Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917)

Émile Durkheim, the father of French sociology and one of the greatest sociologists of the nineteenth century, was born in 1858 and died in 1917. Durkheim planned to become a rabbi since his father was a rabbi [Page 481]and came from a long line of rabbis, but in his adolescence, Durkheim abandoned the idea due to his interest in the new social science of sociology. He held the first chair of sociology in France and did a great deal to establish sociology as an empirical discipline.

He wrote a number of seminal books such as Suicide, The Division of Labor in Society, Moral Education, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim was interested in what he called “social facts,” which he defined in The Rules of Sociological Method as “every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint” (1950, 2). What happened, he maintained, is that normally individuals internalize moral rules, which they get from society, and these moral rules guide their conduct.

Durkheim made a distinction between what he called mechanical and organic solidarity. In mechanical solidarity, people's differences are minimized and the focus is on what is good for all. The family would be a good example of mechanical solidarity. Organic solidarity, the opposite of mechanical solidarity, is characterized by a focus on differences among people. In a differentiated society, people focus on themselves and their goals and aspirations, and not on the common good. The corporation would be a good example of an institution characterized by organic solidarity.

When problems arise in societies and moral rules are no longer seen as valid, you get what he called “anomie.” It refers to a lack of accepted rules of conduct in society that individuals can use to guide their behavior. Durkheim showed that suicide was connected to anomie, and the more integrated individuals are within organizations and the less anomic they are, the less likely they are to commit suicide. One cause of anomie, he suggested, was affluence. He argued that in anomic societies, affluent people are deceived into thinking that society is irrelevant. Anomie, he wrote, deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only, which leads to a corrosive individualism. “The less one has the less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely,” he wrote in Suicide (1951, 254).

In his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim analyzes the complicated relationship that exists between individuals and society. He writes,

We have a double nature, then. We are individuals who live in society, and society lives in us as the values, rules of behavior, and moral codes that we learn as members of society.

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