Émile Durkheim

• 1. Introduction

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  Émile Durkheim was born on the 15th of April 1858 in Épinal, Lorraine, France, the son of a rabbi and the grandson of a rabbi, and the great-grandson of one too. His family's rabbinical lineage stretched back eight generations. Nobody watching that boy in rabbinical school could have predicted that he would abandon that path entirely and spend his life arguing that religion itself was not divine in origin but social. That the beliefs human beings hold sacred are, at their core, the beliefs a community holds about itself.

  By 1895, he had founded the first European department of sociology. By 1897, he had produced a study of suicide that changed what science could say about human behavior. And by the time he died on the 15th of November 1917, he had built an entirely new academic discipline from the ground up. What drove him to it? What did he actually believe? And why does a man who died more than a century ago still appear in introductory courses, philosophy debates, and arguments about crime, religion, and how societies hold together?

• 2. The Making of a Sociologist

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  Jean Jaurès was in Durkheim's entering class at the École normale supérieure in 1879. So was Henri Bergson. Durkheim got in on his third attempt, but the cohort he joined that year was, by later accounts, among the most brilliant of the nineteenth century. At the ENS, he studied under Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist who believed history could be approached scientifically, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu.

  It was in Leipzig, during a study visit to Germany in the 1885-86 school year, that something shifted. Durkheim encountered the value of empiricism as practiced there: a language of concrete, complex things, which he described as standing in sharp contrast to the more abstract, clear, and simple ideas of the Cartesian method he had been raised on. He traveled and studied at the universities of Marburg, Berlin, and Leipzig. He had already been drafting The Division of Labour in Society as part of his doctoral dissertation before he left.

  By 1882, he had obtained his agrégation in philosophy, though he finished next to last in his graduating class. He had been seriously ill the year before. From 1882 to 1887, he taught philosophy at several provincial schools, unable to secure the Paris appointment his ambitions required. The Parisian faculty, he would find for years afterward, were resistant to what some called 'sociological imperialism.'

• 3. Building the Discipline

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  Durkheim received a teaching appointment at the University of Bordeaux in 1887, where he taught the university's first social science course. His official title was Chargé d'un Cours de Science Sociale et de Pédagogie. Sociology had never been taught in France before.

  The 1890s produced a series of works that each staked out new ground. The Division of Labour in Society appeared in 1893 as his doctoral dissertation, arguing that the glue holding modern societies together is not shared belief but mutual dependence on specialized labor. The Rules of Sociological Method followed in 1895, laying out a program for what sociology was and how it must be practiced. He described sociology, in his own words, as 'not an auxiliary of any other science; it is itself a distinct and autonomous science.' That same year he founded the first European department of sociology at Bordeaux.

  In 1898, he established L'Année sociologique, the first French social science journal, which also became the name used to refer to the circle of students and collaborators who developed his program. His nephew Marcel Mauss, who would become a notable social anthropologist in his own right, was among them.

  By 1902, Durkheim finally secured a position in Paris, becoming chair of education at the Sorbonne. He became a full professor there in 1906, and in 1913 was named chair in 'Education and Sociology.' His lectures were the only ones mandatory for the entire student body.

• 4. Social Facts and What They Mean

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  Durkheim defined a social fact as '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.' He coined the term to describe phenomena that exist outside any single person but press upon each of us anyway.

  A flag, he suggested, is a physical social fact. It is a piece of cloth, but its meaning and its emotional weight are immaterial social facts attached to it. The material and the immaterial can inhabit the same object simultaneously. Even phenomena that seem most private, such as love, freedom, or suicide, he regarded as objective social facts: phenomena that exist in society independently of what any individual decides.

  This put him in deliberate contrast to contemporaries like Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, who focused on what motivates individual action. Durkheim's method demanded the opposite approach. A social fact, he insisted, must always be studied in relation to other social facts, never through the consciousness of the individual who studies it. Sociology should privilege comparison over the study of singular events. He agreed with Herbert Spencer that different parts of a society could be understood by the function they serve in keeping the whole working, and he agreed with Spencer's organic analogy: society as a living organism whose parts are interdependent.

  In the Tarde-Durkheim debate of 1903, the anthropological view of Gabriel Tarde was dismissed, an episode that illustrated how aggressively Durkheim defended sociology's boundaries against rival frameworks.

• 5. Suicide as Science

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  In 1897, Durkheim published Suicide, a study that used statistics to examine why suicide rates differed between Roman Catholics and Protestants. His argument was not about theology. He proposed that stronger social control among Roman Catholics resulted in lower suicide rates. Protestant society, by his analysis, had lower levels of social integration.

  He mapped suicide against two axes: social regulation and social integration. From this he derived four types. Egoistic suicide followed from too little social integration, leaving an individual feeling they had made no difference to anyone. Altruistic suicide came from too much, when a group so dominated an individual that they felt meaningless to the larger society. Anomic suicide arose from too little social regulation, producing aimlessness. Fatalistic suicide came from too much regulation: a life locked into the same routine, with nothing to anticipate. Durkheim suggested this last form was most common among prisoners.

