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Émile Durkheim
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"Durkheim" redirects here. For the main-belt asteroid, see 10330 Durkheim.
Émile Durkheim

Frenchsociologist

April 15, 1858(1858-04-15)

Born
Épinal, France
November 15, 1917(1917-11-15)
Died (aged 59)
Paris, France
David Émile Durkheim (French pronunciation: [emildyʁkɛm]) (April 15, 1858 – November 15,
1917) was a Frenchsociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl
Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.[1]
Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in
1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journal
L'AnnéeSociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates
amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to
distinguish social science from psychology or political philosophy.[2]
Durkheim refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting
epistemological realism and the hypothetico-deductive model. For him, sociology was the
science of institutions, its aim being to discover structural "social facts".[3] Durkheim was a major
proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and
anthropology.[4][5] In his view, social science should be purely holistic; that is, sociology should
study phenomenas attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions
of individuals.[6]
Durkheim remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917,
presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including social
stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Marcel Mauss, a notable social
anthropologist of the pre-war era, was his nephew. Durkheimian terms such as "collective
conscience" have since entered the popular discourse.[7]

Contents
[hide]
• 1 Biography
○ 1.1 Childhood and education
○ 1.2 Academic career
• 2 Theories and ideas
○ 2.1 Theoretical foundations of sociology
○ 2.2 Social facts
○ 2.3 Method and objectivity
• 3 Sociological studies
○ 3.1 Education
○ 3.2 Crime
○ 3.3 Law
○ 3.4 Suicide
○ 3.5 Religion
• 4 See also
• 5 Selected works
• 6 References
• 7 Further reading
• 8 External links
[edit] Biography
[edit] Childhood and education
Durkheim was born in Épinal in Lorraine, coming from a long line of devout French Jews; his
father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been rabbis.[8] At an early age, he decided not to
follow in his family's rabbinical footsteps.[8] Durkheim himself would lead a completely secular
life. Much of his work 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.[8] Many of his most prominent
collaborators and students were Jewish, and some were blood relations. The exact influence of
Jewish thought on Durkheim's work remains uncertain; some scholars have argued that
Durkheim's thought is a form of secularized Jewish thought,[9][10] while others argue that proving
the existence of a direct influence of Jewish thought on Durkheim's achievements is difficult or
impossible.[11]
A precocious student, Durkheim entered the ÉcoleNormaleSupérieure (ENS) in 1879.[12] The
entering class that year was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his
classmates, such as Jean Jaurès and Henri Bergson would go on to become major figures in
France's intellectual history. At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis
Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation
on Montesquieu.[13] 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.
There was no way that a man of Durkheim's views could receive a major academic appointment
in Paris. Thus in 1885 he decided to leave for Germany, where he studied sociology in Marburg,
Berlin and Leipzig. As Durkheim indicated in several essays, it was in Leipzig that he learned to
appreciate the value of empiricism and its language of concrete, complex things, in sharp
contrast to the more abstract, clear and simple ideas of the Cartesian method.[14]
[edit] Academic career
A collection of Durkheim's courses on the origins of socialism (1896), edited and published by
his nephew, Marcel Mauss, in 1928.
Durkheim traveled to Bordeaux in 1887, which had just started France's first teacher's training
center. There he taught both pedagogy and sociology (the latter had never been taught in France
before).[15] From this position Durkheim helped reform 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 1892 he published The
Division of Labour in Society, his doctoral dissertation and fundamental statement of the nature
of human society and its development.[16] Durkheim's interest in social phenomena was spurred
on by politics. France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led to the fall of the regime of
Napoleon III, which was then replaced by the Third Republic. This in turn resulted in a backlash
against the new secular and republican rule, as many people considered a vigorously nationalistic
approach necessary to rejuvenate France's fading power. Durkheim, a Jew and a staunch
supporter of the Third Republic 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 is 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'AnnéeSociologique 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).
Durkheim was familiar with several foreign languages and reviewed academic papers in
German, English, and Italian for the journal. 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.
By 1902 Durkheim had 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 schoolteachers, 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, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
The outbreak of World War I was to have a tragic effect on Durkheim's life. His 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 in the trenches. Finally, Durkheim's own son, André,
died on the war front in December 1915 — a psychological blow from which Durkheim never
recovered. Emotionally devastated and overworked, Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in Paris in
1917 and now lies buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
[edit] Theories and ideas

