'Émile Durkheim' (;
April 15,
1858 –
November 15,
1917) was a
French sociologist whose contributions were instrumental in the formation of
sociology and
anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology (''
L'Année Sociologique'') helped establish sociology within the
academy as an accepted
social science. During his lifetime, Durkheim gave many lectures, and published numerous sociological studies on subjects such as
education,
crime,
religion,
suicide, and many other aspects of
society.
Life and career
Early years
Emile Durkheim came from a long line of devout
French Jews; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been
rabbis. At an early age, he decided not to follow in his family's rabbinical footsteps. 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. His Jewish background did, however, shape his sociological perspective; many of his students and collaborators were fellow Jews, and often blood relatives.
A precocious student, Durkheim entered the
École Normale Supérieure in 1879. The entering class that year was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his classmates, such as
Jean Jaurès and
Henri Bergson would go on to become major figures in France's intellectual history. At the ENS, Durkheim studied with
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin
dissertation on
Montesquieu.
[1] At the same time, he read
Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer. 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 curriculum at the time. Durkheim found
humanistic studies uninteresting, and he finished second to last in his graduating class when he
aggregated in philosophy in 1882.
Middle years
There was no way that a man of Durkheim's views could receive a major academic appointment in
Paris, and so after spending a year studying sociology in
Germany he traveled to
Bordeaux in
1887, which had just started France's first teacher's training center. There he taught both
pedagogy and social science (a novel position in France). From this position Durkheim reformed the
French school system 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
1893 he published ''
The Division of Labour in Society'', his doctoral dissertation and fundamental statement of the nature of
human society and
its development. Durkheim's interest in
social phenomena was spurred on by
politics. France's defeat in the
Franco-Prussian War had created a backlash against secular,
republican rule and many considered a vigorously
nationalistic approach to rejuvenate France's fading power. Durkheim, a Jew 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 was and how it ought to be done, and founded the first European Department of Sociology at the
University of Bordeaux. In 1896 he founded the journal ''
L'Année Sociologique'' in order 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.
Later years
In
1902 Durkheim 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, ''
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life''.
World War I was to have a tragic effect on Durkheim's life. Durkheim's 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 as France was bled white in the trenches. Finally, Durkheim's own son died in the war — a mental blow from which Durkheim never recovered. Emotionally devastated and overworked, Durkheim collapsed of a
stroke in
Paris in
1917. He recovered over several months and resumed work on ''La Morale''. He died at the age of 59 on
November 15 from exhaustion. He lies buried at the
Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
Theories and ideas
Social facts
Main articles: Social fact
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. In order to study social life in modern societies, Durkheim sought to create one of the first
scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with
Herbert Spencer, Durkheim 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 keeping the society healthy and balanced, 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 individual people (
methodological individualism), but rather on the study of ''
social facts'', a term which he coined to describe phenomena which have an existence in and of themselves and are not bound to the actions of individuals. He argued that social facts had an independent existence greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that composed society and could only be explained by other social facts rather than, say, by society's adaptation to a particular climate or ecological niche.
Division of labour
In his
1893 work ''The Division of Labour in Society'', Durkheim examined how
social order was maintained in different types of societies. He focused on the
division of labour, and examined how it differed in
traditional societies and
modern societies[1]. Authors before him such as
Herbert Spencer or
Otto von Gierke had argued that
societies evolved much like living
organisms, moving from a simple state to a more complex one resembling the workings of complex machines. Durkheim reversed this formula, adding his theory to the growing pool of theories of
social progress,
social evolutionism and
social Darwinism. He argued that traditional societies were 'mechanical' and were held together by the fact that everyone was more or less the same, and hence had things in common. In traditional societies, argues Durkheim, the
collective consciousness entirely subsumes individual consciousness—
social norms are strong and
social behavior is well-regulated.
In modern societies, he argued, the highly complex division of labour resulted in 'organic'
solidarity. Different specializations in employment and social roles created dependencies that tied people to one another, since people no longer could count on filling all of their needs by themselves. In 'mechanical' societies, for example, subsistence farmers live in communities which are self-sufficient and knit together by a common heritage and common job. In modern 'organic' societies, workers earn
money, and must rely on other people who specialize in certain products (groceries, clothing, etc.) to meet their needs. The result of increasing
division of labour, according to Durkheim, is that individual consciousness emerges distinct from collective consciousness—often finding itself in conflict with collective consciousness.
