Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), along with Marx and Weber, was one of the great founding fathers of modern social science. He took as his main task the explanation of the changes that overcame societies with the development of the Industrial Revolution and the change from traditional or feudal society to the sort of liberal capitalism current in most developed countries today. His work covered an enormous range, encompassing sociological theory, research methodology, and empirical observation. Apart from Marxists, it is probable that the vast majority of modern sociologists would see at least something of Durkheim in their own intellectual approach. Although he wrote little that was directly and obviously about politics, most of what he has to say is suffused with political importance. Methodologically his position was that individual motivations and feelings were irrelevant to the social scientist, because society was something with a real existence of its own, over and above the individual members who were largely formed by the social structure.
Thus social facts were to be explained by other social facts, not by investigating individual human experiences.
A good example of this was his classic study of suicide in which suicide rates in various areas were explained by, inter alia, the rates of affiliation to different religions. Thus a highly personal act, self-slaughter, was turned into social fact, and explained in a structural manner. Perhaps his most important work, as far as political implications go, was his study of the breakdown of social regulation and normative order in modern capitalist societies characterized by a high degree of division of labour. This led both to his investigation of anomie (with important similarities to Marx’s idea of alienation), and to the development of a theory of corporatist politics which was taken over and misused by later fascist dictatorships. He is probably the most important precursor of functionalist social theory, which enjoyed a great influence in post-war social science, and he has stamped modern French social science deeply with his views and methodology. There are probably few main line sociologists nowadays influenced by Durkheim rather than his rival Max Weber, but Durkheim’s influence is felt increasingly strongly in cultural studies.
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