David Emile Durkheim (French: [emil dyRkem] or [dyRkajm]; April 15, 1858 - November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and--with Karl Marx and Max Weber--is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science. Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labour in Society (1893).

Emile Durkheim was born in Epinal in Lorraine, the son of Melanie (Isidor) and Moise Durkheim. He came from a long line of devout French Jews; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been rabbis. He began his education in a rabbinical school, but at an early age, he decided not to follow in his family's footsteps and switched schools. Durkheim led a completely secular life. Much of his work was dedicated to demonstrating that religious phenomena stemmed from social rather than divine factors. While Durkheim chose not to follow in the family tradition, he did not sever ties with his family or with the Jewish community. Many of his most prominent collaborators and students were Jewish, and some were blood relations. Marcel Mauss, a notable social anthropologist of the pre-war era, was his nephew. One of his nieces was Claudette (nee Raphael) Bloch, a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, who became a noted anthropologist. A precocious student, Durkheim entered the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) in 1879, at his third attempt. The entering class that year was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his classmates, such as Jean Jaures and Henri Bergson, would go on to become major figures in France's intellectual history. At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu. 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, turning his attention from psychology and philosophy to ethics and eventually, sociology. He obtained his agregation in philosophy in 1882, though finishing next to last in his graduating class owing to serious illness the year before. The opportunity for Durkheim to a receive major academic appointment in Paris was inhibited by his approach to society. From 1882 to 1887 he taught philosophy at several provincial schools. In 1885 he decided to leave for Germany, where for two years he studied sociology at the universities of Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig. As Durkheim indicated in several essays, it was in Leipzig that he learned to appreciate the value of empiricism and its language of concrete, complex things, in sharp contrast to the more abstract, clear and simple ideas of the Cartesian method. By 1886, as part of his doctoral dissertation, he had completed the draft of his The Division of Labour in Society, and was working towards establishing the new science of sociology.

Ask a question about this article.
Who were his parents?