Emile Durkheim

David Emile Durkheim ( April 15th 1858, Épinal - November 15th 1917, Paris) is a Sociologue French and one of the founders of the modern Sociologie.

Indeed, if this one owes its name with Auguste Count since 1848, it is under the impulse of Durkheim and the school which it will form around the review the sociological Year (1898) that French sociology knew a strong impulse at the end of the 19th century.

Biography

Born with Épinal in 1858, Durkheim belonged to a line of Rabbin S of 8 generations. Refusing to become rabbi, Durkheim between with the National university. It meets men like Henri Bergson or Jean Jaurès and decides to defend Dreyfus. It obtains the Agrégation of philosophy in 1882. This education enables him to fall under a double judaïque and traditional cultural tradition. He becomes professor and is in particular in charge of the courses of Pédagogie and social sciences with Bordeaux in 1887. It is in Bordeaux that it began the drafting of its works of sociology. Durkheim then disputes intellectual hegemony on the discipline incipient vis-a-vis Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), profiting from an international repute but not constituting any school, and vis-a-vis Rene Worms (1858-1917) who created in 1893 the international Revue of sociology then the following year the International institute of sociology. However the School durkheimienne could be essential thanks to intellectual and institutional ideals. In 1902, Durkheim was named with the Faculty of Arts of the Université of Paris. He was also professor of the schools HEI-HEP: it is him which imposes sociology like university discipline. He founds in 1898 a review of social sciences entitled the sociological Year .

Politically, Durkheim remained rather discrete. It is certainly a supporter of Dreyfus first hour, founding member of the Ligue for the defense of the Human rights, however it refuses to influence its students on the innocence or the culpability of the captain. Friend of Jean Jaurès, the sociologist defends sometimes of the theses Socialist-reformists.

The Pacific, Durkheim engages for defense of the motherland. It engages in many committees, which must organize the intellectual mobilization in France and abroad vis-a-vis in Germany and its culture. The fruits of this collaboration are lampoons as Which wanted the war or Germany above all . His/her André son dies in the combat in December 1915. Durkheim sinks then in a great sadness, which partly explains its early death in 1917.

Formed in the school of the Positivism, Durkheim defines the “social Fait” like an entity Sui generis , i.e. as a nonreducible totality with the sum of its parts. This definition enables him to dissociate individual collective, and to logically base the conditions of possibility of a constraining action of the company on the individuals.

“Externality, wide and constraint characterize the social fact”: this thesis made of him the true founder of sociology as an autonomous discipline. Its positivist spirit pushed it to adopt an almost medical design of the social fact by distinguishing the normal one and the pathological one. It is indeed using these categories that Durkheim analyzes the state of the social link. It is for this reason that it employs the concept of “Anomie”, aiming at indicating a pathological form of the Division of the labor which, pushed to the extreme as in our post-industrial companies, led to the individualization and the loss of the reference marks.

The contribution of Durkheim to sociology is fundamental since its method, its principles and its studies exemplary, like that on the Suicide, constitute until our days the bases of modern sociology.

Founding father of the French Sociology

Durkheim seems for much the founding father of French sociology. Indeed, if he were not the first sociologist in France as we saw in introduction, he is the first to commit itself making sociology an autonomous discipline being distinguished from other concurrent social sciences like psychology and philosophy.

First of all, it works to sit sociology like independent institutionellement speaking. Thus he wrote in opening of his course of social science into 1888 that " the only means of showing that sociology is possible, it is to show that it exists and that it vit" . It then will benefit from its statute of professor to begin the diffusion of a sociological spirit in courses at the university as on the family, the social solidarity, the suicide, criminal sociology, socialism, the religion, the pedagogy or the history of sociology. It is always accordingly that Durkheim founds the review the sociological year in 1896. This review made it possible Durkheim to federate a school around him while diffusing in the review the fundamental texts of social sciences of the time.

Thus, Durkheim by its courses and its review will pose the bases of a French sociology like autonomous science including/understanding of the courses, an object, a review and a specific step. Moreover, he will be the writer famous works of sociology such as:

Of the Division of social work (1893)

Rules of the sociological method (1895),

the Suicide (1897) or

elementary Forms of the religious life (1912).

Theory and Ideas

The social fact

See also: Makes social

“the first rule and most fundamental is to regard the social facts as things (...)” .

The study of the social Fait as an object does not have as an intention to bring back it to a purely material subject but rather to give him a form concretes in order to avoid a slip towards a spontaneous and subjective sociology. It is necessary for all to define the social fact objectively to give a legitimacy to its study, to distinguish it from the idea.

The social fact is however difficult to determine, this is why Durkheim stated certain constants allowing its its study and description.

First of all, the social facts are external with the individual and must be explained “by the modifications of internal social environment and not starting from the individual state of consciousnesses” in order not to confuse the social facts with other variables such as the psychology of the subject, its family context, cultural, etc These social facts exist without we being necessarily aware neither of their existence nor of their autonomy. Indeed, a social fact can be independent of the individual, it does not need its presence to appear.

In order to give an account of an absolutely pure social fact, one uses the statistics which make it possible to neutralize the variations between individuals and finally to study an average who, however, will not be apparent in the company and that because of the variables previously quoted. The social fact thus represents “a certain state of the collective heart” .

