Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was born in Epinal, in the Lorraine region of France, into an orthodox Jewish family of rabbis, but became an agnostic. He can be considered the founder of sociology as a formal discipline: he became the first Professor of Sociology in Paris (1913). Works: *Division of Labour in Society (1893, his first book), Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life* (1912), in which he developed a secular understanding of religion. He founded France's first social science journal.

Society as a moral community. For Durkheim, society existed as a moral community over and above the individual. The ties binding people in groups (social solidarities) press individuals to conform, limiting variation in behaviour so that it follows patterns.

• By observing these patterns, we can identify the norms and codes that govern them. So 'invisible' things like ideas, norms and values can be studied empirically.
• He wrote that moral facts are phenomena like others: they can be observed, described, classified, and explained by laws. Moral codes reflect particular social conditions, so a morality suited to one society may not suit another. This made sociology akin to the natural sciences.

Durkheim's vision of sociology had two features:

• Its subject is the 'emergent' level of collective life, where phenomena like religion, family, friendship or patriotism appear: a complex whole larger than, and different from, its parts. Teams, parties, gangs, religious communities and nations belong to a different level of reality from individuals.
• It must be empirical, even though social phenomena are abstract. We cannot 'see' a whole community the way we see a tree; we see only individuals. But social facts are indirectly observable through patterns of behaviour. In Suicide, each case was individual, but the suicide rate across a whole community was a social fact.

Social facts are like things: external to the individual, yet constraining behaviour; collective representations that emerge from people's association; general, not particular to one person. Institutions like law, education and religion, and shared beliefs, feelings and practices, are social facts.

Mechanical and organic solidarity (Division of Labour in Society):

• Mechanical solidarity belongs to primitive societies with small populations: based on similarity; self-sufficient groups whose members do similar work; personal ties. Such societies tolerate little difference and use repressive laws that harshly punish any deviation, a kind of collective revenge, because the individual is submerged in the community.
• Organic solidarity belongs to modern societies with large populations: based on heterogeneity and interdependence; most relationships are impersonal and governed by institutions and rules. Its laws are restitutive: they aim to repair or correct the wrong done. Individuals gain autonomy, join voluntary associations for specific goals, and have many identities and roles.
• Example (new): in a village where everyone farms, someone breaking a community rule might be shunned or harshly punished (repressive); in a city, a shop that sells a faulty phone is ordered by a consumer court to refund or replace it (restitutive).