ÉMILE DURKHEIM: BIOGRAPHY, SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND WORKS - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

Émile Durkheim is a French philosopher and sociologist recognized for establishing sociology as an academic discipline and for having been one of its founding fathers, along with Karl Marx and Max Webber. As a result of his monograph Suicide, one begins to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy.

This monograph deals with a study of the types of suicides and the causes that can generate them. Later, Durkheim increases his reputation by studying the sociocultural dimensions of Aboriginal societies compared to modern societies in his work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Durkheim dedicates much of his career to discovering the structural social facts within institutions in a sociological setting. From his perspective, sociology should study social phenomena from an integral point of view and what affects society as a whole, not from the particular actions of specific individuals.

This thinker has a large number of works dealing with sociological studies, published in books, publications and theses.

Biography

He was born on April 15, 1858 in Lorraine, France, into a family of rabbi parents. However, from an early age he began the processes to abandon Judaism, leaving the rabbinical school and continuing a secular career.

In 1882 he graduated in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and began a career fully dedicated to sociology, after a time interested in pedagogy.

Studies in sociology

Thanks to the influences he received from Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, he decided to move to Germany to continue his studies in sociology. From there he writes articles on philosophy and positive sciences that he sends to some French magazines.

These publications are worth to him to obtain the position of professor in charge of the subject of Social Science and Pedagogy of the University of Bordeaux in 1887. The position is extended in 1896 to the chair of Social Philosophy and the same year he founded the magazine L'Année Sociologique.

From 1902 he began to teach at the University of Paris, in the chair of Educational Sciences. He would be attached to that chair for the rest of his life.

Death

The causes of his death are attributed to a stroke in 1917, which may have been caused by the death of his son on the battlefront a year earlier.

In addition, he was professionally marginalized due to the rise of the nationalist right on the continent during the First World War.

Sociological theory

Building on the influence of Augusto Comte on his studies, Durkheim applied his interest in pedagogy to sociological research.

Émile Durkheim renews his vision of sociology, conceiving the existence of specific social phenomena that must be approached from the techniques of sociology.

This differed from the perspective of previous sociologists, who viewed sociological studies from psychological or organic approaches, and not as an autonomous branch of research.

In his research The rules of the sociological method, he raises the perspective of social facts as relationships that exist prior to the birth of an individual in a given society and, therefore, are alien to him and are part of society as a collective.

However, these social facts are coercive, since individuals develop their training embedded in the norms posed by the society in which they were born. According to Durkheim, if social facts existed before we were born, then they exist outside of us.

Collective consciousness over individual consciousness

The social fact cannot be reduced to psychological data either, since society is something that is both inside and outside the individual in an internalized way.

Therefore, from Durkheim's perspective, the collective consciousness prevails over individual thought and the unit of analysis of sociology must then be society, not the individual.

From a holistic point of view, Émile Durkheim proposes that society is much more than the individuals that compose it and, therefore, extends far beyond individual experiences, at some point determining the course of our actions.

Institutions

Regarding religion as a sociological study, Durkheim maintains in his work The elementary forms of religious life that rites, symbols, ideas and emblems of religious beliefs are elaborate representations that society adapts to affirm its sense of being..

Therefore, from his point of view, the idea of ​​God or gods comes from man as a social subject.

In studying the State as a social institution, Émile Durkheim believes that it should not control social relations or collective consciousness, limiting itself to the functions it fulfills as an organ of social thought and developer of certain social representations that derive in defined collective behaviors.

Main works

On the division of social labor

In 1893 he wrote this work, which was his doctoral thesis. There he examines specialized and dehumanized tasks in the workforce since the advancements of the industrial revolution.

It expresses its concerns regarding the consequences that this revolution would produce in institutional systems.

The rules of the sociological method

This work was published in 1895. There he proposed the positivist method, focusing on society as the subject of study. This way, you can test hypotheses using real data based on statistics and logical reasoning.

Here the science character of Sociology begins to settle. It proposes the empirical observation of events as "things" through four categories of analysis:

- Appearance (preconceptions).

- Depth (nature and essence of the social structure).

- Nature of the event (difference between normal events and pathological events).

- Analysis (investigation and interpretation of the collected data).

Suicide: Study of Sociology

For many, this is the most important work of Émile Durkheim, published in 1897. It breaks with the study of suicide as an individual phenomenon and takes it to the sociological field to analyze it as a social phenomenon.

Analyze the suicide rate of various population groups and their comparisons. Based on this analysis, he proposes to consider 4 categories of social reasons for suicide and conceptualizes them as suicides:

- Selfish (with weak ties and social integration).

- Altruistic (as opposed to selfish, of low importance of individuality).

- Anomic (caused in societies of institutions and ties of coexistence in disintegration).

- Fatalistic (as opposed to anomic, in societies with too strict rules).

References

1. Calhoun, C., Gerteis, J., Moody, J., Pfaff, S., Schmidt, K., & Virk, I. (2002). Classical Sociological Theory. Wiley.
2. Durkheim, E. (1897). Suicide Paris.
3. Durkheim, E. (1956). Les rules de la methode sociologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
4. Durkheim, E. (1987). The social division of labor. Akal.
5. Nisbet, RA (1974). The sociology of Émile Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press.