Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 �
November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist whose contributions were
instrumental in the formation of sociology and anthropology. His work
and editorship of the first journal of sociology (L'Ann�e Sociologique)
helped establish sociology within academia as an accepted social
science. During his lifetime, Durkheim gave many lectures, and published
numerous sociological studies on subjects such as education, crime,
religion, suicide, and many other aspects of society. He is considered
as one of the founding fathers of sociology and an early proponent of
solidarism.
Life and career of Emile Durkheim
�mile Durkheim was born in the eastern
French province of Lorraine on April 15, 1858. He came from a long line
of devout French Jews; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather
had been rabbis. At an early age, he decided not to follow in his
family's rabbinical footsteps. Durkheim himself would lead a completely
secular life. Much of his work, in fact, was dedicated to demonstrating
that religious phenomena stemmed from social rather than divine factors.
While Durkheim chose not to follow in the family tradition, he did not
sever ties with his family or with the Jewish community. Many of his
most prominent collaborators and students were Jewish, and some were
blood relations.
A precocious student, Durkheim entered
the �cole Normale Sup�rieure (ENS) in 1879. The entering class that year
was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his
classmates, such as Jean Jaur�s and Henri Bergson would go on to become
major figures in France's intellectual history. At the ENS, Durkheim
studied with Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social
scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu. At
the same time, he read Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Thus Durkheim
became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in
his career. This meant the first of many conflicts with the French
academic system, which had no social science curriculum at the time.
Durkheim found humanistic studies uninteresting, and he finished second
to last in his graduating class when he aggregated in philosophy in
1882.
Middle years of Emile Durkheim
There was no way that a man of
Durkheim's views could receive a major academic appointment in Paris,
and so after spending a year studying sociology in Germany he traveled
to Bordeaux in 1887, which had just started France's first teacher's
training center. There he taught both pedagogy and social science (a
novel position in France). From this position Durkheim reformed the
French school system and introduced the study of social science in its
curriculum. However, his controversial beliefs that religion and
morality could be explained in terms purely of social interaction earned
him many critics.
The 1890s were a period of remarkable
creative output for Durkheim. In 1893 he published The Division of
Labour in Society, his doctoral dissertation and fundamental statement
of the nature of human society and its development. Durkheim's interest
in social phenomena was spurred on by politics. France's defeat in the
Franco-Prussian War had created a backlash against secular, republican
rule and many considered a vigorously nationalistic approach to
rejuvenate France's fading power. Durkheim, a Jew with a sympathy
towards socialism, was thus in the political minority, a situation which
galvanized him politically. The Dreyfus affair of 1894 only strengthened
his activist stance.
In 1895 he published Rules of the
Sociological Method, a manifesto stating what sociology was and how it
ought to be done, and founded the first European Department of Sociology
at the University of Bordeaux. In 1898 he founded the journal L'Ann�e
Sociologique in order to publish and publicize the work of what was by
then a growing number of students and collaborators (this is also the
name used to refer to the group of students who developed his
sociological program). And finally, in 1897, he published Suicide, a
case study which provided an example of what the sociological monograph
might look like. Durkheim was one of the founders in using quantitative
methods in criminology during his suicide case study.
Later years of Emile Durkheim
In 1902 Durkheim finally achieved his
goal of attaining a prominent position in Paris when he became the chair
of education at the Sorbonne. Because French universities are
technically institutions for training secondary school teachers, this
position gave Durkheim considerable influence - his lectures were the
only ones that were mandatory for the entire student body. Despite what
some considered, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, to be a
political appointment, Durkheim consolidated his institutional power by
1912 when he was permanently assigned the chair and renamed it the chair
of education and sociology. It was also in this year that he published
his last major work, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
World War I was to have a tragic effect
on Durkheim's life. Durkheim's leftism was always patriotic rather than
internationalist � he sought a secular, rational form of French life.
But the coming of the war and the inevitable nationalist propaganda that
followed made it difficult to sustain this already nuanced position.
