Durkheim and the Study of Society

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) was the first academic sociologist in France and one of the founders of the discipline worldwide. Appointed to a chair of sociology at Bordeaux in 1887 and then at the Sorbonne in 1902, he fought throughout his career to establish sociology as an autonomous science with its own object, its own methods, and its own standards of evidence. His landmark methodological work, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), laid out the argument.

The object of sociology, Durkheim insisted, is the social fact (fait social): ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that (1) are external to the individual — they pre-exist any given person's birth and persist after her death; (2) exercise constraint over the individual — one is rewarded for conformity and punished for deviation; and (3) are general across the collective. Language, currency, law, moral norms, architectural conventions, family forms — all are social facts in this sense. The individual inherits them; they structure what she can think, say, and do; and she cannot unilaterally abolish them.

Durkheim's controversial methodological claim was that social facts must be explained by other social facts, not reduced to individual psychology or biology. 'Whenever a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false.' He called this the principle of sociological realism: society is a reality sui generis (of its own kind), emergent from but not reducible to the individuals who compose it. A crowd is more than the sum of its members; a language is more than the sum of its speakers; a religion is more than the sum of its believers.

The position drew immediate criticism. Methodological individualists (then and now) object that only individuals act, think, and feel; talk of 'society' doing anything is metaphor at best. Durkheim's response was empirical: social facts behave with statistical regularity independent of the individuals who happen to instantiate them. Rates of marriage, birth, divorce, crime, and suicide vary systematically across countries and periods in ways individual psychology alone cannot explain. The project of sociology, for Durkheim, was to document these regularities and explain them in terms of the social structures that produce them.