Emile Durkheim

In this article, we will go through Emile Durkheim and his theory. Durkheim believed that society moved from traditional to modern as the division of labour expanded. He compared society to an organism, with various parts that worked together to keep civilization evolving smoothly. He distinguished structure and function in his approach. To him, society is not just individuals’ deeds and opinions. Rather, society exists independently of its individuals. People are constrained and even coerced by societal norms, facts, attitudes, and currents. While they all originate from human behaviour, they form institutions and structures and influence individuals.

Emile Durkheim

A French sociologist, David Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), along with Max Weber and Karl Marx, co-founded sociology. Durkheim’s research focused on how communities might maintain their integrity and coherence as traditional social and religious ties erode and new social institutions emerge. Durkheim researched suicides in Catholic and Protestant populations, creating the groundwork for modern sociology. He authored Les Règles de la méthodologie sociologique (1895), the same year he formed the first European sociology department and France’s first sociology professor. Durkheim’s seminal work Le Suicide (1897) separated social science from psychology and political philosophy. He started L’Année Sociologique in 1898. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) compared aboriginal and modern social and cultural life.

Durkheim was concerned about sociology’s scientific legitimacy. To promote epistemological realism and the hypothetico-deductive approach in social science, he enhanced Auguste Comte’s positivism. Durkheim described sociology as the study of institutions as “beliefs and patterns of behaviour established by collectivity”. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism. His view is that social science should be completely comprehensive, with sociology examining societal processes rather than individual actions.

He gave lectures and wrote on topics such as knowledge sociology, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. The term “collective consciousness” is increasingly extensively used. 

Emile Durkheim’s theory 

Durkheim revolutionised ethnomethodology. “Social truths” was his mistake. These exterior strategies of acting, thinking, and feeling are considered coercive realities. It is a new term. Societal factors shape our life. He set out to investigate the social reality of moral imperatives (sociology was, for him, “a study of ethics”).

He started with SDL. Capitalism brought new moral and economic systems. Instead of “organic solidarity,” industrial civilizations demonstrated it (that is, they were differentiated by a relatively complex division of labour). A legal system was invented by Dr Durkheim.

Durkheim’s work on suicide was revolutionary. He said suicide is not rare. “In” Marx’s boredom was disorder. Anomie causes depression, detachment, and alienation. Normalization loss causes anomic suicide, whereas suffocation causes fatalistic suicide (maybe they are incarcerated in prisons). Egoistic and anomic suicides are linked to a lack of integration/regulation.

Original Durkheimian sociology comprises many key aspects. A social notion is not reducible (i.e. that resists definition in terms of the individuals that it subsumes). He uses “social facts” rather than statisticians. Protestantism, less social integration, and egoistic and anomic suicide caused higher Protestant suicide rates than Catholicism (with their characteristic properties of collectivism and higher social integration, and a tendency towards altruistic and fatalistic suicide).

An influential social philosopher, Durkheim, inspired Parsons. He emphasised the importance of moral education for communal prosperity.

Durkheim distinguished two sociologies: agency and structure. Durkheim, like Parsons, favours structure over agency. It is hard to accomplish both.

Emile Durkheim: Social Fact

Durkheim defined the social fact this way:

“Societal facts are ways of behaviour that can place external constraints on individuals, or that are widespread over the whole of a community while having their existence outside of individual manifestations.”

The concept was solid and applicable.

Anthropomorphism was a social reality that included kinship, marriage, commerce. Deviants from these institutions’ norms are deemed unfit.

It allowed society to be studied rather than just people, as Durkheim discovered. Personnel activities are instances of social actions. There have been several critiques on the Durkheimian approach to suicide, such as Jack Douglas’s The Social Meanings of Suicide (1967) and Max Atkinson’s Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organization of Sudden Death (1978). 

From Emile Durkheim’s famous Suicide (1897) to present writings by sociologists who have modelled their work on Durkheim’s. Douglas brings out major limitations in the structural-functional study of suicide and presents an alternative theoretical approach. Durkheim’s abstract social meaning explanations for suicide rates have an inadequate and deceptive data underpinning, he argues, showing how unreliable government statistics on suicide are. Douglas says that understanding suicidal behaviour necessitates delving into the mind of the person who is contemplating suicide. Using diary entries, notes, and reports from witnesses, he demonstrates how the social meanings of actual cases can be investigated. 

Conclusion

In this article, we learnt about Emile Durkheim and his theory, social fact. According to Durkheim, people who are more socially integrated and connected are less prone to take their own lives than those who are isolated and isolated. Suicide rates rise in conjunction with a decline in social integration. He has also described suicide in his theory. This chapter is very important for Sociology and very common in exams. Therefore, this chapter must be studied properly to get good marks.