1912) was Durkheim’s last major work, and consisted of his study of primitive religions and the function of religious symbols. He focuses on how external social facts can become internalized, and how society’s control over the individual is exercised from within their subjective consciousness. [6] He believes the collective consciousness was reinforced through participation in collective life, and that the decline of traditional religion in modern societies could be seen as an indicator of a decline in social solidarity. [6] Durkheim studied religious phenomena as core elements of systems of common beliefs, and thought that religious ideas symbolized the social group. [11]
Religion has the tendency to create a sense of moral obligation to adhere to society’s demands, yet this simply further reinforces the collective moral conscience. He discerns between sacred and profane objects, claiming that these are socially constructed differences. Durkheim’s analysis points to the functions of the objects; sacredness is not the function, sacredness is placed upon the object. [4] For example, the his studies of the Totemic religion showed that totems (symbols of their society that held them together) created a bond of kinship among the people, and held the members of society together due to the symbolism placed upon them. [1] Overall, Durkheim was searching to understand the empirical elements present in religion.
CRITICISMS
Sociologist George Ritzer believed Durkheim put too much emphasis on social consensus and integration, as well as believing he was too concerned with taming individual impulses and harnessing the energies of individuals for the purposes of society. [2] In addition, Lewis A. Coser describes his thought that Durkheim failed to give consciousness an active role in the social process, and made too many assumptions about human nature concerning the individual. He also says many believed morality was too central in Durkheim’s work; not only was it the driving force behind his sociology, it was also the ultimate goal. [9]
IMPACT
Overall, Durkheim was widely accepted in France, and was incredibly devoted to his family and country. His views were not commonly known or accepted in the United States until the late 1930s, after Parsons published The Structure of Social Action. He made notable contributions to the study of religion and suicide; he believed objects of religious power could only be explained by the power generated by clan festivities and that religion is inherently collective. He also believed suicide was caused by social conditions, and emphasized this with actual statistics. [6] Durkheim had a huge impact on the French educational system; he disposed of the curriculum previously used in the failing Catholic schools and emphasized civic morality in his curriculum for the new public schools. [2] He successfully “divorced” sociology from philosophy [11], and his empirical method and functional style of analysis have been adopted by many schools of anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences. [4] Comte may have opened the doors to studying sociology, but Durkheim defined its subject matter and its methodology. He paved the way for future studies of society, and many of his ideas and theories are still in use today.
FURTHER READING
• Callinicos, Alex. 2007. Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Gane, M.1992. The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss. London: Routledge.
• Giddens, Anthony. 1978. Durkheim, London: Fontana.
• Lukes, Steven. 1985. Émile Durkheim, His Life & Work: A Historical & Critical Study. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University.
• Poggi, Gianfranco. 2000. Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University.
• Thompson, K. 1982. Émile Durkheim. London: Tavistock.
CITATIONS
1. Allan, Kenneth. 2005. Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. Pine Forge Press.
2. Coser, Lewis A. 1977. Masters in Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context,2nd ed. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
3. O’Connell, Peter J. Encyclopedia of Sociology. 1974. “Émile Durkheim.” Guilford, CT: The Dushkin Publishing Group.
4. Farganis, James. 2008. Readings in Social Theory: The Classic Tradition to Post-Modernism,5th ed. McGraw-Hill.
5. Ferrarotti, Franco. 1999. “A Genealogy of Durkheim’s Categories.”13.1. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.
6. Johnson, Doyle Paul. 2008. “Classical Stage European Sources of Sociological Theory”, from Contemporary Sociological Theory.
7. Mann, Douglas. 2008. Understanding Society: A Survey of Modern Social Theory. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press.
8. Rawls, Anne Warfield. “Émile Durkheim (1858-1917).” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology.
9. Rex, John. 1969. “Émile Durkheim.” in The Founding Fathers of Social Science, edited by Timothy Raison. Penguin Books.
10. Ritzer, George. 2008. Sociological Theory, 7th ed. McGraw-Hill.
11. Sica, Alan. 2005. “Emile Durkheim: 1858-1917”.Pp 290-294 in Social Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Present. Boston, MA: Pearson Education.
12. Sim, Stuart and Noel Parker.1997. The A-Z Guide to Modern Social and Political Theorists. Leicester: Prentice Hall.Harvester Wheatsheaf.
13. Slattery, Martin. 2003. Key Ideas in Sociology. Nelson Thones Ltd.
14. Vine, Margaret Wilson. 1969. An Introduction to Social Theory. New York: David McKay Company, Inc.
