Émile Durkheim (1858 - 1917) was a French sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist regarded, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, as one of the principal architects of modern social science. [1] He worked to establish sociology as a distinct academic discipline with its own subject matter and methods, and produced classic studies of the division of labour, suicide and religious life. [2] He held the first professorship in the field in France.
Early life and education
David Émile Durkheim was born on 15 April 1858 in Épinal, in Lorraine, into a devout Jewish family; his father and grandfather were rabbis. [1] He turned away from a religious vocation in adolescence while retaining a lasting scholarly interest in religion as a social phenomenon. After studying at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand he was admitted, on his third attempt, to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, graduating in philosophy in 1882.
He taught in provincial lycées and spent a formative year in Germany, where the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig University and German work on social ethics impressed on him the possibility of an empirical science of morality. [2]
Academic career
In 1887 Durkheim was appointed at the University of Bordeaux to teach social science and pedagogy, the first such post in a French university. [1] In 1902 he moved to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he became professor of education and sociology. He founded the journal L'Année sociologique in 1898, which gathered a school of collaborators and made sociology a recognised research field in France.
Major works
Durkheim's doctoral thesis, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), argued that modern societies are held together not by the shared beliefs of small traditional communities, which he called mechanical solidarity, but by the interdependence created by specialised roles, or organic solidarity. [3] He introduced the concept of anomie to describe the breakdown of regulating norms.
The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) set out his programme: social facts are to be treated as things, external to and constraining on individuals, and explained by other social facts rather than by psychology or biology. [2]
Suicide (1897) applied that programme to statistical data, arguing that variations in suicide rates between groups reflected differing degrees of social integration and regulation rather than individual pathology; it became a model for quantitative social research. [1]
His last major book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), drew on ethnographic accounts of Aboriginal Australian totemism to argue that religion is fundamentally social, and that in worshipping the sacred a society represents itself to itself. [3]
Later life
Durkheim was a supporter of Dreyfus during the Dreyfus affair and an advocate of secular republican education. During the First World War he worked on committees supporting the French war effort and wrote against German militarism. The death of his son André at the front in 1915 was a severe blow, and Durkheim died in Paris on 15 November 1917. [1]
Legacy
Durkheim's insistence on the reality of social facts, his functional analysis of institutions and his methodological rigour shaped structural functionalism, French anthropology and the sociology of religion, deviance and education. [2] His central concepts, including anomie, collective consciousness and the sacred and profane, remain standard vocabulary in the social sciences. [3]
