Émile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim (born April 15, 1858, Épinal, France—died November 15, 1917, Paris) was a French social scientist who developed a vigorous methodology combining empirical research with sociological theory. He is widely regarded as the founder of the French school of sociology.

Childhood and education

Durkheim was born into a Jewish family of very modest means, and it was taken for granted that he would become a rabbi, like his father. The death of his father before Durkheim was 20, however, burdened him with heavy responsibilities. As early as his late teens Durkheim became convinced that effort and even sorrow are more conducive to the spiritual progress of the individual than pleasure or joy. He became a gravely disciplined young man.

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’s religious faith had vanished by then, and his thought had become altogether secular but with a strong bent toward moral reform. Like a number of French philosophers during the Third Republic, Durkheim looked to science and in particular to social science and to profound educational reform as the means to avoid the perils of social disconnectedness, or “anomie,” as he was to call that condition in which norms for conduct were either absent, weak, or conflicting.

He 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.

Fretting at the conventionality of formal examinations, Durkheim passed the last competitive examination in 1882 but without the brilliance that his friends had predicted for him. He then accepted a series of provincial assignments as a teacher of philosophy at the state secondary schools of Sens, Saint-Quentin, and Troyes between 1882 and 1887. In 1885–86 he took a year’s leave of absence to pursue research in Germany, where he was impressed by Wilhelm Wundt, a pioneering experimental psychologist. In 1887 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Bordeaux, where he subsequently became a professor and taught social philosophy until 1902. He then moved to the University of Paris, where he wrote some of his most important works and influenced a generation of scholars.

Analytic methods

Durkheim was familiar with several foreign languages and reviewed academic papers in German, English, and Italian at length for L’Année sociologique, the journal he founded in 1896. It has been noted, however, 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 tribes of Australia and New Guinea and on the Eskimos was all collected by other anthropologists, travelers, or missionaries.

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This was not due to provincialism or lack of attention to the concrete. Durkheim did not resemble the French philosopher Auguste Comte in making 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. In truth, Durkheim’s vital interest did not lie in the study for its own sake of so-called primitive tribes but rather in the light such a study might throw on the present.

The outward events of his life as an intellectual and as a scholar may appear undramatic. Still, much of what he thought and wrote stemmed from the events that he witnessed in his formative years, in the 1870s and ’80s, and in the earnest concern he took in them.

The Second Empire, which collapsed in the 1870 defeat of the French at the hands of Germany, had signified an era of levity and dissipation to the young scholar. France, with the support of many of its liberal and intellectual elements, had plunged headlong into a war for which it was unprepared; its leaders proved incapable. The left-wing Commune of Paris, which took over the French capital in 1871, led to senseless destruction, which appeared to Durkheim’s generation, in retrospect, as evidence of the alienation of the working classes from capitalist society.

The bloody repression that followed the Commune was taken as further evidence of the ruthlessness of capitalism and of the selfishness of the frightened bourgeoisie. Later, the crisis of 1886 over Georges Boulanger, the minister of war who demanded a centralist government to execute a policy of revenge against Germany, was one of several events that testified to the resurgence of nationalism, soon to be accompanied by anti-Semitism. Such major French thinkers of the older generation as Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine interrupted their historical and philosophical works after 1871 to analyze those evils and to offer remedies.

Durkheim was one of several young philosophers and scholars, fresh from their École Normale training, who became convinced that progress was not the necessary consequence of science and technology, that it could not be represented by an ascending curve, and that complacent optimism could not be justified. He perceived around him the prevalence of anomie, a personal sense of rootlessness fostered by the absence of social norms. Material prosperity set free greed and passions that threatened the equilibrium of society.

These sources of Durkheim’s sociological reflections, never remote from moral philosophy, were first expressed in his very important doctoral thesis, De la division du travail social (1893; The Division of Labour in Society), and in Le Suicide (1897; Suicide). In Durkheim’s view, ethical and social structures were being endangered by the advent of technology and mechanization. He believed that societies with undifferentiated labour (i.e., primitive societies) exhibited mechanical solidarity, while societies with a high division of labour, or increased specialization (i.e., modern societies), exhibited organic solidarity. The division of labour rendered workers more alien to one another and yet more dependent upon one another; specialization meant that no individual labourer would build a product on his or her own.

Durkheim’s 1897 study of suicide was based on his observation that suicide appeared to be less frequent where the individual was closely integrated into a society; in other words, those lacking a strong social identification would be more susceptible to suicide. Thus, the apparently purely individual decision to renounce life could be explained through social forces.