Durkheim also made an association of the kind of solidarity in a given society and the preponderance of a law system. He found that in societies with mechanical solidarity the law is generally repressive: the agent of a crime or deviant behaviour would suffer a punishment, that in fact would compensate collective conscience neglected by the crime—the punishment acts more to preserve the unity of consciences. On the other hand, in societies with organic solidarity the law is generally restitutive: it aims not to punish, but instead to restitute normal activity of a complex society.
The rapid change in society due to increasing division of labor thus produces a state of confusion with regard to norms and increasing impersonality in social life, leading eventually to relative
normlessness, i.e. the breakdown of
social norms regulating behavior; Durkheim labels this state ''
anomie''. From a state of anomie come all forms of
deviant behavior, most notably
suicide.
Durkheim developed the concept of anomie later in ''
Suicide'', published in
1897. In it, he explores the differing suicide rates among
Protestants and
Catholics, explaining that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of attachment to their groups, which he calls
social integration. Abnormally high or low levels of social integration may result in increased suicide rates; low levels have this effect because low social integration results in disorganized society, alienation and loneliness in the individual, causing people to turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels cause people to kill themselves to avoid becoming burdens on society, or because the social pressure becomes too great and oppressive. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. This work has influenced proponents of
control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study.
Finally, Durkheim is remembered for his work on 'primitive' (i.e. non-Western) people in books such as his
1912 volume ''Elementary Forms of the Religious Life'' and the essay ''Primitive Classification'' that he wrote with
Marcel Mauss. These works examine the role that
religion and
mythology have in shaping the worldview and personality of people in extremely (to use Durkheim's phrase) 'mechanical' societies. In ''Elementary Forms of the Religious Life'' Durkheim develops a theory of religion which is based on
Collective Effervescence.
Education
Durkheim was also very 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:
# 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.
# To maintain social roles
#
★ School is a society in miniature. It has a similar hierarchy, rules, expectations to the "outside world". It trains young people to fulfill roles.
# 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 believed that
crime was not only ''normal'' in any society, but was also ''functional''. It was normal because no society existed in which some level of crime was not evident, and functional as it served to reinforce social norms, provide the raw material for social change and provide a kind of "safety valve" for social discontent, wherein people can simply disobey the law, rather than seeking to change it.
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).
Religion
In classical sociology, the study of religion was primarily concerned with two broad issues:
# How did religion contribute to the maintenance of social order?
# 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.
Emile 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 says, 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 an 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 recognisable 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 & forbidden-- beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
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:
# Disciplinary, forcing or administrating discipline
# Cohesive, bringing people together, a strong bond
# Vitalizing, to make more lively or vigorous, vitalise, boost spirit
# Euphoric, a good feeling, happiness, confidence, well-being
Literature
★ Durkheim, ''The Division of Labor in Society'', (1893) The Free Press reprint 1997, ISBN 0684836386
★ Durkheim, ''Rules of Sociological Method'', (1895) The Free Press 1982, ISBN 0029079403
★ Durkheim, ''On the Normality of Crime'' (1895)
★ Durkheim, ''
Suicide'', (1897), The Free Press reprint 1997, ISBN 0684836327
★ Durkheim, ''The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life'', (1912, English translation by Joseph Swain: 1915) The Free Press, 1965. ISBN 0-02-908010-X, new translation by Karen E. Fields 1995, ISBN 0029079373
★ Durkheim, ''Professional Ethics and Civic Morals'', English translation by Cornelia Brookfield (1955) Routledge, 1992, ISBN 0-415-06225-X
★
Steven Lukes, ''Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, a Historical and Critical Study.'' Stanford University Press, 1985.
★ Jack D. Douglas, ''The Social Meanings of Suicide.'' Princeton University Press, 1973.
See also
;General:
Normlessness,
Social innovation,
Social control,
Social relation,
Anomie,
Gabriel Tarde
References
1. A History of Sociological Analysis, Bottomore, Tom, Robert Nisbet, , , Basic Books, 1978,
External links
★
Biography of Emile Durkheim
★
Extracts from Emile Durkheim
★
The Durkheim Pages (University of Illinois)
★
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)
★
Emile Durkheim's Sociology
★
Dead Sociologist Index: Durkheim
★
Sociology 318 at University of Regina course notes about Durhkeim
★
Durkheim on Deviance
★
Durkheim on Crime
★
Durkheim and others on Crime
★
Durkheim and others on Crime and Deviance
★
The New Durkheim by Ivan Strenski
★
Forthcoming conference on the ideas of Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde
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