Émile Durkheim: biography, theories and works

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Emile Durkheim was a French Jewish sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist.

He is considered the "Father of Sociology", as he brought to this science elements such as quantitative research to support his studies. He also managed to have sociology considered an academic discipline.

Biography of Émile Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim was born in Épinal, France, on April 15, 1858.

He was born into a Jewish family where men from eight previous generations dedicated themselves to being rabbis. This was also Durkheim's fate, but he chose to leave the rabbinical school.

At the age of 21, he entered the Escola Normal Superior in Paris, where he graduated in Philosophy in 1882, under the guidance of professor and historian Fustel de Coulanges.

His theoretical work began when he entered the University of Bordeaux as a professor of pedagogy and social science. From there, he will challenge the academic society by instituting a new field of knowledge: sociology.

He gathered around him collaborators specialized in history, ethnology, jurisprudence, etc. The result of this effort was the publication of the journal "L'Année Socilogique", from 1989 to 1912, which is considered one of the most scientific journals of sociology ever published.

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He has written hundreds of studies on topics such as education, crime, religion and suicide. His studied works are "Rules of the sociological method", published in 1895 and "The suicide", of 1897.

He died in Paris on November 15, 1917, where he is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

The emergence of Durkheim's sociology

In addition to being the founder of the "French School of Sociology", Émile Durkheim, he formed Modern Sociology, alongside Karl Marx and Max Weber.

He is also one of those responsible for making sociology a university discipline, just as philosophy or history was. Still, he innovated by introducing empirical research to theory, which would make sociology more solid.

The rules of sociological method

The work "The rules of sociological method", published in 1895, is of paramount importance for modern science.

In this book, the author defines the methodology for studying the entire area of the social sciences. In these pages, Durkheim lays down the rules for sociology as a science, its research methods and assigns it an object of study - society.

We highlight some rules of the sociological method, according to this thinker:

the object of sociology is the social fact
instruments proper to exact sciences such as statistics should be used to carry out the sociological study
it is necessary to build a link between the observable phenomenon and experimentation
hypotheses are formulated about the social fact that will be validated or not.

Émile Durkheim's Theories

By stating that "social facts must be treated as things", he posits the sociological object as a scientific object.

Thus, he considered that only science and a new rationalist paradigm could lead to correct responses to increasingly rapid social changes.

In short, his work constitutes a “theory of social cohesion”, to answer how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era. At the end of the 19th century, when Durkheim lived, aspects such as religion, family and steady work were losing importance.

Durkheim lived at a time when people were leaving the countryside and heading towards the city. There they found better material conditions, but they lost their identity and the solidarity that exists in rural areas.

Sociability

According to him, man would be a bestial animal that only became human insofar as he became sociable.

Therefore, the learning process, which was called "socialization" by Durkheim, is the basic factor in the construction of a "collective consciousness".

Through formal education, we come into contact with ideas that will give us the feeling of belonging to the group, whether it is a church or a homeland.

In this way, life in the city and under capitalism would take from human beings their identity references to create hopeless beings. Only with the construction of a secular school and moral values would it be possible to overcome this impasse.

social fact

One of their main contributions to sociology has been to determine the "social facts", which teach us how we should be, feel and do.

The social fact is the reality we already encounter when we are born: school, government, religion, social rites. In short: everything that we have to fulfill out of social obligation or because the law can punish us.

Here, three properties are crucial: generality, exteriority and coerciveness. These are the laws that conduct social behavior, that is, what governs social facts.

The human being is not responsible for social facts. After all, what people feel, think or do does not totally depend on their individual will, as they are a behavior instituted by society.

His theory will also be known as Functionalist, since it makes an analogy with the organism's functions. The existence and quality of different parts of society are decomposed by the roles they play to keep the social environment balanced.

Read too: What is Social Fact?

social institution and anomie

Durkheimian theory studies the function of the social institution, its constitution and its weakening, which the sociologist will call "anomie".

THE social institution it would be the set of socially uniformed rules and artifices to preserve the organization of the group and, therefore, they are traditionalists in essence. As an example he cited family, school, government, religion, etc. These act by making it difficult to oppose changes, by preserving order.

already the anomie, it would be a situation where society would have no clear rules, no values and no limits. This scenario occurs when society finds itself unable to integrate certain individuals who are separated due to the softening of collective consciousness.

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