While Durkheim actively worked to support his country in the war, his
reluctance to give in to simplistic nationalist fervor (combined with
his Jewish background) made him a natural target of the now-ascendant
French right. Even more seriously, the generation of students that
Durkheim had trained were now being drafted to serve in the army, and
many of them perished as France was bled white in the trenches. Finally,
Durkheim's own son died in the war � a mental blow from which Durkheim
never recovered. Emotionally devastated and overworked, Durkheim
collapsed of a stroke in Paris in 1917. He recovered over several months
and resumed work on La Morale.
Durkheim died from exhaustion on
November 15, 1917, at the age of 59. He lies buried at the Cimeti�re du
Montparnasse in Paris.
Theories and ideas of Emile Durkheim
Social facts
Durkheim was concerned primarily with
how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern
era, when things such as shared religious and ethnic background could no
longer be assumed. In order to study social life in modern societies,
Durkheim sought to create one of the first scientific approaches to
social phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, Durkheim was one of the
first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of
a society by reference to what function they served in keeping the
society healthy and balanced, and is thus sometimes seen as a precursor
to functionalism. Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the
sum of its parts. Thus unlike his contemporaries Ferdinand T�nnies and
Max Weber, he focused not on what motivates the actions of individual
people (methodological individualism), but rather on the study of social
facts, a term which he coined to describe phenomena which have an
existence in and of themselves and are not bound to the actions of
individuals. He argued that social facts had an independent existence
greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that
composed society and could only be explained by other social facts
rather than, say, by society's adaptation to a particular climate or
ecological niche.
Division of labour
In his 1893 work The Division of Labor
in Society, Durkheim examined how social order was maintained in
different types of societies. He focused on the division of labor, and
examined how it differed in traditional societies and modern societies.
Authors before him such as Herbert Spencer or Otto von Gierke had argued
that societies evolved much like living organisms, moving from a simple
state to a more complex one resembling the workings of complex machines.
Durkheim reversed this formula, adding his theory to the growing pool of
theories of social progress, social evolutionism and social Darwinism.
He argued that traditional societies were 'mechanical' and were held
together by the fact that everyone was more or less the same, and hence
had things in common.
In modern societies, he argued, the
highly complex division of labor resulted in 'organic' solidarity.
Different specializations in employment and social roles created
dependencies that tied people to one another, since people no longer
could count on filling all of their needs by themselves. In 'mechanical'
societies, for example, subsistence farmers live in communities which
are self-sufficient and knit together by a common heritage and common
job. In modern 'organic' societies, workers earn money, and must rely on
other people who specialize in certain products, such as groceries,
clothing, to meet their needs.
Emile Durkheim also made an association
of the kind of solidarity in a given society and the preponderance of a
law system. He found that in societies with mechanical solidarity the
law is generally repressive: the agent of a crime or deviant behavior
would suffer a punishment, which in fact would compensate collective
conscience neglected by the crime; the punishment acts more to preserve
the unity of consciences. On the other hand, in societies with organic
solidarity the law is generally restitutive: it aims not to punish, but
instead to restitute normal activity of a complex society. The rapid
change in society due to increasing division of labor thus produces a
state of confusion with regard to norms and increasing impersonality in
social life, leading eventually to relative normlessness, i.e. the
breakdown of social norms regulating behavior; Durkheim labels this
state anomie. From a state of anomie come all forms of deviant behavior,
most notably suicide.
Emile Durkheim developed the concept of
anomie later in Suicide, published in 1897. In it, he explores the
differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, explaining that
stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates.
According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of attachment to
their groups, which he calls social integration. Abnormally high or low
levels of social integration may result in increased suicide rates; low
levels have this effect because low social integration results in
disorganized society, alienation and loneliness in the individual,
causing people to turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels
cause people to kill themselves to avoid becoming burdens on society, or
because the social pressure becomes too great and oppressive. According
to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while
Protestant society has low levels. This work has influenced proponents
of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological
study.
Finally, Emile Durkheim is remembered for his work on 'primitive', all
non-Western societies, people in books such as his 1912 volume
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and the essay Primitive
Classification that he wrote with Marcel Mauss. These works examine the
role that religion and mythology have in shaping the worldview and
personality of people in extremely, to use Durkheim's phrase,
'mechanical' societies. In Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Durkheim develops a theory of religion which is based on Collective
Effervescence.
