Emile Durkheim Research Paper

1. Biography

Born on April 15, 1858 in Epinal in the Alsace-Lorraine region into a close-knit rabbinic family, he abandoned Judaism at an early age. He thereafter treated religion agnostically as a social phenomenon demanding sociological explanation (from the mid- 1890s it was increasingly central to his thought) yet maintained that in studying it one is blind without a certain religious sentiment. After his studies at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, he taught philosophy in secondary schools. On a government grant he visited Germany, for whose scientific education there was widespread admiration in defeated France. His encounter with German social scientists strengthened his so-called ‘social realism.’ In 1887 he was appointed to teach social science and pedagogy at the University of Bordeaux, as part of a national drive for a new system of republican, secular education. In 1896 he was appointed the first Professor of Social Science in France and in 1897 founded L’Annee sociologique. While at Bordeaux he published three major works, The Di ision of Labor in Society (Durkheim 1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim 1895), and Suicide (Durkheim 1897) and his Latin doctoral thesis on Montesquieu. He also lectured and published across a wide range of topics including education, the family, the incest taboo, crime and social health, the evolution of punishment, the state, professional ethics and civic morals, religion, Rousseau, the history of sociology, and the history of socialism—the last in response to his students’ political concerns. Averse to the sharpening of class conflict and believing revolutions to be as impossible as miracles, he stressed the need for institutional reforms that would encourage cross-class solidarity around common principles of social justice. He favored an interventionist State offset by a plurality of local, civic, and especially occupational associations, believing that out of this conflict of social forces individual liberties are born (Durkheim 1950). He remained close to the liberal socialism of Jean Jaures, but in the late 1890s the Dreyfus Affair induced him to break his principle that the social scientist should, as such, keep apart from everyday politics. An active Dreyfusard, he denounced those who defended the army and the Church as sacred national institutions and proclaimed that modern society could only be integrated around the religion of individualism, protecting the sacredness of the individual and individual rights, the ‘sole link’ still binding citizens to one another.

In 1902 he moved to Paris to teach education and sociology. He continued to lecture and write across a wide range, publishing a study of Primiti e Classification with Marcel Mauss (Durkheim and Mauss 1903) and his masterpiece The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1912). He debated with philosophers, historians, and psychologists and exercised a magisterial influence on the institutional development of sociology and on educational thinking and practice in France. On all these fronts his doctrines generated controversy and opposition, often fierce, to which he responded vigorously. Much of his energy went into the editing of L’Annee, of which 12 volumes had appeared by 1913. These contained monographs and reviews of works in many disciplines and languages, systematically classified and mined for their theoretical and empirical usefulness to a progressing research program. An extraordinary collaborative achievement, they constitute the Durkheimians’ ongoing debate with the sociologically relevant literature of their time, distinctive, among other things, in its comprehensive attention to the ethnographic record of the world’s remoter peoples. All of this ended with the onset of the World War on whose battlefields several, including the most brilliant and promising of them, including Durkheim’s son Andre, met their deaths. For a second time Durkheim broke his principle of political noninvolvement, contributing to the war effort and writing patriotic pamphlets, but, unable to overcome his grief at his son’s death, he died in Paris on November 15, 1917.

2. Major Contributions

The focus of Durkheim’s sociological vision was his so-called ‘social realism’: the view that social phenomena, or as he called them faits sociaux, are sui generis, with their own characteristics: they are general among, external to, independent of, and constraining upon particular individuals and typically are recognizable by their obligatory force. They constitute a distinct level of reality and are not reducible to the meeting of individual intentions. Hence, his attacks on social contract theorizing and on other forms of methodological individualism that attempted just such a reduction, as practiced for instance by utilitarians, economists, psychologists, and the English sociologist Herbert Spencer. At different stages he focused on faits sociauz of different kinds: on ‘morphological’ phenomena such as population volume and ‘dynamic density’ and spatial distribution, on types of law (see Cotterrell 1999), on institutions and, increasingly, on what he came to call representations collectives (Durkheim 1924). By this he meant collective ideas and sentiments which could, moreover, be evanescent, like crowd enthusiasms or fashions, or more ‘crystallized’ or institutionalized, like legal codes or most stable of all, the fundamental categories of thought. Faits sociaux were what we would now call emergent phenomena whose properties, resulting from the structured interactions of their constituents, could not be accounted for exhaustively in terms of individuals’ presocial properties.

