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Lesson 5
Emile Durkheim
Robert Wonser
SOC 368 – Classical Sociological Theory
Spring 2014
Durkheim’s Life
 Born in France in 1858 into a family with a long
ancestry of Jewish rabbis.
 Was given religious training from an early age –
was to be the next rabbi.
 Was an excellent student in both religious and
secular studies.
 He was an agnostic/atheist for most of his life.
 Durkheim organized and taught France’s first
sociology course.
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Durkheim’s Life
 Was active in public politics.
 Developed an educational curriculum based
upon a “civil morality.”
 Published over 500 articles, books, and reviews.
 Founded the first sociology research institute in
the world.
 Many of his students were killed in WWI.
 Durkheim’s son was also MIA in WWI which put
Durkheim into a deep depression that cost him
his life.
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Intellectual Influences
 Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755):
 Concerned with the question: What is the origin of society? (The
Social Contract Theorists vs. The Social Realists).
 Emphasis on society as a “thing.”
 Spirit of Laws – scientific laws, and social laws.
 Importance of typologies and classificatory systems: republic,
monarchy, despotism.
 Number, arrangement, and relations among parts.
 Argued that societies have “spirits,” “definite forms,” resulting from
specific “causes, and having definite “functions.”
 Durkheim argued that he committed the problem of “final causes”
(teleology and tautology).
 Espoused cultural relativism.
 Structures should be assessed by their functions in context.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
 a leading figure of the French Enlightenment.
 Presocial “state of nature” of human beings –
humans were crudely sense oriented and driven
by basic needs; has little social dependence.
 With agriculture and technological innovations
came private property, jealously, and
competition.
 The solution: eliminate self-interest by making
social relations parallel human relations to
nature – reduce social dependence.
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 Advocated a “political state” where self-interest was
subordinated to the “general will.”
 This is accomplished through an emphasis on civil
religions, common mechanisms of socialization, and the
creation of a powerful state.
 Society is an emergent reality, sui generis – pg. 239.
 Social Pathologies: three concepts are important: egoism,
anomie, forced division of labor.
 The Problem of Social Order:
 Rousseau
the state
 Durkheim
society (and subgroups)
 Society is sacred.
 Collective conscience
 Social integration
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Auguste Comte
Positivism
Durkheim employed Comte’s
methodology.
Organismic Analogy
Social statics – Social Solidarity
Social dynamics – evolution of societies
from simple to complex.
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Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
 Tocqueville’s influences on Durkheim:
 Social structure is integrated when:
 high coordination of differentiated functions.
 individuals are attached to collective
organizations.
 individual freedom is preserved by state.
 state has a common set of norms and values.
 state has set of checks and balances.
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Herbert Spencer
Durkheim was very critical of Spencer.
A society cannot be organized around
libertarian beliefs, but must be held
together by a common morality.
Durkheim’s work is filled with footnotes
attacking the works of Spencer.
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Durkheim’s Major Works
1893 – Division of Labor in Society
1895 – The Rules of the Sociological
Method
1897 – Suicide
1912 – Elementary Forms of Religious Life
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Social Facts
Social facts are the social structures and
cultural norms and values that are
coercive of the individual and external to,
the individual. Ex: language
“sui generis” – “unique”, not reducible to
individuals (exists on its own, a thing unto
itself)
Can be studied empirically
Explained by other social facts
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Two Types of Social Facts
Material social facts are easier to
understand because they are directly
observable, like: architecture, forms of
technology, legal codes
Nonmaterial Social Facts are what we now
call norms, values, generally culture, like:
morality, collective conscious, collective
representations and social currents.
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Nonmaterial Social Facts
 Morality – society should compel members what to do to
curb self interest.
 Collective conscious – “totality of people’s beliefs and
sentiments common to average citizens of the same
society forms a determinate system which has its own
life” (Durkheim1893/1964:79-80)
 General structure of shared understandings, norms and beliefs
 Collective representations – collective ‘ideas’ and a
social ‘force’.
 Lincoln allows us to think of ourselves, as consumers or patriots.
 Social currents – coercive force we’re swept along by
and in, sometimes we oppose but it still acts upon us.
 Ex: waves of enthusiasm, indignation, pity produced in public
gatherings
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The Sociological Theory of Emile
Durkheim
 The Division of Labor in Society (1893)
 “sociology’s first classic”
 Mechanical Solidarity – bond because people
are engaged in similar activities have similar
responsibilities.
 Organic Solidarity – held together by differences
among people by the fact that all have different
tasks and responsibilities.
