Durkheim, Émile

Durk·heim (dûrkʹhīm, dür-kĕmʹ), Émile. 1858-1917.

French social scientist and a founder of sociology who is known for his study of social values and alienation. His important works include The Rules of Sociological Method (1895).

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born April 1858, Épinal, France

died Nov. 15, 1917, Paris

French social scientist.

He developed a vigorous methodology combining empirical research with sociological theory and is widely regarded as the founder of the French school of sociology. Durkheim was greatly influenced by philosopher Auguste Comte, and his sociological reflections, never remote from the moral philosophy he was schooled in, were first expressed in The Division of Labor in Society (1893) and Suicide (1897). In his view, ethical and social structures were endangered by technology and mechanization. The division of labour produced alienation among workers, and the increased prosperity of the late 19th century generated greed and passions that threatened the equilibrium of society. Durkheim drew attention to anomie, or social disconnectedness, and studied suicide as a decision to renounce life. Following the Dreyfus affair, he came to regard education and religion as the most potent means of reforming humanity and molding new social institutions. His Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915) is an anthropological study

centring largely on totemism

of the origins and functions of religion, which Durkheim saw as expressing the collective conscience of a society and producing social solidarity. He also wrote influential works on sociological method. He taught at the Universities of Bordeaux (1887–1902) and Paris (1902–17). See also Marcel Mauss.

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▪ French social scientist

Introduction

born April 15, 1858, Épinal, France

died Nov. 15, 1917, Paris

      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 (Jaurès, Jean), 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 (Wundt, Wilhelm), 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 (Frazer, Sir James George), 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.

      This was not due to provincialism or lack of attention to the concrete. Durkheim did not resemble the French philosopher Auguste Comte (Comte, Auguste) 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 (sacred) and totemism exactly in the same way that Karl Marx (Marx, Karl) 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 1880s, 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 (Paris, Commune of), 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 (Renan, Ernest) and Hippolyte Taine (Taine, Hippolyte) 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 (norm). Material prosperity set free greed and passions that threatened the equilibrium (social 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.

Fame and the effect of the Dreyfus affair

      These early volumes, and the one in which he formulated with scientific rigour the rules of his sociological method, Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (1895; The Rules of Sociological Method), brought Durkheim fame and influence. But the new science of sociology frightened timid souls and conservative philosophers, and he had to endure many attacks. In addition, the Dreyfus affair—resulting from the false charge against a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus (Dreyfus, Alfred), of spying for the Germans—erupted in the last years of the century, and the slurs or outright insults aimed at Jews that accompanied it opened Durkheim's eyes to the latent hatred and passionate feuds hitherto concealed under the varnish of civilization. He took an active part in the campaign to exonerate Dreyfus. Perhaps as a result, Durkheim was not elected to the Institut de France, although his stature as a thinker suggests that he should have been named to that prestigious learned society. He was, however, appointed to the University of Paris in 1902 and was made a full professor there in 1906.

      More and more, Durkheim's thought became concerned with education and religion as the two most potent means of reforming humanity or of molding the new institutions required by the deep structural changes in society. His colleagues admired Durkheim's zeal on behalf of educational reform. His efforts included participating in numerous committees to prepare new curriculums and methods; working to enliven the teaching of philosophy, which too long had dwelt on generalities; and attempting to teach teachers how to teach.

      A series of courses that he had given at Bordeaux on the subject of L'Évolution pédagogique en France (“Pedagogical Evolution in France”) was published posthumously in 1938; it remains one of the best informed and most impartial books on French education. The other important work of Durkheim's later years, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912; The Elementary Forms of Religious Life), dealt with the totemic system in Australia. The author, despite his own agnosticism, evinced a sympathetic understanding of religion in all its stages yet ultimately subordinated religion to the service of society by concluding that religion's primary function was to maintain the social order. French conservatives—who in the years preceding World War I turned against the Sorbonne, which they charged was unduly swayed by the prestige of German scholarship—railed at Durkheim, who, they thought, was influenced by the German urge to systematize, thereby making a fetish of society and a religion of sociology.

      In fact, Durkheim did not make an idol of sociology as did the positivists schooled by Comte, nor was he a “functionalist (functionalism)” who explained every social phenomenon by its usefulness in maintaining the existence and equilibrium of a social organism. He did, however, endeavour to formulate a positive social science that might direct people's behaviour toward greater solidarity.

      The outbreak of World War I came as a cruel blow to him. For many years he had expended too much energy on teaching, on writing, on outlining plans for reform, and on ceaselessly feeding the enthusiasm of his disciples, and eventually his heart had been affected. His gaunt and nervous appearance filled his colleagues with foreboding. The whole of French sociology, then in full bloom thanks to him, seemed to be his responsibility.

Death and legacy

      The breaking point came when his only son was killed in 1916, while fighting on the Balkan front. Durkheim stoically attempted to hide his sorrow, but the loss, coming on top of insults by nationalists who denounced him as a professor of “apparently German extraction” who taught a “foreign” discipline at the Sorbonne, was too much to bear. He died in November 1917.

      Durkheim left behind him a brilliant school of researchers. He had never been a tyrannical master; he had encouraged his disciples to go farther than himself and to contradict him if need be. His nephew, Marcel Mauss (Mauss, Marcel), who held the chair of sociology at the Collège de France, was less systematic than Durkheim and paid greater attention to symbolism as an unconscious activity of the mind. Social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss, Claude) also occupied the same chair of sociology and resembled Durkheim in the way he combined reasoning with intensity of feeling, yet, unlike Durkheim, he went on to become a leading proponent of structuralism.

      Durkheim's influence extended beyond the social sciences (social science). Through him, sociology became a seminal discipline in France that broadened and transformed the study of law, economics, Chinese institutions, linguistics, ethnology, art history, and history.

Henri M. Peyre

Additional Reading

Among the most comprehensive treatments of Durkheim and his works is Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work (1972, reprinted 1992). Anthony Giddens, Émile Durkheim (1978), is an incisive examination of the subject's life and major works. Harry Alpert, Émile Durkheim and His Sociology (1939, reissued 1993), offers, in its first section, a good account of Durkheim's life. Talcott Parsons, “Émile Durkheim,” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 4 (1968, reprinted 1972), pp. 311–320, is clear and succinct. A full chapter on Durkheim's life may be found in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), Émile Durkheim, 1858–1917: A Collection of Essays with Translations and a Bibliography (1960, reprinted 1979; also reissued as Émile Durkheim et al.: Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, 1964). Gianfranco Poggi, Durkheim (2000); and Mustafa Emirbayer (ed.), Émile Durkheim: Sociologist of Modernity (2003), offer more-recent assessments of Durkheim's works.

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