Durkheim advanced this view polemically, as a doctrine, above all in The Rules. It has been suggested that this is best understood in its context as the forging of a vocabulary suited to securing French citizens’ allegiance to their Republic (Jones 1999). What is certain is that Durkheim’s social realist rhetoric generated unproductive controversies and, worse, led to misunderstandings that have, even until today, deflected attention from his explanatory practice, to which his methodological pronouncements are an inadequate guide. Thus he claimed that only social causes can explain social effects and that every time a social fact is explained directly by a psychological fact one could be sure the explanation is false. In various places he uses language that personifies collectivities, making ‘society’ appear as a subject of experience, with a conscience commune, or as an agent with a unified will, requiring conformity, pursuing ends, and imposing ways of acting on its members.

But against such passages one can cite others that stress that society only exists in and through individuals, that neither can exist without the other, and that representations collectives are the product of individuals’ activity and, indeed, of an immense cooperation extending across space and time. In fact, Durkheim’s actual explanations are by no means confined to the macrolevel: he sometimes seeks to explain the micro by the macro, as in Suicide, and the generation of macrophenomena at the microlevel, as in the generation and regeneration of religious faith through collective effervescences and rituals in The Elementary Forms. In short, Durkheim’s explanatory practice was interactionist, not holistic. Unfortunately, his polemical antimethodological individualism and hostility to psychological explanation precluded him from reflecting on the microunderpinnings of his macro explanations and, in general, on micro–macro connections, so that these aspects of his explanations remain under-theorized. Yet this very inattention may have generated insights. By not seeing certain things, perhaps he focused more intensely on what he did see.

Faits sociaux, he wrote in The Rules, should be treated ‘as things’ (‘comme des choses’), independent of and external to observers as well as actors, and enabling one to decide between competing theories. This expresses his commitment to scientific method as he saw it, as against philosophical theorizing uncontrolled by empirical evidence (to philosophize, he once told a doctoral candidate, is to think what one wants) and as against the Positivism of Comte, committed to the identification of a small set of transhistorical laws, rather than the systematic study of specific causal mechanisms (he rejected the label ‘positivist,’ preferring that of ‘rationalist’). Social scientific method required the abandonment of pre theoretical preconceptions, the systematic testing of theories by evidence, quantitative where appropriate(as amply illustrated in Suicide), the careful selection of indicators, the rejection of teleological and functional explanations (though not the identification of social functions), the use of comparison (sociology’s substitute for experiment), and the construction of social typologies. He conceived of types of society within a broadly evolutionary framework, proceeding from the least to the most advanced societies (and citing recent and contemporary tribal societies and those of Antiquity as instances of the former). He further thought that one could distinguish between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ developments within each type, at each stage of its development. This enabled him, he thought, to diagnose certain aspects of modern industrial societies, notably the prevalence of anomie, as pathological. The problem here was that his notion of normality was ambiguous between a statistical definition and one that embodied an implicit theory of social and psychological health or equilibrium relative to a given society’s ‘conditions of existence.’ (How could a pathological phenomenon be both prevalent and abnormal?) Such diagnosis and the elaboration of feasible institutional remedies were, he thought, the chief ways in which the sociologist could contribute to social progress.