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List of sociologists · Index

v•d•e

[edit] Theoretical foundations of sociology

A fundamental influence on Durkheim's thought was the sociological positivism of Auguste
Comte, who effectively sought to extend and apply the scientific method found in the natural
sciences to the social sciences. According to Comte, a true social science should stress for
empirical facts, as well as induce general scientific laws from the relationship among these facts.
There were many points on which Durkheim agreed with the positivist thesis. First, he accepted
that the study of society was to be founded on an examination of facts. Second, like Comte, he
acknowledged that the only valid guide to objective knowledge was the scientific method. Third,
he agreed with Comte that the social sciences could become scientific only when they were
stripped of their metaphysical abstractions and philosophical speculation.[17]
A second influence on Durkheim's view of society beyond Comte's positivism was the
epistemological outlook called social realism. Although he never explicitly exposed it, Durkheim
adopted a realist perspective in order to demonstrate the existence of social realities outside the
individual and to show that these realities existed in the form of the objective relations of society.
[18]
As an epistemology of science, realism can be defined as a perspective which takes as its
central point of departure the view that external social realities exist in the outer world and that
these realities are independent of the individual's perception of them. This view opposes other
predominant philosophical perspectives such as empiricism and positivism. Empiricists such as
David Hume had argued that all realities in the outside world are products of human sense
perception. According to empiricists, all realities are thus merely perceived: they do not exist
independently of our perceptions, and have no causal power in themselves.[18] Comte's positivism
went a step further by claiming that scientific laws could be deduced from empirical
observations. Going beyond this, Durkheim claimed that sociology would not only discover
"apparent" laws, but would be able to discover the inherent nature of society.
Throughout his career, 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. To study social life in modern societies, he hence
sought to create one of the first rigorous scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with
Herbert Spencer, he 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 maintaining the quotidian (i.e. by
how they make society "work"), 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 Tönnies and Max Weber, he focused not on what motivates the
actions of individuals (an approach associated with methodological individualism), but rather on
the study of social facts.
[edit] Social facts
Main article: Social fact
Durkheim's work revolved around the study of social facts, a term he coined to describe
phenomena that have an existence in and of themselves and are not bound to the actions of
individuals. Durkheim argued that social facts have, sui generis, an independent existence
greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that compose society. Being
exterior to the individual person, social facts may thus also exercise coercive power on the
various people composing society, as it can sometimes be observed in the case of formal laws
and regulations, but also in situations implying the presence of informal rules, such as religious
rituals or family norms.[19] Unlike the facts studied in natural sciences, a "social" fact thus refers
to a specific category of phenomena:
A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an
external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society,
while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.[3]
Such social facts are endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they may control
individual behaviors. According to Durkheim, these phenomena cannot be reduced to biological
or psychological grounds.[20] Hence even the most "individualistic" or "subjective" phenomena,
such as suicide, would be regarded by Durkheim as objective social facts. Individuals composing
society do not directly cause suicide: suicide, as a social fact, exists independently in society,
whether an individual person wants it or not. Whether a person "leaves" a society does not
change anything to the fact that this society will still contain suicides. Sociology's task thus
consists of discovering the qualities and characteristics of such social facts, which can be
discovered through a quantitative or experimental approach (Durkheim extensively relied on
statistics).[21]
[edit] Method and objectivity
In his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Durkheim expressed his will to establish a
method that would guarantee sociology's truly scientific character. One of the questions raised by
the author concerns the objectivity of the sociologist: how may one study an object that, from the
very beginning, conditions and relates to the observer? According to Durkheim, observation
must be as impartial and impersonal as possible, even though a "perfectly objective observation"
in this sense may never be attained. A social fact must always be studied according to its relation
with other social facts, never according to the individual who studies it. Sociology should
therefore privilege comparison rather than the study of singular independent facts.[22]
It has been noted, at times with disapproval and amazement by non-French social scientists, that
Durkheim traveled little and that, like many French scholars and the notable British
anthropologist Sir James Frazer, he never undertook any fieldwork. The vast information
Durkheim studied on the aboriginal tribes of Australia and New Guinea and on the Inuit was all
collected by other anthropologists, travelers, or missionaries.[23]
This was not due to provincialism or lack of attention to the concrete. Durkheim did not intend to
make venturesome and dogmatic generalizations while disregarding empirical observation. He
did, however, maintain that concrete observation in remote parts of the world does not always
lead to illuminating views on the past or even on the present. For him, facts had no intellectual
meaning unless they were grouped into types and laws. He claimed repeatedly that it is from a
construction erected on the inner nature of the real that knowledge of concrete reality is obtained,
a knowledge not perceived by observation of the facts from the outside. He thus constructed
concepts such as the sacred and totemism exactly in the same way that Karl Marx developed the
concept of class.[23]
[edit] Sociological studies
[edit] Education
This section does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed. (April 2009)

