Emile Durkheim

# Key points in biography

Durkheim was born in France in 1858, after first following family tradition to become a Rabbi, he started to reject Judaism during his adolescence. After starting his studies in philosophy Durkheim soon became disenchanted with the subject and turned to the study of sociology instead. His aim was to use sociology as a means to reconstitute the moral order in France that he perceived to be severely decaying since the end of the French Revolution. Durkheim first became a professor at the University of Bordeaux and then later at the Sorbonne in Paris. He especially advocated, first, that everything could be scientifically studied and, second, that students had to receive a moral yet secular education. Durkheim became especially active during the *Dreyfus Affair* during which he was a member of the Ligue des droits des hommes that actively promoted clearing Dreyfus of all charges. Durkheim died in 1917.

# Contributions to Sociology

## Key Concepts

**Social facts** are conditions and circumstances, ways of acting, thinking and feeling that external to the individual (outside her consciousness) that, nevertheless, determine their course of action. Durkheim saw statistics and official numbers as opportunities to accurately define and measure these social facts. Whether these types of conduct coincide with my own preferred behavior and thus don't feel like a constraint, doesn't matter. The proof of the coercion lies in the resistance to it. Every social fact is imitated; it has a tendency to become general, but that is because it is social, i.e., obligatory. Its power of expansion is not the cause but the consequence of its sociological character.

**Social solidarity** or the cohesion of social groups describes Durkheim's concern with the dynamics and the social bonds that hold social groups together. He maintained that without such solidarity and cohesion society would inevitably cease to exist.

**mechanical solidarity**, was the kind of social cohesion that Durkheim attributed to traditional societies, **organic solidarity**, social cohesion in modern societies.

**collective conscience**, refers to the whole body of beliefs and feelings that an average citizen in a society has and that constitutes an independent entity that has its own life. These moral sentiments exist independently from the particular situation in which the individual is placed (**collective representations** is another term used by Durkheim to refer to the same thing)

## The Rules of Sociological Method

Durkheim makes three central points in this work

1. Sociology is a distinct field of study
2. Despite the fact that social sciences are distinct from the natural sciences, the methods of the latter can be applied to the former
3. The social field is, furthermore, clearly distinguishable from the psychological field

According to Durkheim there are two different ways in which social facts can be identified

1. Social facts are any general factors or realities pervasive at the given stage of evolution of a country
2. A social fact is, moreover, marked by any way in which it can act out a constraint over an individual, it has a **coercive power**

Durkheim also maintains that crime is an inevitable reality of all societies. Since individuals are never all exactly alike the need arises to define boundaries of moral acceptability which are crossed by crime and then serve to reaffirm the collective moral convictions. Crime followed by punishment, rule-breaking and the respective punishment, serve to reaffirm the very rules of society

"In the case of purely moral maxims: the public conscience exercises a check on every act which offends it by means of surveillance it exercises over the conduct of citizens and the appropriate penalties at its disposal.", "Crime is, then, necessary; it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life, and by that very fact it is useful, because these conditions of which it is a part are themselves indispensable to the normal evolution of morality and law." Durkheim here maintains that crime is useful because it can lead to a further development of law and moral sentiments and to an adaptation of the law to new and maybe changed circumstances. As he says "Nothing is good indefinitely and to an unlimited extent", something which is be considered a crime today might be considered revolutionary and progressive tomorrow, so crimes continually contribute to a healthy development of the laws of society.

"Even when I free myself from these rules and violate them successfully, I am always compelled to struggle with them."

Durkheim asserts that there are certain external collective forces that compel people to act in concert with one another. He addresses crowd or mass phenomena, where a collective emotions sweeps people away. In these cases going along with the group might not feel like coercion because the sentiment of the group is so strong that it seems natural to the individual to go along, its coercive pressure will, however, reveal itself in the moment that the individual tries to resist.

## The Division of Labor in Society 1893

In this work Durkheim studied how the division of labor affected individuals in a society as well as the society as a whole. Contrary to Marx, he maintained that a division of labor did not necessarily have to result in negative consequences and did not have to threaten the social cohesion of the society.
In order to examine this point Durkheim introduced two different concepts of solidarity

1. **Mechanical solidarity**, which is characterized by feelings of likeness between people, people doing or feeling the same thing - typical of traditional, small societies where there is hardly any specialized division of labor but everyone has to contribute in the broadest fashion possible for each individual case, this collectivity and these feelings of being alike lead to a collective feeling of oneness in society
2. **Organic solidarity**, which is provoked by interdependence between people who form a web of complex and cooperate associations, this also leads to a feeling of oneness stemming from the fact that each individual contributes his or her own part to society as a collective organism - therefore, a growing society does not need to experience decreasing social cohesion but simply experiences a different type of social cohesion.