The Division of Labor contains (a) the positing of two ideal types of society, which Durkheim took to characterize less and more advanced societies respectively (but which can evidently co-exist), (b) an analysis of the mechanisms claimed to explain the transition from the former to the latter; and (c) a diagnosis of the latter’s pathological forms. Mechanical solidarity, held to typify preindustrial societies, based on resemblances, exhibits identical and juxtaposed elements, segmentally structured and with weak social bonds, low population volume and moral density, undifferentiated social organization, repressive or penal law, and collective beliefs and sentiments (which at that stage he called the conscience collective) that strongly tie the individual to the society as a whole, while organic solidarity, typical of industrialized societies (in their ‘normal’ state of functioning), based on the division of labor, the fusion of markets, and the growth of cities, exhibits interdependence and strong social bonds, high volume and density, an increasing differentiation of social functions, restitutive or co- operative law, the gradual withering away of the conscience collective, and the emancipation of the individual, allowing space for individual initiative and reflection. The transition from mechanical to organic solidarity, which constituted the ‘progress of the division of labor and of civilization,’ occurs, Durkheim maintained, ‘mechanically’ as a consequence of growth in the social mass and its social or dynamic density, through expanding markets, a ‘struggle for existence,’ a resultant development of new occupations and of corresponding consumer demand. Durkheim intuitively assumed an equilibrium outcome of increasing division of labor but did not specify the parameters that would generate that outcome. The division of labor exhibits perverse effects and thus abnormal forms where the conditions for the social equilibrium of organic solidarity are not satisfied. Anomie—the lack of appropriate rules—is evident in industrial and commercial crises, veering between prosperity and depression, resulting from ignorance and uncertainty of producers concerning demand, in the antagonism between capital and labor, and also in increasingly fragmented scientific specialization, and results in general from a too rapid industrialization in which the appropriate rules have not had time to stabilize relations between social functions and roles. The ‘forced division of labor’ exists where inequality is seen as illegitimate, as when unequal chances of mobility violate the meritocratic principle. And a third abnormal form, which Besnard calls ‘bureaucratic’ (Besnard 1987), is found where excessive specialization is combined with weak productivity and poor mutual adaptation of functions.

Durkheim considerably deepened his notion of anomie and his diagnosis of capitalism’s ills in Suicide. Anomieis one of the two major modern social causes of suicide: a condition of rulelessness in which individuals lose their moorings: their expectations exceed the possibilities of satisfying them, potentially insatiable desires are no longer regulated within a stable and legitimate normative framework of economic rewards or status ranking or conjugal sexual relations. The other major modern social condition causing suicide is egoism: a breakdown of integration, a lack of attachment of individuals to common values, to socially approved relationships, activities, and purposes, isolating and privatizing their lives. (Excessive regulation, or fatalism, and excessive integration, or altruism, are less prevalent, Durkheim thought, in modern societies.) Suicide is the extreme response of the small, randomly distributed but statistically stable minority of suicide-prone individuals whose social situations expose them to the social causes in question. He expounded this theory by accounting for differential suicide rates (e.g., higher among Protestants than Catholics, lower among married men, higher during economic crises, lower during wars) by characterizing suicide’s social causes as ‘suicidogenic currents,’ thereby suggesting a macro–macro explanation that evaded the microlevel, in line with his anti-individualist methodological stance. In reality his theory of suicide is a macro–micro theory of the social conditions for individual psychological equilibrium, or health (anomie being the ‘malady of infinite aspiration’), which that stance deflected him from elaborating. Suicide has been widely seen as remarkable for its sophisticated use of statistics (albeit questionable in abstracting from suicide’s social meanings to which, likewise, Durkheim paid no attention), including the use of multivariate analysis to exclude alternative explanations. But above all, the work exhibits its author’s typical boldness in extending sociological explanation to what might seem least amenable to it: the most private and individual of acts. The same boldness is evident in The Elementary Forms, whose introduction and conclusion advance a theory of the fundamental categories of thought, while the rest of the work advances a theory of the origins, meaning and functions of religious beliefs and practices, of magic, and of the relation of both to science. All this he developed with reference to ethnographic evidence of totemism (assumed to be the most primitive form of religion and its evolutionary origin, or at least its earliest known form) as found in ‘simpler,’ tribal societies in Australia and America. He made the questionable assumption that the essential elements of religious thought and life should be found, at least in germ, in the most primitive religions, regarding the study of a ‘very simple’ religion as particularly instructive, since the relations between its constituent elements are ‘more apparent’ there.