Education
Durkheim was also interested in
education. Partially this was because he was professionally employed to
train teachers, and he used his ability to shape curriculum to further
his own goals of having sociology taught as widely as possible. More
broadly, though, Durkheim was interested in the way that education could
be used to provide French citizens the sort of shared, secular
background that would be necessary to prevent anomie in modern
societies. It was to this end that he also proposed the formation of
professional groups to serve as a source of solidarity for adults.
Durkheim argued that education has many
functions:
- To reinforce social solidarity
History: Learning about individuals who have done good things for
the many makes an individual feel insignificant.
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". It trains young people to
fulfill roles.
- To maintain division of labour.
School sorts students into skill groups, encouraging students to
take up employment in fields best suited to their abilities.
Crime
Durkheim's views on crime were a
departure from conventional notions. He believed that crime is "bound up
with the fundamental conditions of all social life" and serves a social
function. He stated that crime implies, "not only that the way remains
open to necessary change, but that in certain cases it directly proposes
these changes... crime [can thus be] a useful prelude to reforms." In
this sense he saw crime as being able to release certain social tensions
and so have a cleansing or purging effect in society. He further stated
that "the authority which the moral conscience enjoys must not be
excessive; otherwise, no-one would dare to criticize it, and it would
too easily congeal into an immutable form. To make progress, individual
originality must be able to express itself...[even] the originality of
the criminal... shall also be possible" (Durkheim, 1895).
Punishment
Durkheim was a strong advocate of
morality in society. He believed that having good strong morals would
prevent individuals from 'disintegrating'. Disintegration would happen
if the collective conscience became weak. The collective conscience was
a term coined by Durkheim which meant that individuals shared common
beliefs and sentiments. Without this consensus or agreement on
fundamental moral issues, social solidarity would be impossible and
individuals could not be bound together to form an integrated social
unit. In order to prevent society from disintegrating Durkheim believed
that punishment was necessary. Punishment is 'a passionate reaction of
graduated intensity to offences against the collective conscience'.
Unlike conservatives who believed that the harshest possible punishment
should be enforced to make men moral and preserve the status quo,
Durkheim believed that only the necessary relevant amount of punishment
was needed to threaten men to remain moral. Therefore, he believed that
punishment was necessary in order to promote social cohesion and bind
individuals together.
Law
Beyond the specific study of crime,
criminal law and punishment, Durkheim was deeply interested in the study
of law and its social effects in general. Among classical social
theorists he is one of the founders of the field of sociology of law. In
his early work he saw types of law (characterised by their sanctions) as
a direct reflection of types of social solidarity. The study of law was
therefore of interest to sociology for what it could reveal about the
nature of solidarity. Later, however, he emphasised the significance of
law as a sociological field of study in its own right. In the later
Durkheimian view, law (both civil and criminal) is an expression and
guarantee of society's fundamental values. Durkheim emphasised the way
that modern law increasingly expresses a form of moral individualism - a
value system that is, in his view, probably the only one universally
appropriate to modern conditions of social solidarity. Individualism, in
this sense, is the basis of human rights and of the values of individual
human dignity and individual autonomy. It is to be sharply distinguished
from selfishness and egoism, which for Durkheim are not moral stances at
all. Many of Durkheim's closest followers, such as Marcel Mauss, Georges
Davy, Paul Fauconnet, Paul Huvelin, Emmanuel Levy and Henri Levy-Bruhl
also specialised in or contributed to the sociological study of law.
Suicide
Durkheim used official statistics to
carry out a study into suicide. He found that people who are not
integrated into the society that they live in are more likely to kill
themselves. He stated that there are four types of suicide;
-Egoistic suicide this is where people
kill themselves for their own individual interest. This usually occurs
in societies where social bonds are weak with a low level of social
integration due to emphasis put onto individual rights, welfare and
interests. You could say that this society has the norms and values to
think of themselves, causing them to be more individual rather than
coming together as a society. These people are often encouraged (for
example, by their religions) to make their own decisions and therefore
accept the consequences. This may mean that other people of the society
see it as acceptable that a person has killed themself due to failure or
unhappiness. To conclude this type of suicide is caused by a low amount
of social integration and could lead to a high suicide rate in that
society.
