Durkheim: Social Facts, Solidarity, and Anomie

Emile Durkheim, born in Epinal, France in 1858, is widely regarded as the founder of academic sociology, having established the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895 and the first major sociological journal, L'Annee sociologique, in 1898. Durkheim's central ambition was to establish sociology as a rigorous science with its own distinct subject matter, irreducible to biology, psychology, or philosophy. In The Rules of Sociological Method, published in 1895, Durkheim defined sociology's subject matter as social facts: ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that are external to the individual and exercise a coercive power over individual behavior.

Social facts exist at the level of the collective, not the individual. They include legal codes, moral norms, religious beliefs, financial systems, language, and professional practices. What makes them social facts rather than merely individual preferences is that they exist independently of any particular individual, they constrain behavior through sanctions and internalization, and they can be studied objectively using empirical methods. Durkheim insisted that social facts must be explained by other social facts, not by reducing them to individual psychology.

The suicide rate of a society, for example, is a social fact that remains relatively stable year after year despite the constant turnover of individuals who compose the society. It cannot be explained by individual mental states because it is a property of the society, not of any individual. Durkheim also distinguished between normal and pathological social facts. A social fact is normal when it is found in the average society of a given type at a given phase of development. Crime, for example, is a normal social fact because it is found in all societies; only a society of saints, in which every deviation from the norm was severely punished, could eliminate crime, and such a society would be pathologically rigid.

A certain level of deviance is not only normal but functional, as it reinforces collective sentiments by marking the boundaries of acceptable behavior and can serve as a source of social innovation.