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:
1. 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.
2. To maintain social role
○ School is a society in miniature. It has a similar hierarchy, rules, expectations to
the "outside world." It trains young people to fulfill roles.
3. To maintain division of labour.
○ School sorts students into skill groups, encouraging students to take up
employment in fields best suited to their abilities.
[edit] 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).
[edit] 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,
distinguished as repressive versus restitutive 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.[24] 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, Paul Fauconnet and Paul Huvelin
also specialised in or contributed to the sociological study of law.
[edit] Suicide
In Suicide (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and
Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates.
According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant
society has low levels. There are at least two problems with this interpretation. First, Durkheim
took most of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli,[25]
who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers
found that the Protestant-Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-
speaking Europe and thus may always have been the spurious reflection of other factors.[26]
Despite its limitations, Durkheim's work on suicide has influenced proponents of control theory,
and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study.
Durkheim's study of suicide has been criticized as an example of the logical error termed the
ecological fallacy.[27][28] Indeed, Durkheim's conclusions about individual behaviour (e.g. suicide)
are based on aggregate statistics (the suicide rate among Protestants and Catholics). This type of
inference, explaining micro events in terms of macro properties, is often misleading, as is shown
by examples of Simpson's paradox.[29]
However, diverging views have contested whether Durkheim's work really contained an
ecological fallacy. Van Poppel and Day (1996) have advanced that differences in suicide rates
between Catholics and Protestants were explicable entirely in terms of how deaths were
categorized between the two social groups. For instance, while "sudden deaths" or "deaths from
ill-defined or unspecified cause" would often be recorded as suicides among Protestants, this
would not be the case for Catholics. Hence Durkheim would have committed an empirical rather
than logical error.[30] Some, such as Inkeles (1959),[31] Johnson (1965)[32] and Gibbs (1968),[33]
have claimed that Durkheim's only intent was to explain suicide sociologically within a holistic
perspective, emphasizing that "he intended his theory to explain variation among social
environments in the incidence of suicide, not the suicides of particular individuals."[34]
More recent authors such as Berk (2006) have also questioned the micro-macro relations
underlying Durkheim's work. For instance, Berk notices that
Durkheim speaks of a "collective current" that reflects the collective inclination flowing down
the channels of social organization. The intensity of the current determines the volume of
suicides (...) Introducing psychological [i.e. individual] variables such as depression, [which
could be seen as] an independent [non-social] cause of suicide, overlooks Durkheim's conception
that these variables are the ones most likely to be effected by the larger social forces and without
these forces suicide may not occur within such individuals.[35]
Durkheim stated that there are four types of suicide:
• Egoistic suicides are the result of a weakening of the bonds that normally integrate
individuals into the collectivity: in other words a breakdown or decrease of social
integration. Durkheim refers to this type of suicide as the result of "excessive
individuation", meaning that the individual becomes increasingly detached from other
members of his community. Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social
groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with
little social support or guidance, and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased
basis. An example Durkheim discovered was that of unmarried people, particularly
males, who, with less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals,
committed suicide at higher rates than married people.[36]
• Altruistic suicides occur in societies with high integration, where individual needs are
seen as less important than the society's needs as a whole. They thus occur on the
opposite integration scale as egoistic suicide.[36] As individual interest would not be
considered important, Durkheim stated that in an altruistic society there would be little
reason for people to commit suicide. He stated one exception, namely when the
individual is expected to kill themselves on behalf of society – a primary example being
the soldier in military service.
• Anomic suicides are the product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of
legitimate aspirations through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and
order on the individual conscience. This is symptomatic of a failure of economic
development and division of labour to produce Durkheim's organic solidarity. People do
not know where they fit in within their societies. Durkheim explains that this is a state of
moral disorder where man's desires are limitless and, thus, his disappointments are
infinite.
• Fatalistic suicides occur in overly oppressive societies, causing people to prefer to die
than to carry on living within their 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 and excessive regulation that prohibits them
from pursuing their desires.
These four types of suicide are based on the degrees of imbalance of two social forces: social
integration and moral regulation.[36] Durkheim noted the effects of various crises on social
aggregates – war, for example, leading to an increase in altruism, economic boom or disaster
contributing to anomie.[37]
[edit] Religion
This section does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed. (May 2008)

In classical sociology, the study of religion was primarily concerned with two broad issues:
1. How did religion contribute to the maintenance of social order?
2. 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. In his article,
'The Origin Of Beliefs' Émile 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
itmyths, 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 presented five elementary forms of religious life (The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life; Conclusion) to be found in all religions, from the more "primitive" to
Judeo/Christian/Moslem. These are: 1. Sacred/Profane division of the world; 2. Belief in
souls,spirits, mythical personalities 3. Belief in divinity, either local or multi-local 4.a negative or
ascetic cult within the religion 5. Rites of oblation, communion, imitation, commemoration or
expiation.
He argued that these five forms were communal experiences, thereby distinguishing religion
from magic.
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 and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral
community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." (The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, Book 1, Ch. 1)
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:
1. Disciplinary, forcing or administrating discipline
2. Cohesive, bringing people together, a strong bond
3. Vitalizing, to make livelier or vigorous, vitalise, boost spirit
4. Euphoric, a good feeling, happiness, confidence, well-being
[edit] See also
• Anomie
• Antipositivism
• Collective consciousness
• Collective effervescence
• Normlessness
• Organic solidarity
• Positivism
• Social fact
• Social research
• Social structure
• Structural functionalism
[edit] Selected works
• Montesquieu's contributions to the formation of social science (1892)
• The Division of Labour in Society (1893)
 • Rules of the Sociological Method (1895)
• On the Normality of Crime (1895)
• Suicide (1897)
• The Prohibition of Incest and its Origins (1897), published in L'AnnéeSociologique, vol.
1, pp. 1–70
• Sociology and its Scientific Domain (1900), translation of an Italian text entitled "La
sociologia e ilsuodominioscientifico"
• The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)
• Who Wanted War? (1914), in collaboration with Ernest Denis
• Germany Above All (1915)
Published posthumously:
• Education and Sociology (1922)
• Sociology and Philosophy (1924)
• Moral Education (1925)
• Socialism (1928)
[edit] References
This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has
insufficient inline citations.
Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2008)
1. ^ Kim, Sung Ho (2007). "Max Weber". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (August
24, 2007 entry) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/ (Retrieved 17-02-2010)
2. ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 1.
3. ^ ab Durkheim, Émile [1895] "The Rules of Sociological Method" 8th edition, trans.
Sarah A. Solovay and John M. Mueller, ed. George E. G. Catlin (1938, 1964 edition), pp.
13.
4. ^ Hayward, J.E.S. "Solidarist Syndicalism: Durkheim and DuGuit", Sociological Review,
Vol. 8 (1960)
5. ^ Thompson, Kenneth. 2002. Emile Durkheim. Routledge.
6. ^ "Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be
classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description." – Cf. Durkheim,
Émile [1892] "Montesquieu's Contribution to the Rise of Social Science" in Montesquieu
and Rousseau. Forerunners of Sociology, trans. Ralph Manheim (1960), p.9
7. ^ Simpson, George (Trans.) in Durkheim, Emile "The Division of Labour in Society"
The Free Press, New York, 1993. p. ix
8. ^ abc Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 1.
9. ^Strenski, Ivan. 1997. Durkheim and the Jews of France. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, Google Print pp. 1-2
10. ^ "While Durkheim did not become a Rabbi, he may have transformed his father's