Another criterion making it possible to define the social fact is its caractère contraignant. The social fact is binding on the individual, that he wants it or not, and not opposite. It corresponds to a system of standards established for and by the company and is only seldom modifiable differently than by a social upheaval; the man acquires number of them at the beginning of his education and tends to interiorize a great part of it. Education holds the role of socializing institution par excellence, it makes of the child a social being. Since present as of childhood, the obligatory nature of the social facts is done less obvious and becomes a practice: it is the principle even of socialization.

One can however highlight this concept of constraint thanks to the Institution S, those being former to each one among us thus legitimate, and to the sanctions which they inflict. They can be direct or indirect but, in all the cases, they do not cease reminding the individual that in fact the social facts are essential on him and not the opposite. That which deviates some will undergo sanctions of its entourage such as the blame, reprobation or the setting with the variation. These sanctions can also be organized, with the image of the legal or religious judgments.

A flight, for example, can be punished by a custodial sentence, but there exist also less manifest sanctions and the phenomenon of the mode is one of the most explicit examples: if an individual decides to carry a boot around the neck, the mockeries and the amused glances of its entourage will constitute a sanction with this nonconformism although it is not contrary with the law.

By this capacity of coercion, Durkheim, in a deterministic vision and holist of sociology, presents the domination of the company, via the social facts, on the manner of thinking and of being of an individual. The two main features of a social fact are thus its collective character and its obligatory function: “Well far they are a product of our will, they determine it outside” . Emile Durkheim proposes this definition: the social facts “consist of manners of acting, to think and feel, external with the individual, and which are endowed with a capacity of coercion in virtue of which they are essential on him. ”

Finally, Durkheim defines the social fact as follows:

“is made social any manner of making, fixed, likely or not to exert on the individual an external pressure; or even, which is general in the extent of a company given while having a clean existence, independent of its individual demonstrations. ”

During its study on the Suicide, Durkheim seeks to prove that this social fact, which seems so dependant on our will, on our liberty of action, also depends on social factors: one can commit suicide more among Protestants that among catholics, at the rural ones that at the urban ones. Durkheim seeks through its famous work of 1897 to find these factors.

The social link

Method, objectivity and criticisms

To found this disciplinary news, Durkheim expresses its will to install a specific methodology guaranteeing its scientificity and its specificity. “It has there, indeed, only one means of making in science, it is to dare it, but with method” ( Of the Division of social work ). An important point of the sociological study is the objectivity of the sociologist: How to study an object which upon the departure conditions the observer? The observation must be most impersonal possible, getting rid of these prejudices to avoid any perceptive deformation, but will be it never perfectly. This is why the method of Durkheim is based on the comparison rather than on the study of a social fact taken independently: the social fact will be studied according to the other social facts and not according to the person who studies it. This method will be detailed in the work " Rules of the method sociologique" of 1895.

Moreover, as a perfect holist, Durkheim will study done everything social by the social one, without being based on a psychological examination of the actors then subjected to the constraints sociétales. It is the statistical study which makes it possible to study in a reliable way the reports/ratios: if those Ci are repeated, the social fact is normal, if not it is pathological.

Durkheim was highly criticized in its attempt to establish sociology like a science. Some regarded its definition of the social fact as a vision minimalist of the real-world. Others, like Robert K. Merton, see on the assumptions of Durkheim “an orientation does not provide that a very broad framework to the empirical investigation” .

One of the assertions of Durkheim caused incomprehension at its contemporaries: in the rules of the sociological method , it declares that the crime has a function in the company and that it is consequently normal. A social fact normal for a given social type, considered with a given phase of its development, when it occurs in the average of the companies of this species, is considered with the corresponding phase of their evolution. Although it is not-in conformity with the social norms, it is present in all the companies, which makes of him a normal phenomenon. Moreover, “the wrong which it makes at the company is cancelled by the sorrow, if it functions regularly”. It is thus possible to judge the good performance of a company according to the repression exerted on the crimes.

Durkheim was also shown of Déterminisme after the publication of its theories. Indeed, which freedom does it remain with the man in a company as constraining as that which it describes? Which place to grant to the free will?

Whereas Durkheim tried to explain the social phenomena starting from the communities, one of its contemporaries, max Weber, studied very an other approach of sociology, perfectly contrary to the Holisme of Durkheim. For Weber, indeed, “the human action directed significantly compared to others” , and the social phenomena are expressed through the individual.

Thus, while at the same time sociology had just appeared as such, two extreme tendencies were born already: the Holisme of Durkheim (very criticized by Raymond Aron) and the Individualism of Weber, the opposition enters the social structures and the play of the actors the sociological phenomena.

Explanations of order " naturel" at Durkheim

Although Durkheim tried to provide sociological explanations to the phenomena which he studied, he inserted all the same of the explanations, Sexiste S, biologisantes and naturalizing certain social behaviors. In the case of its study on the suicide for example, it declared that if the women committed suicide less than the men, after a mourning or a divorce, that was due in their lower state of nature, therefore with more autonomy of their share:

But this consequence of divorce is special with the man; it does not reach the wife. Indeed, the sexual needs for the woman are less mental, because generally its mental life is developed. They are more immediately in connection with the requirements of the organization, follow them more than they do not precede them and find there consequently a brake effective. Because the woman is a being more instinctive than the man, to find the calm one and peace, it has only to follow its instincts. Social legislation as narrow as that of the marriage and, especially, marriage monogamist are thus not necessary for him.

Random links: