What type of researcher was emile durkheim

He was keen on clarifying contrasts in suicide rates yet not in the investigation of why a particular individual submitted suicide. All the while he was keen on why are assemble had a higher rate of suicide than another. So he accepted that exclusive social actualities could clarify it.

He continued to give a sociological order of suicides by demonstrating all the main sorts of suicide which are expected totally to social causes. Durkheim had clarified four noteworthy types of Suicide. They are an Egoistic b Altruistic c Anomie d Fatalistic. This absence of mix prompts an inclination that neither the individual is a piece of society nor the general public is a piece of the person.

Durkheim asserts the significance of social powers if there should be an occurrence of self-absorbed suicide additionally, where the individual may be believed to be free of social limitations. Durkheim claimed that the study of suicide showed that behavior was a product of social facts rather than individual motives. Since each society had a particular suicide rate that remained relatively constant over time, the cause of that rate was to be found in the nature of society, not in the nature of the individual.

Although suicide appears to be a uniquely personal and private act, it causes lie in the nature of social groups. It has been judged successful because its findings are seen to be based on data which can be directly observed and measured. Durkheim saw the real capacity of instruction as the transmission of the general public standards and qualities. Instruction propagates and fortifies this picture anything by settling in the kid from the earliest starting point the basic likenesses which aggregate life requests.

Despite his muted political engagement, Durkheim was an ardent patriot of France. He hoped to use his sociology as a way to help a French society suffering under the strains of modernity, and during World War I he took up a position writing anti-German propaganda pamphlets, which in part use his sociological theories to help explain the fervent nationalism found in Germany.

Durkheim was not the first thinker to attempt to make sociology a science. Auguste Comte, who wished to extend the scientific method to the social sciences, and Herbert Spencer , who developed an evolutionary utilitarian approach that he applied to different areas in the social sciences, made notable attempts and their work had a formative influence on Durkheim. However, Durkheim was critical of these attempts at sociology and felt that neither had sufficiently divorced their analyses from metaphysical assumptions.

While Durkheim incorporated elements of evolutionary theory into his own, he did so in a critical way, and was not interested in developing a grand theory of society as much as developing a perspective and a method that could be applied in diverse ways. With Emile Boutroux, Durkheim read Comte and got the idea that sociology could have its own unique subject matter that was not reducible to any other field of study.

Gabriel Monod and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, both historians, introduced Durkheim to systematic empirical and comparative methods that could be applied to history and the social sciences. Charles Renouvier, a neo-Kantian philosopher, also had a large impact on Durkheim. Between and , Durkheim spent an academic year visiting universities in Germany. What Durkheim found there impressed him deeply. Importantly these scholars were relating morality to other social institutions such as economics or the law, and in the process were emphasizing the social nature of morality.

Arguably the most important of these thinkers for Durkheim was Wundt, who rejected methodological individualism and argued that morality was a sui generis social phenomenon that could not be reduced to individuals acting in isolation. Early in his career Durkheim wrote dissertations about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu, both of whom he cited as precursors to sociology.

The most important of these, arguably, is Immanuel Kant , whose moral and epistemological theories were of great influence. Durkheim remains a fundamental and prominent figure for sociology and social theory in general. This can be partly explained by the fact that the Durkheimian school of thought was greatly reduced when many of his most promising students were killed in WWI, that Durkheim went to such great lengths to divorce sociology from philosophy, or by the fact that his thought has been, and continues to be, simplified, misunderstood, or ignored.

Nevertheless, his ideas had, and continue to have, a strong impact in the social sciences, especially in sociology and anthropology. These thinkers, however, never discuss Durkheim at length, or acknowledge any intellectual debt to him. According to Durkheim, all elements of society, including morality and religion, are part of the natural world and can be studied scientifically. In particular, Durkheim sees his sociology as the science of institutions, which refer to collective ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

A fundamental element of this science is the sociological method, which Durkheim formulated specifically for this purpose. According to Durkheim, social facts have an objective reality that sociologists can study in a way similar to how other scientists, such as physicists, study the physical world. An important corollary to the above definition is that social facts are also internal to individuals, and it is only through individuals that social facts are able to exist.

In this sense, externality means interior to individuals other than the individual subject. In order to fully grasp how social facts are created and operate, it must be understood that for Durkheim, a society is not merely a group of individuals living in one particular geographical location. Rather, a society is an ensemble of ideas, beliefs, and sentiments of all sorts that are realized through individuals; it indicates a reality that is produced when individuals interact with one another, resulting in the fusion of individual consciences.

This fusion of individual consciences is a sui generis reality. This means that the social fact, much as water is the product of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, is a wholly new entity with distinct properties, irreducible to its composing parts, and unable to be understood by any means other than those proper to it.

In other words, society is greater than the sum of its parts; it supercedes in complexity, depth, and richness, the existence of any one particular individual. This psychic reality is sometimes although especially in Division referred to by Durkheim with the term conscience collective , which can alternately be translated into English as collective conscience or collective consciousness. What is more, society and social phenomena can only be explained in sociological terms, as the fusion of individual consciences that, once created, follows its own laws.

Society cannot be explained, for example, in biological or psychological terms. Social facts are key, since they are what constitute and express the psychic reality that is society.

Through them individuals acquire particular traits, such as a language, a monetary system, values, religious beliefs, tendencies for suicide, or technologies, that they would never have had living in total isolation. Durkheim identifies different kinds of social facts with constraint remaining a key feature of each.

In these cases it is easy to see how society imposes itself onto the individual from the outside through the establishment of social norms and values to which conformity is either expected or encouraged. Currents of opinion, or social phenomena that express themselves through individual cases, are also social facts. Examples include rates of marriage, birth, or suicide. In these cases, the operation of society on the individual is not so obvious.

Nevertheless, these phenomena can be studied with the use of statistics, which accumulate individual cases into an aggregate and express a certain state of the collective mind. There are also social facts of a morphological, or structural, order, including the demographic and material conditions of life such as the number, nature, and relation of the composing parts of a society, their geographical distribution, their means of communication and so forth.

While perhaps not as evident, these types of social facts are also influenced by collective ways of thinking, acting, or feeling and have the same characteristics of externality and constraint as the other types. Durkheim thus identifies a broad range of social facts that correspond roughly with his intellectual development: in his early work he focuses on social morphology, he then wrote a book on suicide, while his late work concentrates on social norms and values seen especially in morality and religion.

In his early work constraint has more of a repressive or obligatory nature, whereas in his later works he highlights the attracting or devotional aspects of social facts, or how individuals are drawn voluntarily to particular symbols, norms, or beliefs. Important to point out also is that social facts operate at varying degrees of formality and complexity. Durkheim provides a set of rules for studying social facts.

While he lists a number of rules, the most fundamental come from Chapter 2 of Rules. The first and most important rule is to treat social facts as things. What Durkheim means by this is that social facts have an existence independent of the knowing subject and that they impose themselves on the observer. Social facts can be recognized by the sign that they resist the action of individual will upon them; as products of the collectivity, changing social facts require laborious effort.

The next rule for studying social facts is that the sociologist must clearly delimit and define the group of phenomena being researched. This structures the research and provides the object of study a condition of verifiability. The sociologist must also strive to be as objective towards the facts they are working on as possible and remove any subjective bias or attachment to what they are investigating.

Similarly, the sociologist must systematically discard any and all preconceptions and closely examine the facts before saying anything about them. Durkheim applies these rules to empirical evidence he draws primarily from statistics, ethnography, and history. Durkheim treats this data in a rational way, which is to say that he applies the law of causality to it. At this, Durkheim introduces an important rationalist component to his sociological method, namely the idea that by using his rules human behavior can be explained through observable cause and effect relationships.

Accordingly, he often uses a comparative-historical approach, which he sees as the core of the sociological method, to eliminate extraneous causes and find commonalities between different societies and their social facts. In so doing, he strives to find general laws that are universally applicable. Durkheim also argues that social facts can only be understood in relation to other social facts.

As an example, he explains suicide rates not in reference to psychological factors, but rather to different social institutions and the way they integrate and regulate individuals within a group. In his work Durkheim also follows the historical development of political, educational, religious, economic, and moral institutions, particularly those of Western society, and makes a strict difference between historical analysis and sociology: whereas the historical method strives only to describe what happened in the past, sociology strives to explain the past.

In other words, sociology searches for the causes and functions of social facts as they change over time. Within this realist position there are two important claims. First, Durkheim makes an ontological claim concerning the sui generis reality of social facts. Hence, Durkheim is arguing that social facts have particular properties of being and that they can be discovered and analyzed when the sociologist treats them in the proper, scientific way.

Durkheim strongly refutes such accusations. In response to the first critique, it must be remembered that social facts are both exterior and interior to individuals, with externality in this case meaning interior to individuals other than the individual subject. As Durkheim argues, social facts exist in a special substratum of the individual mind.

His position then ultimately is that while the social fact is unmistakably a sui generis product of social interaction, it is produced and resides exclusively in this special substratum of the individual mind. To say that social facts exist independent of all individuals is an absurd position that Durkheim does not advocate.

Only on a methodological level, in order to study social facts from the outside as they present themselves to individuals, does the sociologist abstract social facts from the individual consciences in which they are present. In response to the second critique, Durkheim maintains that social facts, as products of the psyche, are wholly ideational and do not have a material substratum.

They can only be observed through the more or less systematized phenomenal reality to be analyzed as empirical data that expresses them. His most definitive statement on the subject can be found in Forms , a book dedicated not only to studying religion, but also to understanding how logical thought arises out of society. Other works, such as Pragmatism and Sociology , a posthumous lecture series given late in his life, elaborate his views.

Not only are our common beliefs, ideas, and language determined by our social milieu, but even the concepts and categories necessary for logical thought, such as time, space, causality, and number, have their source in society. This logical structure helps to order and interpret the world, ensuring that individuals have a more or less homogenous understanding of the world and how it operates, without which human society would not be possible.

According to Durkheim, no knowledge of the world is possible without humanity in some way representing it. Furthermore, Durkheim rejects the idea of the Ding an sich , or the transcendent thing in itself. This means that the world exists only as far as it is represented, and that all knowledge of the world necessarily refers back to how it is represented.

As Durkheim explains, words, or concepts, are unlike individual sensory representations, which are in a perpetual flux and unable to provide a stable and consistent form to thought. Concepts are impersonal, stand outside of time and becoming le devenir , and the thought they engender is fixed and resists change.

Consequently, language is also the realm through which the idea of truth is able to come into being, since through language individuals are able to conceive of a world of stable ideas that are common to different intelligences. Thus, language conforms to the two criteria for truth that Durkheim lays out, impersonality and stability.

These two criteria are also precisely what allow for inter-subjective communication. Language is, therefore, obviously a sui generis product of social interaction; it is the product of the fusion of individual consciences, with the result being completely new and irreducible to the parts that make it up and with the result residing in the minds of individuals as a product of collective action.

As such, language does not bear the imprint of any mind in particular, and is instead developed by society, that unique intelligence where all of the others come to meet and interact, contributing their ideas and sentiments to the social nexus. Words are merely the way in which society, in its totality, represents to itself objects of experience. In this way, language is also infused with the authority of society. With this, Durkheim makes a reference to Plato, saying that when confronted with this system of concepts, the individual mind is in the same situation as the nous of Plato before the world of ideas.

The individual is thereby compelled to assimilate the concepts and appropriate them as their own, if only so as to be able to communicate with other individuals. As Durkheim argues, objects of experience do not exist independently of the society that perceives and represents them.

They exist only through the relationship they have with society, a relationship that can reveal very different aspects about reality depending on the society. Through language society is able to pass on to an individual a body of collective knowledge that is infinitely rich and greatly exceeds the limits of individual experience.

The way in which an individual, literally, sees the world, and the knowledge an individual comes to have about existence, therefore, is highly informed by the language that individual speaks.

Language is not the only facet of logical thought that society engenders; society also plays a large role in creating the categories of thought, such as time, space, number, causality, personality and so forth. In formulating his theory, Durkheim is especially critical of rationalists, such as Kant , who believe that the categories of human thought are universal, independent of environmental factors, and located within the mind a priori.

The categories, such as time and space, are not vague and indeterminate, as Kant suggests. Rather, they have a definite form and specific qualities such as minutes, weeks, months for time, or north, south, inches, kilometers for space. The characteristics of the categories, furthermore, vary from culture to culture, sometimes greatly, leading Durkheim to believe that they are of a social origin.

Durkheim argues that the categories share the same properties as concepts. Categories, like concepts, have the qualities of stability and impersonality, both of which are necessary conditions for the mutual understanding of two minds. Like concepts, then, categories have a necessarily social function and are the product of social interaction. Individuals could therefore never create the categories on their own. Durkheim believes that it is possible to overcome the opposition between rationalism and empiricism by accounting for reason without ignoring the world of observable empirical data.

