Social Facts

In his work on The Rules of Sociological Method ([1895] 1982), the French sociologist Durkheim defined social facts as ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that were external to individuals and exercised a constraint over them. Although the concept of social facts is closely identified with Durkheim, it is also relevant to the understanding of any type of social theory that treats society as an objective reality apart from its individual members. In general, it can be distinguished from theoretical paradigms that place a greater emphasis on social action or individual definitions of reality.

According to Durkheim, social facts are general to the whole society and have a distinctively collective character. They constitute the distinctive subject matter of sociology. They are often embodied in social institutions, such as religions, kinship structures, or legal codes. These institutions are the primary focus of sociology as a science. However, social facts can also appear as social forces of more diffuse type—for example, in the mass behavior of crowds and other forms of collective action or in the collective tendencies manifested in statistical rates of social phenomena such as suicide and crime.

[Page 741]Durkheim stated that the sociologist should treat such social facts as things. The sociologist must study these social facts as realities in their own right, with their own objective laws of organization, apart from the representation of these facts in the individual's consciousness. In Durkheim's view, if society does not exist as a distinct level of reality, then sociology has no subject matter. The social and the psychological are distinguished as different and independent levels of analysis. For Durkheim and his followers, this meant examining both the social substratum, or distribution of groups in space, as well as the collective representations or collective psychology shared by most members of society.

Durkheim also distinguished between the normal and the pathological within the sphere of social facts. Phenomena such as crime and suicide are normal for a society if they correspond to its type of social organization and level of development. For example, crime is normal in a society that also prizes individual innovation, and no progress would be possible without the actions of those great criminals who represent in their individual person the new cultural tendencies and provide a focus for new outlets for emerging currents of public opinion. In his book Suicide, Durkheim ([1897]1951) examined social suicide rates as a type of social fact. He argued that suicide rates varied regularly with differing social circumstances, and he proposed a theory of four social causes of suicide, two of which were particularly central to modern society. Egoistic suicide resulted from the lack of integration of the individual into social groups and was the most common type of suicide in modern society. Based on his examination of suicide rates, Durkheim constructed a formula that stated that the rate of egoistical suicide varies inversely with degree of integration of familial, religious, and political society. Durkheim thought that familial, religious, and political ties were generally weakened in modern society and, therefore, suicide rates were higher. He argued generally that society needed to supplement these weakened ties with new and stronger ones rooted in important emerging realities such as the occupational or professional group.

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