Durkheim's Project

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) was not the first thinker to use the word sociologie — Auguste Comte had coined it in the 1830s, and Herbert Spencer had given it a systematic but speculative treatment — but Durkheim was the thinker who built the institutional and methodological infrastructure that made sociology a recognized academic discipline in the twentieth century (Lukes 1973, pp. 1-8). The stakes of that achievement are worth specifying at the outset: before Durkheim, the study of society was divided among political economy, moral philosophy, history, and the emerging discipline of psychology, none of which treated social phenomena as an autonomous object of scientific investigation. Durkheim's argument was that they were wrong to do so, and that a proper science of society required the identification of a distinctive class of facts — social facts — that could not be reduced to the subject matter of any adjacent discipline.

Durkheim's biographical trajectory is inseparable from this institutional ambition. Born in Épinal, Lorraine, to a family of rabbis, he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1879 in the same cohort as Henri Bergson and Jean Jaurès (Lukes 1973, pp. 39-44). After teaching at provincial lycées and a study period in Germany, he was appointed in 1887 to a chair of social science and pedagogy at the University of Bordeaux — the first such chair in France. In 1902 he moved to the Sorbonne, where he held the chair of the science of education, and where his influence on French academic and educational institutions reached its maximum (Lukes 1973, pp. 104-112). From 1898 until his death, he edited L'Année Sociologique, the journal that trained and networked the first generation of French sociologists — including Marcel Mauss, Maurice Halbwachs, and Célestin Bouglé — and that effectively defined the research program of Durkheimian sociology (Collins 1988, pp. 185-190).

The intellectual setting of Durkheim's project is the French Third Republic after 1870 — a secular, anticlerical, republican regime struggling to consolidate itself against both monarchist-Catholic opposition and revolutionary socialism. The republic's great cultural project was the construction of a secular civic morality to replace the moral authority of the Church, and Durkheim's work was unusually aligned with this project (Bellah 1973, pp. ix-xiv). He believed, and stated repeatedly, that sociology could clarify the moral conditions of social cohesion in modern industrial society, and that such clarification was both scientifically valid and practically urgent (Durkheim 1893, preface to first edition). Sociology was, for Durkheim, the science that the Third Republic needed.

The competition that Durkheim faced was real. Psychology — in the hands of Alfred Binet and later Pierre Janet — was a rising discipline with institutional momentum, and its claim was that social phenomena were ultimately combinations of individual mental states and could be explained by psychological laws. Political economy, in the classical liberal tradition, treated society as the aggregation of utility-maximizing individuals. History described the particular and refused theoretical generalization. For sociology to exist as something more than a repackaging of these fields, Durkheim argued, it had to identify its own object of study and its own mode of explanation, and to do so in terms precise enough to be defended against reductive challenges (Giddens 1972, pp. 1-15).

This is the context in which to read The Rules of Sociological Method (1895). The book is often taught as a methodological treatise — a manual of research procedure — but it is more accurately read as a disciplinary manifesto: an argument that sociology exists as a science because it has a distinctive object (social facts), a distinctive rule for treating that object (as things, comme choses), and a distinctive mode of explanation (social facts by antecedent social facts). The three theses are inseparable, and together they constitute what the discipline has ever since called Durkheim's methodological position (Alexander 1982, pp. 216-224).