Durkheim, Émile

Émile Durkheim (1858–1916) was the founder of theoretically grounded empirical sociology in France. He acknowledged the opacity of the social world and identified the ways in which an excessive reliance on experience tended to lead to a misrepresentation of its nature. He developed his own unique form of “scientific rationalism” in order to discover and clearly present its inherent properties, modes of existence, and forms of organization.

Durkheim was born in a small town in Alsace-Lorraine, in a family of modest means; his mother supplemented their family income with her embroidery shop. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were rabbis, but Émile decided while still a schoolboy that this was not to be his vocation. After attending his local school, he went to Paris to study and at his third attempt, gained admittance to the École Normale Supérieure. While he found the style of education there too humanistic and literary, he gained immensely from working with the historian Fustel de Coulanges and with the neo-Kantian philosopher Émile [Page 219]Boutroux. At that time, and indeed subsequently, he was also strongly influenced by Charles Renouvier, another neo-Kantian philosopher. In 1885, he visited Germany for a year, and then on his return, he taught philosophy for a short time in the Lycée de Troyes. In 1887, Durkheim was appointed to a post as chargé de cours of social science and pedagogy at the Faculty of Letters at Bordeaux, where he stayed for 15 years. In 1902, he returned to Paris and was appointed as chargé de cours in the Science of Education at the Sorbonne. While he was made a Professor of Education in 1906, it was only in 1913 that he was given the title of Professor of Education and Sociology.

His specific conception of the nature of social order was first sketched out in his 1887 essay “The Positive Science of Morality in Germany” but more fully developed in The Division of Labor in Society ([1893] 1984). In this book, he examined “the connection between the individual personality and social solidarity,” arguing that there are two different kinds of society, grounded in different kinds of social solidarity, that is, forms of social regulation that lead individuals to engage in activities that create feelings of identification with other members of society and with society as a whole. In each case, moreover, the dominant legal system is both an index of and a source of the form of solidarity. The first of these, mechanical solidarity, is a form of social unity based upon the similarity of individuals who share a uniform way of life and have identical beliefs. Repressive law, particularly criminal law, is of particular importance in such societies. The second, organic solidarity, is present when there is extensive social differentiation, including specialist hierarchical organizations run by individuals whose responsibilities reflect their relevant personal skills, the development and valorization of autonomous personalities, and an exchange of goods and services leading individuals to recognize that they are also mutually interdependent and have shared interests. Restitutive law, where law intervenes not so much to punish transgressors as to facilitate a return to a just status quo ante, is more characteristic of these societies. While such societies may function smoothly, they may not. This is particularly true in the case of organic solidarity, where there may be what Durkheim describes as “pathological forms of the division of labor.” One is the anomic division of labor, when individuals suffer from a lack of moral and social relatedness; they cannot see the relationship between their specialized activity, that of others, and the goal of an enterprise as a whole, and the extant forms of regulation are inappropriate for the key forms of social organization. But perhaps the most significant is the “forced division of labor,” where the existence of large social inequalities and the institution of inherited wealth means that better qualified but less prosperous people are unjustly displaced from senior decisionmaking positions by members of wealthy families who have little natural ability and/or little commitment to working hard at self-development, but have bought advantage for themselves. True organic solidarity requires the appropriation, redistribution, and abolition of inherited wealth.

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