As Durkheim argues, the categories are the natural, sui generis result of the co-existence and interaction of individuals within a social framework. What is more, not only does society institute the categories in this way, but different aspects of the social being serve as the content of the categories.

For example, the rhythm of social life serves as the base for the category of time, the spatial arrangement of the group serves as a base for the category of space, the social grouping of society for example in clans or phratries serves as a base for the category of class as in the classification of items , and collective force is at the origin of the concept of an efficacious force, which was essential to the very first formulations of the category of causality.

Another category of utmost importance is the category of totality, the notion of everything, which originates from the concept of the social group in total. The categories are not, of course, used only to relate to society. Rather, they extend and apply to the entire universe, helping individuals to explain rationally the world around them. As a result, the ways in which individuals understand the world through the categories can vary in important ways.

As Steven Lukes has pointed out, Durkheim does not distinguish between the faculties of categorical thinking, such as the faculty of temporality, and the content of these faculties, such as dividing time into set units of measurement. Instead, Durkheim views both the capacity and the content of categorical thought as stamped onto the individual mind by society at the same time.

There may be different classifications within a society, for example, but in order for an individual to recognize these classifications in the first place, they must have prior possession of the ability to recognize classifications. Another vital role that society plays in the construction of human knowledge is the fact that it actively organizes objects of experience into a coherent classificatory system that encompasses the entire universe.

With these classificatory systems it becomes possible to attach things one to another and to establish relations between them. This allows us to see things as functions of each other, as if they were following an interior law that was founded in their nature and provides order to an otherwise chaotic world.

What is more, Durkheim argues that it was through religion that the very first cosmologies, or classificatory systems of the universe, came into being, in the form of religious myth. Religion was thus the first place where humans could attempt to rationally explain and understand the world around them.

As a result, Durkheim argues that the evolution of logic is strongly linked to the evolution of religion though both ultimately depend upon social conditions. This leads to the claim that religion is at the origin of much, if not all, of human knowledge. This argument has a far reach, affecting even the way in which modern science views itself. Social Research Glossary. Citation reference: Harvey, L.

This is a dynamic glossary and the author would welcome any e-mail suggestions for additions or amendments. Durkheim, Emile. Although Durkheim has been closely associated with positivist approaches, his sociology is varied and complex. Arguably, Durkheim developed a social realist approach to sociology. These works include discussions of methodology as well as substantive empirical works.

First, a view that society existed to control the insatiable desires of individuals what Durkheim referred to as individualism both for the good of the collective and for the good of the individual. Thus Durkheim assumed that social control not social change was not only desirable but the aim of sociological analysis.

Second, order comes about as a result of stability. Stability depends upon solidarity within society. Individuals acting as atomistic units disrupt this stability. Third, a healthy society is one that is not only ordered but meritocratic. In such a society everyone would know, and be prepared to accept, their place on merit.

For Durkheim, sociology is the study of social phenomena through the analysis of social behaviour. The approach is to direct attention to the study of social facts. Social facts are the representation of social currents courantes sociologiques and collective consciousness conscience collective that exist independently of the individual. Methodologically, Durkheim developed a procedure for investigating social phenomena. These comprise a set of rules for:.

For Durkheim, the first and most important principle is to consider social facts as thing. Durkheim argued for the elimination of biases, sense perception, and objectivity. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been rabbis, and it was assumed that he would follow their lead when they enrolled him in a rabbinical school. However, at an early age, he decided not to follow in his family's footsteps and switched schools after realizing that he preferred to study religion from an agnostic standpoint as opposed to being indoctrinated.

Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his career, which meant the first of many conflicts with the French academic system—which had no social science curriculum at the time. Durkheim found humanistic studies uninteresting, turning his attention from psychology and philosophy to ethics and eventually, sociology. He graduated with a degree in philosophy in Durkheim's views could not get him a major academic appointment in Paris, so from to he taught philosophy at several provincial schools.

In he left for Germany, where he studied sociology for two years. Durkheim's period in Germany resulted in the publication of numerous articles on German social science and philosophy, which gained recognition in France and earned him a teaching appointment at the University of Bordeaux in This was an important sign of the change of times and the growing importance and recognition of the social sciences. From this position, Durkheim helped reform the French school system and introduced the study of social science in its curriculum.

Also in , Durkheim married Louise Dreyfus, with whom he later had two children.