Durkheim, ÉMile

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Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the son and grandson of rabbis, was born in the Alsatian town of Épinal, Vosges, France, on April 15. In 1887 he married Louise Julie Dreyfus, and the death of their son in World War I hastened Durkheim's own premature end in Paris on November 15.

In 1870, when Durkheim was twelve, German troops occupied his home during the Franco-Prussian War, forcing him to confront a normless, anomic (unstable) social environment and loss of collective well-being that was later to figure as a theme in his sociological research. He attended the École Normale Superieure (1879–1882), France's best teachers' college, and formed an early friendship with Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), later a leading socialist, which broadened Durkheim's academic and political interests to include philosophy and political action. In 1887 he was named professor at the University of Bordeaux, where he became the first person to teach social sciences in France, and from which he moved to the University of Paris in 1902. As a youth he had been schooled in the traditional education of male Jews, but when still young found himself attracted to Catholic mysticism, eventually dispensing with formal religion altogether. Nevertheless, a deeply religious and ethically alert sensibility shaped virtually all his mature scholarship, though skillfully recast in secular, scientific terms.

Durkheim's central sociological argument, which extends from his earliest to his final works, holds that a scientifically crafted theory of societal morality could prevent the sort of "anomie" that he thought afflicted citizens within France's Third Republic (1870–1940), and that extended as well to all rapidly industrializing nations. He treated this topic in his dissertation, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), a book with now almost biblical significance in sociology. Durkheim posed this question: How might morally binding norms be promulgated within a secularized and diversified society? His answer was that such norms would have to be shaped through professional groups, each of which would be responsible for guiding and monitoring the behavior of its members.

Other important works include Suicide (1897), which demonstrates that killing oneself is as much a sociological as a psychological event, and The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), which points to the "social fact" as the foundation of social research, thus separating sociology from the work of the other social sciences. The book he regarded his masterpiece, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), is an exhaustive study of aboriginal religious practices compared with their modern progenies. With his nephew Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), Durkheim also cowrote Primitive Classification (1903), an innovative study in what came to be called "the sociology of knowledge." Highlighting as examples Australian aboriginals, the Zuni, Sioux, and Chinese, the two authors showed that the contrasting ways different societies arrange knowledge is a direct reflection of their particular forms of social organization; that is, they concluded, mental categories repeat social configurations. This was a direct attack on conventional epistemology, which held that all humans comprehend and analyze their environment in roughly the same way.

What gives Durkheim a unique status in the living tradition of classical social theory is his ability to blend science with ethics, as part of his lifelong effort to create what he called a "science of morality." To twenty-first-century ears this seems a quixotic venture, because science and ethical maxims have been severed one from the other (at least since Max Weber wrote "Science as a Vocation" in 1917, if not before), particularly among researchers whose principal allegiance is to scientific procedure. Yet even in his Rules of Sociological Method (still a key text for apprentice sociologists), he showed that identifying "social facts" is never an end in itself, but rather a realist propaedeutic (preparatory study) to understanding how norms operate in various societies, and how deviant behavior is curtailed or controlled.

In a famous essay, "The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions," Durkheim invoked "the old formula homo duplex," explaining that "Far from being simple, our inner life has something that is like a double center of gravity. On the one hand is our individuality—and more particularly, our body in which it is based; on the other is everything that is in us that expresses something other than ourselves" (1973 [1914], p. 152; emphases added). Durkheim's deeply ambivalent relation to "pure" science originates in his divided loyalties as expressed in this essay: On one side stands the scientist looking for "laws" of social life; on the other is the ethicist and philosopher of culture, whose main goal is to identify, albeit via strictly scientific methods, the "something other" that encourages people to lay aside their natural egocentricity and embrace values that often conflict with their own best, individualized interests.

From his earliest work in Division of Labor and Suicide up through his masterly Elementary Forms, Durkheim always sang the praises of modern science and insisted that sociology be imbued with rigorous positivism. Yet never far away from his gaze were the "larger questions" that had troubled ethicists since Plato and Confucius, culminating in Leo Tolstoy's famous question: "What constitutes a life worth living?" To this pressing query, science has no answer, as Durkheim well knew.

In addition to his virtuosic sociological research, Durkheim also established the first scholarly journal of sociology in France, trained an entire generation of anthropologists and sociologists (many of them, along with his son, slaughtered in World War I), and wrote a posthumously published history of education in France that remains a standard work. Given all these scholarly achievements, many argue that Durkheim is indeed the father of modern sociology and the first to lay out in exact terms how the sociological viewpoint differs from that of its allied disciplines.

Communitarianism;; French Perspectives;; Parsons, Talcott;; Professions and Professionalism;; Sociological Ethics.

Durkheim, Émile. (1915 [1912]). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain. London: Allen and Unwin.

Durkheim, Émile. (1933 [1893]). The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson. New York: Free Press.

Durkheim, Émile. (1938 [1895]). The Rules of Sociological Method, 8th edition, trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller, and ed. George E. G. Catlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Durkheim, Émile. (1951 [1897]). Suicide, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Durkheim, Émile. (1973 [1914]). "The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions." In Émile Durkheim on Morality and Society, ed. Robert Bellah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Durkheim, Émile, and Marcel Mauss. (1963 [1903]). Primitive Classification, trans. and ed. Rodney Needham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LaCapra, Dominick. (1972). Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lukes, Steven. (1972). Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Poggi, Gianfranco. (2000). Durkheim. New York: Oxford University Press.

Weber, Max. (1917). "Science as a Vocation." In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press (1946). Available from http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/ Weber/scivoc.html.

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