Background

David Emile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858, in Epinal, the capital town of the department of Vosges, in Lorraine, France. His mother, Mélanie, was a merchant's daughter, and his father, Moïse, had been rabbi of Epinal since the 1830s and was also Chief Rabbi of the Vosges and Haute-Marne.

Education

As an excellent student at the Lycée Louis le Grand, Durkheim was a strong candidate to enter the renowned and highly competitive École Normale Supérieure in Paris. While taking his board examination at the Institut Jauffret in the Latin Quarter, he met another gifted young man from the provinces, Jean Jaurès, later to lead the French Socialist Party and at that time interested, like Durkheim, in philosophy and in the moral and social reform of his country. Jaurès won entrance to the École Normale in 1878; one year later Durkheim did the same.

Durkheim enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere of the École Normale - the discussion of metaphysical and political issues pursued with eagerness and animated by the utopian dreams of young men destined to be among the leaders of their country. Durkheim was respected by his peers and teachers, but he was impatient with the excessive stress on elegant rhetoric and surface polish then prevalent in French higher education. His teachers of philosophy struck him as too fond of generalities and too worshipful of the past.

By 1886, as part of his doctoral dissertation, Durkheim had completed the draft of his The Division of Labour in Society. In 1892 he earned his Doctor of Philosophy.

Career

From 1882 to 1885 Durkheim taught philosophy in several provincial lycées. A leave of absence in 1885-1886 allowed him to study under the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in Germany. In 1887 he was named lecturer in education and sociology at the University of Bordeaux, a position raised to a professorship in 1896, the first professorship of sociology in France.

On his return from Germany, Durkheim had begun to prepare review articles for the Revue philosophique on current work in sociology. In 1896, realizing that the task was too much for a single person to do adequately, he founded the Année sociologique. His purpose, he announced, was to bring the social sciences together, to promote specialization within the field of sociology, and to the E make evident that sociology was a collective, not a personal, enterprise. He was also an advisory editor on the first US sociology journal, The American Journal of Sociology. In 1902 Durkheim was named to a professorship in sociology and education at the Sorbonne. There he remained for the rest of his career.

Achievements

• Durkheim not only founded the French school of sociology, but he also left behind a school of brilliant researchers who developed the field, often in directions quite different from Durkheim's original approach, testifying to his ability to encourage and inspire his students to go beyond him in their pursuit of knowledge. Durkheim's students included his nephew, Marcel Mauss, who later chaired the department of sociology at the College de France, influencing another generation of eminent sociologists, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, who developed the school of "structural anthropology."
  
  Durkheim's influence went beyond sociology. Students studying philosophy, languages, history, and literature were required to take his sociology course, and it was said that he was such a masterful teacher that one had to avoid his class to escape his influence. Thus, while not achieving the transformation of society he passionately strove for, his ideas on society and how it is transformed remain foundational in the social sciences.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Division Of Labor In Society

    (Emile Durkheim's seminal work studies the nature of socia...)

    1893
  • The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

    (In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile D...)

    1912
  • The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method

    (The Rules of Sociological Method represents Emile Durkhei...)

    1982
  • Suicide: A Study In Sociology

    (Emile Durkheim's Suicide addresses the phenomenon of suic...)

    1897
  • Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings 1972

Religion

Durkheim was himself an agnostic. But he always remained the product of a close-knit, orthodox Jewish family, as well as that long-established Jewish community of Alsace-Lorraine that had been occupied by Prussian troops in 1870, and suffered the consequent anti-Semitism of the French citizenry. Later, Durkheim would argue that the hostility of Christianity toward Judaism had created an unusual sense of solidarity among the Jewish.

Politics

Durkheim lived and worked during the Third Republic, a relatively stable period in France that was, in theory, committed to parliamentary democracy (as opposed to constitutional monarchy or socialism). The Third Republic was a compromise government, and that its stability could perhaps be attributed to its moderation. Durkheim was actively involved with supporting the Third Republic and saw sociology as the science that could lead to better policy-making. He was also an outspoken critic of antisemitism and much in sympathy with socialism. Durkheim once told a close friend "with a moving simplicity how, at a certain moment of his spiritual life, he had had to admit to himself that he was a socialist." During World War I, he was active in supporting France and even wrote a series of short articles decrying the "German mind" for its tendency to militarism and overreach.

Views

Durkheim was concerned primarily with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era when commonalities 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. It should be noted that Durkheim himself never undertook any fieldwork. Instead, he analyzed observations made by others. This was entirely consistent with his stance that concrete observations in and of themselves are not necessarily illuminating. He believed that it is the concepts, such as "totemism," that shed light on the nature of society. 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 - a position that would come to be known as Functionalism.

Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts. Thus, unlike his contemporary 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 objective existence and could only be explained by other social facts rather than, say, by society's adaptation to a particular climate or ecological niche.