Observing that such categories as space, time, number, causality, the person, etc. impose themselves on us inescapably as the framework of our under-standing, Durkheim rejected as nonexplanatory Kant’s account of them as given a priori, arguing that they express the most general relations existing be- tween things which are revealed to us through social action and mutual communication: their necessity has a social basis. Moreover, they are fundamental to commonsense and to science (natural and social) and across cultures. Religion he defined by its universal dichotomizing of the world into the sacred and the profane, uniting believers around the sacred to which they accord a special, awed respect. Starting from the assumption that religious beliefs cannot be illusory (for otherwise they would not persist), he asked to what reality they correspond, answering that, once decoded, they express our understanding of our society and our obscure and intimate relations with it. They require decoding since, until social science, these cannot be apprehended directly: religion is, in this respect, a sort of mythological proto-sociology. (Thus, the idea of the soul is the way religion represents the duality of human nature, part corporeal, part social.)

This exclusively society-oriented interpretation of religious symbolism has been much criticized (it was Durkheim, not the savage, Evans-Pritchard suggested, who made society into a God). A further contentious issue is whether or not accepting it challenges religious belief (Durkheim claimed it did not). In the domain of knowledge science replaces religion but religion continues to symbolize and dramatize social relations, strengthening and re-animating social bonds and believers themselves through the collective enactment of rituals. This aspect of religion survives and would, he speculated, remain basic to the political cohesion of modern, secular societies as civil religion. Religious beliefs themselves originate in such collective effervescences and are renewed by their re-enactment.

Cognitively, religions are, he held, cosmologies, offering a ‘first explanation of the world,’ seeking realities behind appearances, teaching people to unite what the senses separate, and thus prefiguring science. Religion and science are alike in that they both seek to render the (natural and social) world intelligible, but only the latter disposes of methods that subject its observations to systematic control. Likewise, magic, which occurs within profane or everyday life, draws on prevailing religious beliefs and seeks to predict and manipulate the world, but without benefit of scientific tests, statistics or experiments, adducing (as scientists also do) auxiliary hypotheses to account for its failures. So for Durkheim, humanity is unitary in its thinking, not, as Lucien Levy-Bruhlbelieved, divided between prelogical primitives and logical, science-based moderns.

