Émile Durkheim Sociology
Émile Durkheim was a prominent figure in the development of sociology, focusing on the study of social facts and the role of institutions in shaping society. He emphasized the importance of social integration and solidarity in maintaining social order and stability. Durkheim's work laid the foundation for the structural-functional approach in sociology, which examines how social institutions contribute to the functioning of society.
6 Key excerpts on "Émile Durkheim Sociology"
eBook - ePub- Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick, Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...DURKHEIM, EMILE (1858–1917) French sociologist, regarded as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology. His early work developed a theory of society as a transcendent reality that constrained individuals, and proposed the methodology necessary to study that reality. His work was influenced by Kant, by the French tradition of Rousseau, Saint-Simon and Comte, and stood in opposition to the individualism inherent in British moral and social philosophy. In 1898 he founded the journal Année Sociologique, which was crucial to the institutionalisation of sociology as an academic discipline in France. His later work showed an increasing interest in smallscale, pre-industrial societies and religions, and thus contributed to the development of cultural anthropology. Durkheim’s first major publication, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), offers an account of what holds a society together, and thereby seeks to demonstrate that social order and stability cannot be explained by a reduction to the actions of individuals, and particularly not in terms of Herbert Spencer’s appeal to free social contracts between individuals. Durkheim compares modern industrial society to smallscale, pre-industrial society, initially suggesting a sharp distinction between the two. Modern societies have an extensive division of labour. It is this phenomenon that makes social contract theories plausible, for no one individual can master all the skills necessary to survive in the society. Each individual is dependent upon all others to provide those satisfactions which he or she is unable to provide for him or herself. The individual is thereby inhibited, practically, from leaving society...
eBook - ePubTheory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
An Encyclopedia
- R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Daniela S. Barberis Daniela S. Barberis Durkheim, Émile Durkheim, émile 214 218 Durkheim, Émile David Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the French philosopher, and founder of the French school of sociology and of the journal L’Année Sociologique, made significant contributions to the anthropology of religion and developed the structural-functional approach to society. Biography and Major Works Durkheim was born in Éastern France, the youngest of four children. His father was a rabbi, as was his paternal grandfather. The young Emile appeared destined to follow this family tradition but had a change of heart while still a schoolboy and abandoned all religious belief by the time he left his home town of Épinal to prepare for the entrance exam to the École Normale in Paris. By the time he passed his agrégation (the examination required one to be eligible to teach in state secondary schools), Durkheim had decided that the topic of his doctoral dissertation in philosophy would be the relations between individualism and socialism. The problem he was concerned with was the development and maintenance of social cohesion in the face of the conflicting demand of modern life toward increasing specialization and individualization. This concern with the glue that held society together was a driving issue for Durkheim and stemmed in part from the social situation of France in the 19th century, a period rife with recurrent political crises. He refined his conception of this work throughout 1884–1886, during which period he visited Germany and studied with the pioneering psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, among others...
eBook - ePub- Pip Jones, Liz Bradbury(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...However, Durkheim was influenced not by Comte’s conservatism but by his advocacy of positivism as the methodology for the new science of sociology. Durkheim criticized Comte’s work for being over-reliant on philosophical speculation, whereas Durkheim wanted to develop a scientifically precise approach to the carefully controlled strengthening of the moral climate of France in a progressive direction. This was deemed necessary because France was experiencing not only the political and cultural crises mentioned above but also rapid industrialization. This latter had allowed capitalism to develop in an unregulated manner, which led to class conflict, unregulated competition and routinized, degrading, meaningless work (Lukes 1973: 174). All of these issues cried out for the scientific study of society’s collective moral beliefs as sources of social cohesion. Durkheim thus saw the role of sociology as similar to that of a medical physician who applies scientific techniques to distinguish between health and illness and to prescribe the appropriate remedy for the latter. The medicine required in this case was an answer to how the process of transition from traditional to modern values could achieve a balance between respect for individual freedom and a strong sense of community. Social structure For Durkheim, the crucial feature of social structures is that they are made up of norms and values – cultural definitions of behaviour considered appropriate and worthy in different settings. Since it is through socialization that we learn these normative definitions, it is only this process which moulds people into members of a society and therefore makes social life possible. It was Durkheim who first of all stressed the view that the thoughts and experiences of individuals are inherited, and not invented anew by each generation. For example, people who attend a religious service may believe sincerely in their god...
