Émile

Durkheim
 Émile Durkheim
• Born April 15, 1858 in Epinal, Alsace, France.
• Although coming from a Jewish tradition he
was secular in his religious views.
• Entered the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris in 1879.
• Read and studied with classicists with a
social scientific outlook while in school.
• The French academic system had no social
science curriculum at the time, and he took
his degree in philosophy in the class in 1882.
• 1887 – started his teaching career in Bordeaux to
teach pedagogy and social science to new teachers.
• In 1885-86 he spent a year studying psychology with
Wilhelm Wundt in Berlin.
• 1895 - published Rules of the Sociological Method, and
founded the European Department of Sociologique at
the University of Bordeaux.
• 1896 - founded the journal, L'Année Sociologique the
first journal of sociology in France.
• 1902 - awarded a prominent position
in Paris as the chair of education at the
Sorbonne.
• 1912 - published Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life. His position became
permanent and he renamed it the
chair of education and sociology.
• His son died in World War I, and he
never recovered emotionally.
• Suffered a stroke in Paris in 1917,
briefly recovered and resumed work
but later that year, on November 15,
he died at age 59 from exhaustion.
Notable Works, Contributions
and Theories
Durkheim on Education:
Believed that education served many functions:
 To reinforce social solidarity
Pledging allegiance: makes individuals feel part of a group and therefore
less likely to break rules.
 To maintain social roles
School is a society in miniature: it has a similar hierarchy, rules, expectations
to the “outside world,” and trains people to fulfill roles.
 To maintain division of labor
School sorts students into skill groups, encouraging students to take up
employment in fields best suited to their abilities.

Along with sociology he was trained in pedagogy, and concluded

that the institution of public education was a necessary
replacement for religion in a secular society.
• Durkheim on Anomie:
• Anomie is the breakdown of social norms regulating behavior.
• Durkheim and other sociological theorists coined the term anomie as
“a reaction against, or retreat from, the social controls of society.”
• All deviant behavior stems from a state of anomie, including suicide.
• Durkheim on Crime:
• Crime serves a social function, meaning that it has a purpose in
society.
• He saw crime as being able to release certain social tensions and so
have
a cleansing or purging effect in society.
• His views on crime were unconventional at the time.
 The Division of Labor

• Society can be divided into two parts:

Traditional society and Modern society

Traditional society:
• Based on Hunting and gathering
• Based on commonly shared belief and strong group identity
• Simply division of labor
Modern society:
• Based on industries and new technology
• Society become complex due to industrialization
• Based on class level upper, middle and lower
 Social Facts

• Social facts is an idea or things.

• This mean that we must study social facts by acquiring data
from outside from our own mind through observation and
experimentation.
• Durkheim himself gave several example of social facts,
including legal rules, moral obligations, and social convention.
He also refers to language as a social facts, and it provide an
easily understood example. language is a thing that must be
studied empirically.
 Example of social facts

Material and Non material

• Material:
Technology, housing arrangements, population
distribution, etc.
• Nonmaterial
Norms, values, roles (ways of acting, thinking
and feeling), systems (language, currency,
professional practices)
 Suicide (1897)
• According to Durkheim, the term suicide is applied to all cases of death
resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim
himself, which he knows will produce this result.Durkheim’s goal was to
show that an individual act is actually the result of social factors, thus the
relevance of the sociological perspective.

• A key was the degree of social integration: the integration of a group of

people into the mainstream of society.

• Observed that abnormally high or low levels or social integration may

result in increased suicide rates.

• He explored the differing suicide rates among differing social groups.

•Results he found include:
–Suicide rates are higher for widowed, single or divorced people rather than
those who are married.
–Rates are higher for those who have no children rather than those who do.
–Rates are higher among Protestants than Catholics.
–Coroners in a Catholic country are less likely to record a suicide as the
reason of death because in Catholism it is a sin.

Key Concepts in Suicide

• Suicide was a Social Fact
• Anomie is a "condition in which society provides little moral guidance to
individuals". term is commonly understood to mean normlessness, and
believed to have been popularized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim
• Anomic Division of Labor (leftover from “Division of Labor”):
Integration & Regulation

• Defined Four Types of Suicide:

– Altruistic, Egoistic, Anomic, Fatalistic
 Types of suicide
Egoistic Suicide - occurs in a society where there is too much
individualism, that is, low social integration. Egoistic suicide is
committed by people who are not strongly supported by
membership in a interconnected social group

Altruistic suicide - the term 'altruism' was used by Emile

Durkheim to describe a Suicide committed for the benefit of
others or for the community: this would include self-sacrifice
for military objectives in wartime. Altruistic suicides reflect a
courageous indifference to the loss of one's life
 Types of suicide
Anomic suicide - This type of suicide is committed during times
of great stress or change. Without regulation, a person cannot
set reachable goals and in turn people get extremely
frustrated. Life is too much for them to handle and it becomes
meaningless to them. An example of this is when the market
crashes or spikes.

Fatalistic suicide - The final type of suicide is Fatalistic suicide.

People commit this suicide when their lives are kept under
tight regulation. They often live their lives under extreme rules
and high expectations. These types of people are left feeling
like they’ve lost their sense of self
 Durkheim’s Argument in Suicide
 Unlike animals, human desire is “unlimited,” – there is no internal check on
needs and desires.
 The “passions… must be limited,” but this must be done by some force
exterior to the individual.
 This exterior force must be the community (collective conscience) because
it is the “only moral power superior to the individual, the authority of
which he accepts.”
 Regulation through collective conscience is required to ensure that people
will accept their position in life, because true social equality is impossible.
 Anomie occurs when societies break down or “pass through some
abnormal crisis,” people are “not adjusted to the conditions forced on
them,” and social bonds/collective conscience fail to do work of regulating.
 Functionalism
• Functionalism emphasizes a societal equilibrium. If something
happens to disrupt the order and the flow of the system,
society must adjust to achieve a stable state. According to
Durkheim, society should be analyzed and described in terms
of functions. Society is a system of interrelated parts where
no one part can function without the other. These parts make
up the whole of society. If one part changes, it has an impact
on society as a whole.

• Five institutions of society:

Family, religion, economy, education and political.
Durkheim’s Legacy
• Durkheim helped make the study of sociology
mainstream. Sociology today has gained
tremendous popularity in Europe, the US, and
across the world.
• Many of Durkheim’s students pursued his ideas in
their own studies.
• Founded the academic journal, L'Annee
Sociologique.
• In recent decades, Durkheim’s philosophies have
been more influential in the US and Britain than in
France, his native country.
• Durkheim’s ideas influenced several major
theoretical movements in the twentieth century.
– His work was strongly present in the emergence of
‘structuralism’ through the work of Jean Piaget and
Claude Levi-Strauss.