3. Influence, Impact, And Current Significance

His collaborators applied and developed Durkheim’s ideas in many directions, from economics to Chinese thought (in the work of Marcel Granet) to primitive and ancient law (see Besnard 1983). They also had a considerable contemporary impact on neighboring disciplines in France, for instance, on historians, initially through Henri Berr and his Revue de synthese historique and later through Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and the Annales school, on human geography, beginning with Paul Vidal de la Blache, on jurists, notably Leon Duguit, and on the study of comparative mythology in the work of Georges Dumezil. The surviving Durkheimians continued into the 1930s but their research program gradually lost its dynamism and, as Raymond Aron observed, it came to seem increasingly irrelevant to the times. Among those who have made a significant impact on subsequent work, one can single out Robert Hertz’s studies of death and of right and left (Hertz 1907, 1909), Maurice Halbwachs’s work on collective memory (Halbwachs 1925) and, above all, Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew, pupil, and collaborator, author of several major works on Durkheimian themes, including magic and sacrifice (co-authored with Henri Hubert), seasonal variations among the Eskimos (with Henri Beuchat), the techniques of the body and the category of the person (Mauss 1950), who succeeded in breaking down Durkheim’s conceptual dichotomies and methodological rigidities vis-a-vis other disciplines, in the interest of studying the fait social total, as in his classic and influential study of The Gift (Mauss 1925). In several ways, Mauss rendered Durkheimian sociology more subtle, complex, and forward-looking. Through Mauss, it influenced French structuralism via his impact on Claude Levi-Strauss (see his introduction to Mauss 1950) and also on Louis Dumont, author of the major work on the Indian caste system, Homo Hierarchicusand of parallel studies of Western individualism. Its influence is also evident in the Revue de MAUSS (Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales) which since 1993 has published antiutilitarian articles on various aspects of social life. Among French sociologists, George Friedmann, Pierre Bourdieu, and Raymond Boudon (see Boudon 1999) have incorporated Durkheimian ideas, albeit far from uncritically, the latter insisting upon a convincing interactionist reading of Durkheim. This has, in turn, been developed by Mohamed Cherkaoui (Cherkaoui 1998) who has, moreover, resurrected for close attention Durkheim’s sociology of education, in particular his remarkable study of the evolution of French educational thought and institutions, and their interaction, since the early Church (Durkheim 1938), which explores various themes less than evident in his better known works: class power and conflict and the struggle for cultural domination, the role of intellectuals and the sociology of educational knowledge focusing on dominant epistemologies and disciplinary hierarchies. Another important work is the definitive study of the concept of anomie and its career within sociology (Besnard 1987). Besnard also inaugurated the valuable Etudes durkheimiennes in Paris in 1977 as a forum for scholarship on Durkheim and the Durkheimians. It moved to Urbana, Illinois under the editorship of Robert Alun Jones in 1989 and to Oxford in 1995, published by the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies along with a continuing series of important Occasional Papers.

The Durkheim school’s impact on British social anthropology has been immense, initially through Radcliffe-Brown but chiefly through his successor E. E. Evans-Pritchard, whom it helped liberate from his predecessor’s structural-functionalism. Despite serious reservations, he identified himself with the work of the Durkheimians, praising it as an indispensable theoretical capital, embodying rigorous methods of scholarship (see his introduction to Hertz 1907). In the early 1950s he launched an extensive series of English translations of works by Durkheim and his collaborators, and himself drew on Durkheimian ideas, especially in his work on the Nuer. The impact of Durkheimian ideas is also evident in the work of other Oxford anthropologists, particularly that of Rodney Needham and Nick Allen on symbolic classification, but also in the various writings of Mary Douglas on pollution and symbolic boundaries, and in the work of Robin Horton on African religions.

Durkheim’s reception into American sociology began early, influencing, among others, Elton Mayo and W. Lloyd Warner, but it was Talcott Parsons’s extended treatment of his work in his Structure of Social Action that marked his canonization as a ‘grand theorist,’ treated there as a pre-Parsonian protostructural functionalist, with a distinctive solution to the ‘problem of order’ through the internalization and institutionalization of consensual, society-wide values.

Substantively, the impact of his ideas was pervasive, influencing innumerable accounts of industrialization, urbanization, social control, social disorganization, and collective behavior. These were, directly or indirectly, extrapolated from Durkheim’s picture of advancing social differentiation leading through rapid social change to the breakdown of social ties. According to such accounts, rapid industrialization generates disharmony between life experiences and the normative framework which regulates them, leading to virtually unlimited possibilities for group conflict and thus to a variety of social movements: peaceful agitation, political violence, millennarianism, nationalism, revolution, underground subversion, etc., that in turn attract those suffering most severely under the displacements created by structural change. Examples of this approach are found in the work of Samuel Huntington, Chalmers Johnson, Ted Gurr, and Neil Smelser. Such accounts were criticized by Tilly (1981) for relying on three basic ‘Durkheimian’ arguments that are held to have been refuted by the historical evidence: (a) that conflict varies directly with the prevalence of differentiation within organization and the scale of groups; (b) that social disorder correlates with accelerated urbanization or industrial growth; and (c) that the various forms of ‘disorder,’ such as crime, suicide, conflict, and protest, vary together, in the same settings and circumstances. In short, Tilly rejects the ‘Durkheimian line’ on conflict, protest, and collective action, which he explains instead in terms of group solidarities, common interests, and mobilization. But, first, the ‘line’ is extrapolated from, not argued by, Durkheim, who never sought to explain so much by so little; it is his American successors, not Durkheim, who posited the strains resulting from rapid industrialization as the catch-all source of so many ‘disorders,’ which he never treated as equivalent and associated. Second, his ideas about the processes creating and re-animating collective solidarity are surely not irrelevant to the explanation of collective action. And third, his focus on the consequences of rapid economic and social change outstripping the norms that could regulate it has an inescapable relevance for the diagnosis of the distinctive ills of the most advanced forms of contemporary capitalism, in particular the corrosive effects of technical change on social relations and individual lives.