  Critics later noted that Durkheim drew much of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli, who had been more careful about generalizing from their own findings. Subsequent researchers also found that the Protestant-Catholic differences in suicide appeared largely limited to German-speaking Europe. The study has been called an example of the ecological fallacy, though scholars including Inkeles in 1959, Johnson in 1965, and Gibbs in 1968 have argued that Durkheim's intent was simply to explain variation among social environments in the incidence of suicide, not to predict the decisions of particular individuals. Despite the debate, the book pioneered modern social research methods and helped establish that social science could be distinguished from psychology and political philosophy.

• 6. The Sacred and the Social

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  The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life appeared in 1912, Durkheim's last major work. His starting point was totemism, the religion of Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans, which he considered the most ancient form of religion. He focused on it precisely because he believed its simplicity would make the essential elements of religion easier to examine.

  He rejected earlier definitions, including the anthropologist Tylor's claim that religion was 'belief in supernatural beings.' Drawing on the ethnologies of Spencer and Gillen regarding Aboriginal Australians, Durkheim argued that primitive societies did not divide reality into natural and supernatural categories. Instead they divided it into the sacred and the profane, and those were not moral categories: both could contain what was good or evil.

  His definition of religion ran as follows: '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 definition makes no reference to God or the supernatural. Religion, for Durkheim, was the mechanism by which a community experienced itself as a community. The sacred was simply what a society had collectively decided to hold apart.

  He described the totem this way: 'Now the totem is the flag of the clan.' The clan itself was too complex a reality for its members to hold in mind directly, so they attached their feelings of dependence and vitality to the totem instead. The most serious critique of the work came from Arnold van Gennep, an expert on religion and Australian belief systems, who argued that Durkheim's views of primitive peoples were 'entirely erroneous' and that Durkheim had accepted data collected by traders and priests without sufficient critical scrutiny. Yet Robert Alun Jones later wrote that Durkheim's arguments had 'stimulated the interest and excitement of several generations of sociologists irrespective of theoretical school or field of specialization.'

• 7. Solidarity, Anomie, and Modern Life

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  Collective consciousness, the term Durkheim coined to describe the norms, beliefs, and values that form the moral basis of a society, has since passed into everyday language. He described it as 'the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society,' forming 'a determinate system with a life of its own.' In his account, it was the emotional dimension of this consciousness that mattered most: human beings act socially because culture binds them emotionally, not merely rationally.

  Durkheim traced a path from what he called mechanical solidarity, the cohesion of simpler societies based on personal ties and tradition, to organic solidarity, the interdependence of complex modern societies based on specialized labor. In mechanical solidarity, the law is punitive and aims to reinforce community cohesion through public and extreme punishment. In organic solidarity, the law focuses on repairing damage and centers on individuals rather than the community.

  One of the main features of organic, modern society, in his view, was the sacredness given to the concept of the individual. He described this as the 'cult of the individual': 'moral individualism, the cult of the individual, is in fact the product of society itself. It is society that instituted it and made of man the god whose servant it is.' The individual had become, in modern life, the center of public and private rituals once performed by religion.

  Anomie, the condition he described as a lack of social norms produced by populations growing too rapidly for interaction to keep pace, was one of the chief pathologies he identified in modern life. Another was the forced division of labour, when those holding power direct people into work they are unsuited for, producing unhappiness and instability. Fashion, in a lighter vein, he described as a cyclical phenomenon: lower classes adopt the styles of upper classes, depreciating them, which forces the upper classes to find new ones.

• 8. Legacy and Contested Ground

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  The list of scholars Durkheim influenced reads like an index of twentieth-century thought: Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Robert K. Merton, Jean Piaget, Erving Goffman, and Pierre Bourdieu among them. Randall Collins built a theory of interaction ritual chains by synthesizing Durkheim's work on religion with Goffman's micro-sociology.

  The more troubling branch of his influence runs through Ziya Gökalp, the founder of Turkish sociology, who replaced Durkheim's concept of society with that of the nation. Gökalp became an ideologue who provided intellectual justification for the Ottoman Empire's wars and demographic engineering, including the Armenian genocide. Whether Durkheim bears any responsibility for how his ideas were applied is a separate question from what those ideas actually said.

  The philosopher John Searle published a book called The Construction of Social Reality that elaborated a theory of social facts and collective representations, which Searle believed to be a landmark work bridging analytic and continental philosophy. Neil Gross later demonstrated that Searle's views were substantially a reconstitution of Durkheim's theories. Searle's response was to admit he had not read much of Durkheim: 'Because Durkheim's account seemed so impoverished I did not read any further in his work.' Stephen Lukes refuted Searle's allegations point by point, arguing that Searle had simply never engaged with the work.

  Durkheim's own son André died on the war front in December 1915. Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in Paris and died on the 15th of November 1917. He was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery. Margaret Gilbert's 1989 book On Social Facts, the title likely an homage to Durkheim's faits sociaux, continued to argue that what had seemed philosophically untenable in his work was in fact important and fruitful.