Durkheim was convinced that individuals' actions are often heavily influenced, if not totally predetermined, by aspects of the social structure of which they are unaware. His grasp of the social domain was unique. Although he considered himself an objective scientist, he brought to the study of social phenomena a strong sense of morality. Durkheim believed that the regulation of egoistic impulses is necessary throughout civil society. He favored a "moral liberalism" that also emphasized self-discipline and the individual's duty to others. He feared that the call of conscience was losing effectiveness in moderating behavior and that people increasingly lacked a moral compass.

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, or primitive, societies, and modern societies. Authors before him, such as Herbert Spencer and Ferdinand Tönnies, had argued that societies evolved much like 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. Like the atoms in inorganic crystals, arranged in regularly ordered lattices, members of such societies do not move around of their own accord. In traditional societies, argued Durkheim, the "collective consciousness" entirely subsumes individual consciousness - norms are strong and behavior is well-regulated.

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 to meet their needs. The result of increasing division of labor, according to Durkheim, is that individual consciousness emerges distinct from collective consciousness - often finding itself in conflict with the collective consciousness.

Durkheim also made a connection between the kind of solidarity in a given society and the nature of its penal 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, that in fact would compensate the collective conscience harmed by the crime - the punishment heals wounds and provides expiation so that the offense is removed from the collective consciousness. On the other hand, in societies with organic solidarity, the law is generally restitutive: it aims not to punish, but instead to repair damage and restore the normal activity of a complex society.

Durkheim was generally optimistic that changes in the structure of society due to the division of labor would lead to positive developments for both society and the individuals in society. However, he also noted that changes in society due to increasing division of labor might produce a state of confusion with regard to norms and increasing impersonality in social life, leading eventually to the breakdown of social norms regulating behavior. Durkheim labeled this state "anomie." He claimed that from the state of anomie come all forms of deviant behavior.

Durkheim further developed the concept of anomie in his 1897 publication, Suicide. In it, he explored the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, suggesting that stronger social control among Catholics resulted in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of attachment to their groups, which he called "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 a disorganized society, causing people to turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels cause people to kill themselves to avoid becoming burdens on society. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. This work, which influenced proponents of "control theory," is considered a classic sociological study.

Durkheim was also very interested in education. Partly, this was because he was professionally employed to train teachers, and he used his ability to shape the curriculum to further his own goal 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 with the sort of shared, a secular background that would be necessary to prevent anomie in modern society. 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, such as reinforcing social solidarity, maintaining social roles, and maintaining the division of labor. However, he also noted that education is an image or reflection of society, and so problems in education cannot be solved without first solving those problems in society.

Quotations: "Our science came into being only yesterday. It must not be forgotten, especially in view of the favorable reception that sociology is given now, that, properly speaking, Europe did not have as many as ten sociologists fifteen years ago."

Personality

Emile Durkheim was very well-known by all kinds of intelligent people, especially in circles of philosophy and psychology. He was a very good debater, administrator, and organizer and provided assistance to friends and supporters. Durkheim was a mesmerizing lecturer and was even accused of having too much control over the minds of his young students. He often worked too hard, sometimes even into illness.

Quotes from others about the person

• Durkheim was "deeply opposed to all war whether of classes or of nations; he desired change only for the benefit of society as a whole and not that of any one of its parts, even if that latter had numbers and force. He regarded political revolutions and parliamentary developments as superficial, costly and more theatrical than serious. He therefore always resisted the idea of submitting himself to a party." - Marcel Mauss (1928)
  
  "His adversaries, his enemies, not taking sufficient account of his personal disinteredness, considered him, and sometimes treated him, as ambitious and as an intriguer. What an error of judgement! His ends were noble and went beyond personal rewards, and I believe that all the steps he took, when they related to getting people jobs - advancing some, and thwarting and excluding others - had the single objective of the interest of science and the community." - Bourgin (1938)

Interests

• Reading

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Plato, Herbert Spencer, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, William James, John Dewey, Fustel de Coulanges, Jean-Marie Guyau, Charles Bernard Renouvier, John Stuart Mill

Connections

In 1887, Emile Durkheim married a young embroiderer named Louise Julie Dreyfus, the daughter of a director of a foundry. The couple had two children, Marie Bella (born 1888) and Andre-Armand (born 1892).

It is said that Louise was well-educated and helped Emile with his work. Where Emile was austere, Louise was light-hearted. By all accounts, they had a happy marriage.

Andre would die in 1915, from an injury sustained in battle in Bulgaria. When waiting to hear news of his son, on the battlefront, he wrote to a close friend, "The image of this exhausted child, alone at the side of a road in the midst of night and fog... that seizes me by the throat." It is said that the death of his son precipitated Emile Durkheim's decline and early death, following a stroke (at age 59).

Father:

Moïse Durkheim

Mother:

Mélanie Durkheim

Spouse:

Louise Julie Dreyfus

(married 1887)

Daughter:

Marie Bella Durkheim

(born 1888)

Son:

Andre-Armand Durkheim

(born 1892 - died 1915)

Acquaintance:

Jean Jaurès

References

• Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work - A Historical and Critical Study
  1972