The concept of anomie has had an impact in other fields. Robert Merton imported it in his influential paper on Social Structure and Anomie (Merton 1949) but in the process mis- or reinterpreted Durkheim’s notion as a maladaptation of means to ends, rather than a sociopsychological condition of deregulation (so that the problem, on Durkheim’s account, should be seen as lying in the success ethic itself, not in the socially structured inability of some to realize its promises). But this idea, together with the other causes of suicide, and indeed the structure, content and mode of its attempted explanation, have exercised a continuing and productive stimulus within the sociology of deviance and criminology, as often through attempts to develop or revise Durkheim’s contribution as through more or less radical refutations of his whole approach.

It is, however, his later ‘religious sociology’ that has had most impact within sociology during the1990s, applying its concepts, insights, and hypotheses to historical and modern societies. Durkheim and the Durkheimians never did this, and indeed a surprised Mauss could write in the late 1930s, contemplating Nazism and Fascism, of the tragic ‘verification’ of their theory in the spectacle of large modern societies ‘hypnotized like Australians are by their dances’ (Ranulf 1939, cited in Lukes 1972). From the 1960s through the 1980s, practitioners of historical sociology were largely focused on the rise and development of capitalism and were class-oriented and state-centered in approach: Marx, Weber, and Tocqueville were the presiding ancestors. Since then a growing interest in cultural analysis has been evident, with an associated interest in Durkheimian ideas. Initially, this development had a Parsonian, consensual emphasis. Edward Shils argued that secular, differentiated societies have sacred ‘centers’ that explain the allocation of status (Shils 1975), Clifford Geertz interpreted cultural systems in a way that linked sacredness, ritual and the mobilization of solidarity (Geertz 1973), and Robert Bellah published and stimulated studies of civil religion under modern conditions (Bellah and Hammond 1980). More recently, there has been a growing interest in symbolism and ritual and their relation to the institutionalization of power and social control but without the assumption of social consensus. In Jeffrey Alexander’s words, a ‘late Durkheimian framework’ is applied to ‘analyze phenomena which are disruptive, contingent, and related to social change,’ while Randall Collins, exponent of conflict sociology, has sought to combine Durkheim with Erving Goffman, in exploring how ‘focused and emotionally arousing interaction produces group solidarity’ (Alexander 1988). Studies along such ‘late Durkheimian’ lines have included French Revolutionary festivals, ritual and symbolism under Fascism, nationalist movements, mass strikes, and media events.

These are the main lines of Durkheim’s impact upon twentieth-century social science. I have not discussed his impact beyond the social sciences (for example, on and through such partly literary figures as Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, and George Bataille, members of the so-called College de Sociologie in the late 1930s), or countless unacknowledged influences. More specific and acknowledged social scientific influences could also be cited, for instance, upon the work of Basil Bernstein on sociolinguistic and educational ‘codes,’ drawing on Durkheim’s ideal-typical polarities, and upon the so-called ‘strong program’ in the sociology of science, originating in the University of Edinburgh, focusing, in a relativizing vein, on the ‘social’ origins of ‘natural’ classifications (see Bloor 1976). Here, as ever, Durkheim’s ideas are interpreted in accordance with locally generated concerns. The story of their reception, sketched here, confirms both their continuing attraction and their continuing power to generate alternative and invariably controversial readings.

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