eBook - ePubExplorations in Classical Sociological Theory
Seeing the Social World
- Kenneth Allan, Sarah Daynes(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...(Part of the Masters of Social Theory series; short, book-length introduction to Durkheim’s life and work) Lukes, S. (1972). Émile Durkheim, his life and work: A historical and critical study. New York: Harper & Row. (The definitive book on Durkheim’s life and work) Meštrovic, S. G. (1988). Émile Durkheim and the reformation of sociology. Totowa, NJ: Rowman &Littlefield. (Unique treatment of Durkheim’s work; emphasizes Durkheim’s vision of sociology as a science of morality that could replace religious morals) Seeing the Social World (knowing the theory) Write a 500-word synopsis of Durkheim’s sociological imagination, making certain to include not only how he sees the world (perspective) but also how that perspective came about (history, social structures, and biography). After reading and understanding this chapter, you should be able to define the following terms theoretically and explain their theoretical importance to Durkheim’s theory: social facts, society sui generis, collective consciousness, religion, sacred and profane, ritual, effervescence, social solidarity (mechanical and organic), punitive and restitutive law, the division of labor, social differentiation, cultural generalization, intermediary groups, social pathologies, anomie, suicide (altruistic, fatalistic, egoistic, and anomic), the cult of the individual. After reading and understanding this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions (remember to answer them theoretically): Explain the organismic analogy and use it to analyze the relations among and between social structures. Define social facts and explain how society exists sui generis. Explain how society is based on religion. Discuss how Durkheimian rituals create sacred symbols and group moral boundaries. Define collective consciousness, social solidarity, and mechanical and organic solidarity. Explain the problem of modernity and describe how organic solidarity creates social solidarity in modernity. Describe how organic solidarity can produce certain social...
eBook - ePubThe New Century
Bergsonism, Phenomenology and Responses to Modern Science
- Keith Ansell-Pearson, Alan D. Schrift(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 THE EMERGENCE OF FRENCH SOCIOLOGY: ÉMILE DURKHEIM AND MARCEL MAUSS Mike Gane Durkheim’s formation was in philosophy. 1 After attaining his Agrégation de Philosophie in 1882, he taught philosophy in schools in Sens, Quentin, and Troyes. However, he became dissatisfied with philosophy in its apparent struggle against the sciences, particularly the social sciences, very early on in his career, and in 1887 he accepted a position at the University of Bordeaux to organize courses in social sciences and in pedagogy (he became Professor in 1896). It was from this base that he published the results of his initial researches into sociology and the methodology that he had constructed to carry them out. He established a team of researchers that he, with his nephew Marcel Mauss, 2 organized around the journal L’Année sociologique from 1898. Mauss accepted a Chair at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1901 and, in 1902, Durkheim accepted a post in Paris at the Sorbonne, holding the Chair in the “Science of Education” (renamed as a Chair in Science of Education and Sociology in 1913). Durkheim did not promote himself as founder of sociology in France; this accolade came posthumously. He regarded his work as attempting a reorganization and correction of the sociology of Auguste Comte. *3 He regarded positivism as the greatest contribution of French thought in the nineteenth century both to philosophy and the social sciences. His appropriation and modification of the positivist tradition took place within the framework of French Kantianism, and particularly the writings of Charles Renouvier, against the background of academic eclectic philosophy dominated by the legacy of Victor Cousin. It was Durkheim rather than Mauss who engaged in a dialogue with philosophy, but, ironically, it has been the work of Mauss that has seemed more to interest philosophers. I...
- Anthony Giddens(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This latter point became focal to Durkheim’s critical assessment of socialist doctrines. Socialism is superior to utilitarianism in recognizing that human wants are not simply ‘contained’ in the individual, but are socially created; however it shares with utilitarianism the notion that society does not have to intervene in the satisfaction of needs. According to socialist theory, production thus has to be regulated, but consumption must be freed from social control. The positive connections between the conceptions of moral individualism and anomie, apart from the early formulation in The Division of Labour, were nowhere explicitly stated in any detail by Durkheim, and thus have tended to be among the most frequently misunderstood parts of his writings. As I have tried to show elsewhere, faulty interpretation of Durkheim on this matter has helped to sustain two of the most prevalent misrepresentations of Durkheim’s sociology in the secondary literature: that which sees his work as primarily concerned with an abstract ‘problem of order’, and the closely related view of his writings as advancing a heavily authoritarian theory of moral discipline. 13 If there is a basic opposition in all of Durkheim’s work, it is not that of social integration (normative control) versus social disintegration (lack of normative regulation: anomie), but, as with virtually all leading social thinkers of his time, that of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ society, with all the profound social transformations which this latter distinction implies. It does not seem to have been generally appreciated that there is necessarily an historical dimension to Durkheim’s treatment of anomie: this is integral to the very conception of ‘socially generated need’, but it is also important in regard to the second aspect of anomie, that of provision for wants. In the traditional social order, human faculties and needs are kept to a low level, and therefore are readily provided for...