-Altruistic suicides This occurs in
societies that see individual needs as less important than the societies
as a whole. As individual interest was not important, Durkheim stated
that in an altruistic society there would be little reason for people to
commit suicide. He stated one exception; if the individual is expected
to kill themselves on behalf of the society. An example of this rare
type of suicide would be suicide bombers who are willing to take their
lives for their religions.
-Anomic suicides For this type of
suicide, Durkheim pointed out that people are naturally selfish and put
their own needs and interests first. He said that there is a framework
of 'acceptable behaviour' within a society and if this framework is
weakened then people will revert to their natural selfishness. These
restraints are usually weakened by social change so Durkheim linked
social change with the rate of suicide.
-Fatalistic suicide This type of
suicide seems to occur in overly oppressive societies, causing people to
prefer to die than to carry on living within this society. This is an
extremely rare reason for people to take their own lives, but a good
example would be within a prison; people prefer to die than live in a
prison with constant abuse.
Religion
In classical sociology, the study of
religion was primarily concerned with two broad issues:
How did religion contribute to the
maintenance of social order?
What was the relationship between religion and capitalist society?
These two issues were typically combined in the argument that industrial
capitalism would undermine traditional religious commitment and thereby
threaten the cohesion of society. More recently the subject has been
narrowly defined as the study of religious institutions.
�mile Durkheim placed himself in the
positivist tradition, meaning that he thought of his study of society as
dispassionate and scientific. He was deeply interested in the problem of
what held complex modern societies together. Religion, he argued, was an
expression of social cohesion. His underlying interest was to understand
the existence of religion in the absence of belief in any religion's
actual tenets. Durkheim saw totemism as the most basic form of religion.
It is in this belief system that the fundamental separation between the
sacred and the profane is most clear. All other religions, he said, are
outgrowths of this distinction, adding to it myths, images, and
traditions. The totemic animal, Durkheim believed, was the expression of
the sacred and the original focus of religious activity because it was
the emblem for a social group, the clan. Religion is thus an inevitable,
just as society is inevitable when individuals live together as a group.
Durkheim thought that the model for
relationships between people and the supernatural was the relationship
between individuals and the community. He is famous for suggesting that
"God is society, writ large." Durkheim believed that people ordered the
physical world, the supernatural world, and the social world according
to similar principles.
Durkheim�s first purpose was to
identify the social origin of religion as he felt that religion was a
source of camaraderie and solidarity. It was the individual�s way of
becoming recognizable within an established society. His second purpose
was to identify links between certain religions in different cultures,
finding a common denominator. Belief in supernatural realms and
occurrences may not stem through all religions, yet there is a clear
division in different aspects of life, certain behaviours and physical
things.
In the past, he argued, religion had
been the cement of society--the means by which men had been led to turn
from the everyday concerns in which they were variously enmeshed to a
common devotion to sacred things. His definition of religion, favoured
by anthropologists of religion today, was, "A religion is a unified
system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e. things
set apart & forbidden-- beliefs and practices which unite in one single
moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
Durkheim believed that �society has to
be present within the individual.� He saw religion as a mechanism that
shored up or protected a threatened social order. He thought that
religion had been the cement of society in the past, but that the
collapse of religion would not lead to a moral implosion. Durkheim was
specifically interested in religion as a communal experience rather than
an individual one. He also says that religious phenomena occur when a
separation is made between the profane (the realm of everyday
activities) and the sacred (the realm of the extraordinary and the
transcendent); these are different depending what man chooses them to
be. An example of this is wine at communion, as it is not only wine but
represents the blood of Christ. Durkheim believed that religion is
�society divinised�, as he argues that religion occurs in a social
context. He also, in lieu of forefathers before who tried to replace the
dying religions, urged people to unite in a civic morality on the basis
that we are what we are as a result of society.
Durkheim condensed religion into four
major functions:
- Disciplinary, forcing or
administrating discipline
- Cohesive, bringing people
together, a strong bond
- Vitalizing, to make more lively or
vigorous, vitalise, boost spirit
- Euphoric, a good feeling,
happiness, confidence, well-being
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim
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