philosophical and moral concerns into something new, his version of sociology." –
 Meštrović, Stjepan Gabriel (1993). Émile Durkheim and the reformation of sociology.
Rowman& Littlefield, Google Print, p. 37
11. ^ Pickering, W. S. F. 2001. "The Enigma of Durkheim's Jewishness", in Critical
Assessments of Leading Sociologists. British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, v. 1,
Google Print, p. 79
12. ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 2.
13. ^Bottomore, Tom, Robert Nisbet (1978). A History of Sociological Analysis. Basic
Books. pp. 8.
14. ^ Jones, Robert Alun and Rand J. Spiro. "Contextualization, cognitive flexibility, and
hypertext: the convergence of interpretive theory, cognitive psychology, and advanced
information technologies." in Susan Leigh Star (ed.) 1995. The Cultures of Computing.
Sociological Review Monograph Series, Google Print p. 149
15. ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3.
16. ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. x.
17. ^ Morrison, Ken (2006): Marx, Durkheim, Weber: formations of modern social thought.
Second edition. SAGE, p. 151.
18. ^ ab Morrison, Ken (2006), p. 152.
19. ^ Martin, Michael and Lee C. McIntyre. 1994. Readings in the Philosophy of Social
Science. Boston: MIT press, Google Print p. 433
20. ^ Martin, Michael and Lee C. McIntyre. 1994. Readings in the Philosophy of Social
Science. Boston: MIT press, Google Print p. 434
21. ^ "Suicide [...] is indeed the paradigm case of Durkheim's positivism: it remains the
exemplar of the sociological application of statistics." Hassard, John. 1995. Sociology
and Organization Theory: Positivism, Paradigms and Postmodernity. Cambridge
University Press (ISBN 0521484588) Google Print p. 15
22. ^ "Durkheim was the first to seriously use the comparative method correctly in the
scientific sense" Cf. Collins, Randall. 1975. Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory
Science. N.Y.: Academic Press, p. 529
23. ^ ab "Émile Durkheim." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
(Retrieved 14-06-2009)
24. ^Cotterrell, Roger (1999). Emile Durkheim: Law in A Moral Domain. Stanford
University Press. chs. 7–9.
25. ^ Stark, Rodney and William Sims Bainbridge. 1996. Religion, Deviance and Social
Control. Routledge, Google Print p. 32
26. ^ Pope, Whitney, and Nick Danigelis. 1981. "Sociology's One Law," Social Forces
60:496-514.
27. ^ Freedman, David A. 2002. The Ecological Fallacy. University of California. [1]
28. ^ H. C. Selvin. 1965. "Durkheim's Suicide:Further Thoughts on a Methodological
Classic", in R. A. Nisbet (ed.) Émile Durkheim pp. 113-136
29. ^Irzik, Gurol and Eric Meyer. "Causal Modeling: New Directions for Statistical
Explanation", Philosophy of Science, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), p. 509
 30. ^ Van Poppel, Frans, and Lincoln H. Day. "A Test of Durkheim's Theory of Suicide--
Without Committing the Ecological Fallacy". American Sociological Review, Vol. 61,
No. 3 (Jun., 1996), p. 500
31. ^ Cf. Inkeles, A. 1959. "Personality and Social Structure." pp. 249-76 in Sociological
Today, edited by R. K. Merton, L. Broom, and L. S. Cottrell. New York: Basic Books.
32. ^ Cf. Johnson, B. D. 1965. "Durkheim's One Cause of Suicide." American Sociological
Review, 30:875-86
33. ^ Cf. Gibbs, J. P. and W. T. Martin. 1958. "A Theory of Status Integration and Its
Relationship to Suicide." American Sociological, Review 23:14-147.
34. ^ Berk, Bernard B. "Macro-Micro Relationships in Durkheim's Analysis of Egoistic
Suicide". Sociological Theory, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), p. 60
35. ^ Berk, Bernard B. "Macro-Micro Relationships in Durkheim's Analysis of Egoistic
Suicide". Sociological Theory, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 78-79
36. ^ abc Thompson, Kenneth. 1982. Emile Durkheim. London: Tavistock Publications, pp.
109-111
37. ^Dohrenwend, Bruce P. "Egoism, Altruism, Anomie, and Fatalism: A Conceptual