 Volume, # of people enveloped by collective
conscious, intensity, how deeply individuals feel
about it, rigidity, how clearly it is defined, content,
the form the collective conscious takes in the two
types of society
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The Four Dimensions of the Collective Conscious
Solidarity
Volume
Intensity Rigidity Content
Mechanical Entire Society
Organic
Particular
Groups
High
Low
High
Religious
Low
Moral
Individualism
(individual
elevated to a
moral precept)
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What causes the transition from one type
to the other?
Dynamic density – the number of people
in society and the amount of interaction
that occurs among them
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Repressive and Restitutive Law
 Nonmaterial social facts are difficult to measure
directly  sociologist should examine material
social facts that reflect the nature of, changes in,
nonmaterial social facts
 Mechanical solidarity uses repressive law,
severe punishment because it violates the group
and deviation isn't tolerated.
 Organic uses restitutive law where offenders
must make restitution for their crimes.
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The Sociological Theory of Emile
Durkheim: Normal and Pathological
 Crime is normal, not pathological
 Pathological:
 anomic division of labor – lack of regulation in
society that celebrates isolated individuality and
doesn’t tell people what they should do
 inequality and forced division of labor –
outdated norms can force people into ill suited
positions (almost Marxian)
 inadequately coordinated division of labor –
when specializations don’t result in increased
interdependence but instead but simply isolation
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Suicide
 Paradigmatic example of how a sociologist should
connect theory and research
 Chose to study suicide to demonstrate the
awesomeness of sociology! (no, really!)
 Explained suicide rates, why one group had a higher rate
than another
 Changes in collective sentiments  changes in social
currents  changes in suicide rates.
 Important variables:
 Integration refers to the attachment people have to society
 Regulation refers to the degree of external restraint on people.
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Four Types of Suicide
 Egoistic – individual is not well integrated into
the larger social unit
 Altruistic – “social integration is too strong”
 Anomic – more likely to occur when regulative
powers of society are disrupted  little control
over their passions, free to run wild, insatiable
race for gratification  anomie  suicide
 Fatalistic – excessive regulation
 All suicides stem from social currents
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The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
 This is Durkheim’s investigation into the
sociology of religion.
 Concerned with the nature of symbols and their
effects on social organization.
 He is concerned with three central questions:
What is the social glue that weaves individuals into
social units?
How are individual desires and self-interests regulated
and controlled?
How are individuals attached to the symbolic, and
structural social world?
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Social Rituals
The social mechanisms Durkheim uses to
answer these questions are social rituals.
For Durkheim, every religion has three
elements:
beliefs about the sacred and profane
cult organization, a church
rituals toward the sacred totems (symbols)
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The Sacred and the Profane
 The worship of the sacred is the worship of society
 The collective conscience as the sacred force
 Sacred – created through rituals that transform the
moral power of society into religious symbols that bind
individuals to the group.
 Set apart from the everyday, treated with reverence.
 Profane – the commonplace, utilitarian and mundane
aspects of everyday life.
 Religion functions to:
 regulate human needs and actions
 integrate society through rituals
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Totemism
Totemism - a religious system in which
certain things, particularly animals and
plants, come to be regarded as sacred
and as emblems of the clan.
Nothing but representations of the clan
itself.
Rituals coalesce the group
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Sociology of Knowledge
Durkheim argued that all mental
categories are ultimately extensions of
religious ideas, and that mental categories
are reflections of the social organization of
a society.
Social origins of the six fundamental
categories that philosophers had
previously identified as essential to human
understanding.
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Six Fundamental Categories
 Time – comes from rhythm of social life
 Space – develops from the division of space in
society
 Classification is tied to the human group
(totemism)
 Force – derived from experiences with social
forces
 Imitative rituals are the sources of causality
 Totality – society itself
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Collective Effervescence
 Collective effervescence – times when even the
most fundamental moral and cognitive
categories can change or be created a new.
 The great moments in history when a collectivity
is able to achieve a new and heightened level of
collective exaltation that in turn can lead to great
changes in the structure of society.
 Decisive formative moments in social
development
 The birth of social facts
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Concepts are collective representations
that society produces, at least initially,
through religious rituals.
Religion is what connects society and the
individual since it is through sacred rituals
that social categories become the basis for
individual concepts.
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Criticisms
 Introduced through Talcott Parsons… as a
functionalist.
Because his focus was macro
 Only occasional and accidental ‘strong
functionalist’
 Did NOT believe sociologists can infer sociological
laws through biological analogy.
 Can social facts be studied as he outlines?
 Social forces controlling individuals? No agency?
 What should be done from what now exists? Who
decides?
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