EMILE DURKHEIM

During the early academic ca­reer of the Frenchman Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), France was in the throes of great political and religious up­heaval. Anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews) was being ex­pressed, along with ill feeling among other religions, as well. Durkheim, himself Jewish, was fascinared by how the public degradation of Jews by non-Jews seemed to calm and unify a large segment of the divided French public. Durkheim later wrote that public rituals have a spe­cial purpose in society, creating social solidarity, referring to the bonds that link the members of a group. Some of Durkheim's most significant works explore the question of what forces hold society together and make it stable.

Emile Durkheim established the significance of society as something larger than the sum of its parts. Social facts stern from society and have profound influence on the lives of people within society.

According to Durkheim, people in society are glued together by belief systems (Durkheim 1912/1947). The. rituals of religion and other institutions symbolize and re­inforce the sense of belonging that insiders in a society or group feel. Public ceremonies create a bond between peo­ple in a social unit. Drawing on this insight, Durkheim made a creative leap that helps explain social deviance. Durkheim argued that deviance has a purpose in society— that by labeling some people as deviant, the society con­firms a sense of normalcy and strengthens social solidarity Identifying some behaviors as deviant gives definition to nondeviant or "normal" behaviors. Durkheim thought that deviance, like public rituals, sustains moral cohesion in society. In this sense, society actually creates deviance-— a type of behavior that it claims to want to eliminate,

Durkheim viewed society as an entity larger than the sum of its parts. He described this as society mi generis ("thing in itself"), meaning that society is a sub­ject to be studied separate from the sum of the individu­als who compose it. Society is external to individuals, yet its existence is internalized in people's minds—that is, people come to believe what society expects them to be­lieve. Durkheim conceived of society as an integrated whole—each part contributing to the overall stability of the system. His work is the basis for functionalism, an im­portant theoretical perspective that we will return to later in this chapter.

One contribution from Durkheim was his conceptualization of the social. Durkheim conceptualized social facts as those social patterns that are external to individ­uals. Things such as customs and social values exist out­side individuals, whereas psychological drives and moti­vation exist inside people. Social facts, therefore, are not to be explained by biology or psychology, but are the proper subject of sociology; they are its reason for being. A striking illustration of this principle was Durkheim's Study of suicide (Durkheim 1897/1951). He analyzed rates of suicide in a society, as opposed to looking at in­dividual (psychological) causes of suicide. He showed that suicide rates varied according to how clear the norms and customs of the society were, whether the norms and customs were consistent with each other and noncontradictory. Where norms were either grossly unclear or con-rradictoty, a condition that he called anomie ("normlessness") existed, and the suicide rates were higher in such societies or such parts of a society. It is important to note that this condition was "external," thus outside of each individual taken singly. In this sense such a condition is truly societal.

Durkheim held that social facts, though they exist outside individuals, nonetheless pose constraints on in­dividual behavior. Durkheim's major contribution was the discovery of the social basis of human behavior. He proposed that a social system could be known through the discovery and analysis of social facts and that adding со the fund of reliable social facts was the central task of the sociologist (Bellah 1У73; Coser 1977; Durkheim 1938/1950).