Analysis of Durkheim's Types", American Sociological Review, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Aug.,
1959), p. 473
[edit] Further reading
• Bellah, Robert N. (ed.) (1973). Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, Selected
Writings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (ISBN 9780226173368).
• Cotterrell, Roger (1999). Emile Durkheim: Law in a Moral Domain. Edinburgh
University Press / Stanford University Press (ISBN 0804738084, ISBN 9780804738088).
• Cotterrell, Roger (ed.) (2010). Emile Durkheim: Justice, Morality and Politics.Ashgate
(ISBN 9780754627111).
• Douglas, Jack D. (1973). The Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton University Press
(ISBN 978-0-691-02812-5).
• Eitzen, Stanley D. and Maxine Baca Zinn (1997). Social Problems (11th ed.). Needham
Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon (ISBN 0205547966).
• Giddens, Anthony (ed.) (1972). Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings. London: Cambridge
University Press (ISBN 0521097126, ISBN 978-0521097123).
• Giddens, Anthony (ed.) (1986). Durkheim on Politics and the State. Cambridge: Polity
Press (ISBN 0-7456-0131-6).
• Henslin, James M. (1996). Essentials of Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach.
Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon (ISBN 0205174809, ISBN 9780205174805).
• Jones, Susan Stedman (2001). Durkheim Reconsidered. Polity (ISBN 074561616X, ISBN
978-0745616162).
• Lemert, Charles (2006). Durkheim's Ghosts: Cultural Logics and Social Things.
Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0521842662, ISBN 9780521842662).
 • Lockwood, David (1992). Solidarity and Schism: "The Problem of Disorder" in
Durkheimian and Marxist Sociology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (ISBN 0198277172, ISBN
978-0198277170).
• Lukes, Steven (1985). Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, a Historical and Critical
Study. Stanford University Press (ISBN 0804712832, ISBN 9780804712835).
• Mestrovic, Stjepan (1988). Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology. Rowan &
Littlefield. (ISBN 0847678679)
• Pickering, W. S. F. (2009). Durkheim's Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories, The
James Clarke & Co (ISBN 9780227172971).
• Pickering, W. S. F. (ed.) (1975). Durkheim on Religion, Routledge&Kegan Paul (ISBN
0-7100-8108-1).
• Pickering, W. S. F. (ed.) (1979). Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education,
Routledge&Kegan Paul (ISBN 0-7100-0321-8).
• Siegel, Larry J (2007). Criminology: Theories, Patterns, and Typologies (7th ed.)
Wadsworth/Thomson Learning (ISBN 049500572X, ISBN 9780495005728).
• Tekiner, Deniz (2002). "German Idealist Foundations of Durkheim's Sociology and
Teleology of Knowledge", Theory and Science, III, 1, Online publication.
• Thompson, Kenneth (2002). Emile Durkheim (2nd ed.) Routledge (ISBN 0415285305,
ISBN 9780415285308).
[edit] External links
Find more about Émile Durkheim on Wikipedia's sister projects:

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About Durkheim:
• The Durkheim pages (University of Chicago)
• Bibliography on Durkheim (McMaster University)
• Annotated bibliography on Durkheim and Religion (University of North Carolina)
• Review material for studying Émile Durkheim
Online works:
• Moral Education
• Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (collection of lectures)
• Primitive Classification (with Marcel Mauss)
• Pragmatism and Sociology (collection of lectures)
• The Evolution of Educational Thought (selected writings)
• For all of Durkheim's works in French, including many unpublished essays, go to:
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/Durkheim_emile/durkheim.html
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Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim"

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