As Durkheim puts it "The first binds the individual directly to society without any intermidiary. In the second, he depends upon society, because he depends upon the parts of which it is composed.", "This is what gives moral value to the division of labor. Though it, the individual becomes cognizant of his dependence upon society"

However, Durkheim maintained that specialization can only exert such a positive influence if it springs up naturally and if it is not pushed too far in the sense that the individual would be threatened to become isolated in a specific task. Such an overly specialized division of labor would lead to the creation of classes and castes which in turn endanger the moral cohesion of society and lead to a state of **anomie**, a lack of moral regulation

"Society becomes more capable of collective movement at the same time that each of its elements has more freedom of movement."

## Suicide 1897

In Suicide Durkheim considers a phenomenon that is commonly regarded as a if not *the* most private phenomenon and explains its inherently social roots. By comparing suicide rates with other statistics, Durkheim strove to prove that suicide is not dispositional, pathological so he disassociated it with commonly regarded causes such as alcoholism and showed that it rather occurred in those places and moments where individuals lacked social and moral integration and regulation. Just as in the *Division of Labor* Durkheim sought to outline the differences between traditional and modern societies not only in regards to the frequency but also to the types of suicide.

Durkheim focused on two factors prevalent in modern societies

1. **Egoism**, the lack of integration of individuals into social groups, pathological weakening of social bonds
2. **Anomie**, the lack of moral regulation. This becomes especially prevalent in times of intense social or personal change (which may be negative or positive in nature, as Durkheim says "If therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is not because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is, disturbances of the collective order.")

Durkheim believed that an exaggeration of both these conditions were what led to suicide.

In traditional societies on the contrary, this extreme individualization is constrained by the strong collective character of society. There we can find the occurrence of **altruistic suicide**, an individual giving his or her life for the sake of the group

"To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness", "At least the horizon of the lower classes is limited by those above them, and for this reason their desires are more modest. Those who have only empty space above them are almost inevitably lost in it, if no force restrains them."

"Egoistic suicide results from man's no longer finding a basis for existence in life; altruistic suicide, because this basis for existence appears to man situated beyond life itself. The third sort of suicide [...] results from man's activity's lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings. By virtue of its origin we shall assign this last variety the name *anomic suicide*."

## The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

In this work Durkheim sought to explore the workings of the moral realm through a study of religion. In religious ceremonies Durkheim recognized not only the religious character as such, but more than that a celebration of social life itself. He regarded religious force as nothing else than the collective and anonymous force underlying and driving society. In the worship for transcendental deities Durkheim saw the actual worship of the social group and the force in enacted upon society.

Durkheim defined **religion** in a very broad way, not relating it only to church or institution bound practices but rather as a system of symbols and rituals about the sacred that is practiced by a community of believers. This is a *functionalist* definition of religion since it emphasizes the social function religion has over its substantive content. This function according to Durkheim is to encode the system of relations the respective group has by focusing and reaffirming the ideas and collective sentiments. This communal function of religion is fulfilled through the processes of ritualization and symbolization.

1. A **ritual** is a highly routinized act that binds individuals of a social group together through a common experience and focus. That way there can be secular as well as religious rituals that have inherently the same character and function.
2. A **symbol** is something that stands for something else in the sense of a collective idea or a collective meaning that the symbol is the representation of. Symbols can either be classified as
	1. **Sacred**, anything that is extraordinary and set apart from the world; or
	2. **Profane**, everything that belongs to everyday life, to the mundane world

No object as such is inherently sacred or profane, their meanings are rather continually affirmed, altered and reaffirmed in collective processes of ritualization and symbolization.

# References

1. ↑  Appelrouth, Scott, Desfor Edles, Laura, *Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory*, pp. 85-88
2. ↑  Appelrouth, Scott, Desfor Edles, Laura, *Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory*, pp. 88-93
3. ↑  Applerouth, Scott, Desfor Edles, Laura, *Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory*, pp.102-104
4. ↑  Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labor in Society
5. ↑  Appelrouth, Scott, Desfor Edles, Laura, *Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory*, pp. 110-113
6. ↑  Durkheim, Emile, Suicide
7. ↑  Appelrouth, Scott, Desfor Edles, Laura, *Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory*, pp. 126-129