Émile Durkheim

Abstract

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) played a central role in the development of a theoretically robust empirical sociology in France. Engaged by some of the major social, political and intellectual concerns of his times, Durkheim explored topics as diverse as industrialization, socialism, crime, suicide, religion, morality, the family, education, professional ethics, and sociological method. Building on the work of his theoretical predecessors (e.g., Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer), a significant challenge Durkheim took up was the development of appropriate methodological protocols for the systematic study of society. His erudite writings were animated by his enduring passion to uncover and explore the deeply social foundations of our human existence.Durkheim's tireless intellectual labors were pivotal to sociology's establishment as an institutionally legitimized and productive academic discipline. This was evident by the central role he played in the successful establishment of the discipline's first major academic journal in France, L'Année Sociologique in 1898, and by his earning of the first post in France to bear the name "sociology." As Edward Tiryakian aptly remarks, "before Durkheim sociology was a provocative idea; by his professional endeavors it became an established social fact" (Tiryakian 2009: 11).Durkheim was adamant that there was a responsibility to develop sociology in ways that could illuminate the complex nature of social reality on its own terms. He dissented from the reigning position that sociology be corralled into a domain of study limited by the psychologistic assumption, shared by many European thinkers since the seventeenth century, that society is merely the sum total of individuals. Durkheim hints that sociology was, in fact, the master discipline within the social sciences: 9Émile Durkheim TARA MILBRANDT AND FRANK PEARCE 1 tara milbrandt and frank pearce of teachers who came to have a formative influence on his intellectual development. These included the historian Fustel de Coulanges and the neo-Kantian philosopher Émile Boutroux. He became strongly influenced by the writings of Charles Renouvier, another neo-Kantian philosopher, whose writings he was introduced to during his university studies in Paris.It is an understatement to say that Durkheim belonged to an extremely influential generation of students. Many of his classmates at L'École Normale, including Henri Bergson and Jean Jaurès (who became a close friend), would go on to become influential and leading intellectual figures. Within this exceptional context, it is notable that Durkheim was considered almost excessive in his studiousness and seriousness, even earning the nickname "the metaphysician" (Coser 1977) amongst his peers. Though at the end of his third year he scored abysmally (second from the bottom) on a national test, Durkheim came to be well respected by those professors with whom he became well acquainted. In a letter of reference dated October 14, 1882, Fustel de Coulanges described Durkheim ...

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: Discursive Monument, Symbolic Feast

“…spread despair, increased rates of suicide, sclerotic democratic and state forms, and the uneven development of educational institutions (Milbrandt and Pearce 2011;Fournier 2013). These conditions impeded the necessary development of plural bases of a democratic-communicative infrastructure necessary to adequate conscientious considerations of social justice, i.e., a concern with the well-being of society as a whole, which would require the full inclusion of all social groups.…”

“…Most significantly, they are reminders of the salience of the questions Durkheim posed concerning the very constitution of social life (cf. Milbrandt and Pearce 2011;Ramp 2010;Datta 2008).…”

“An Army of Civil Servants”:MaxWeber andÉmileDurkheim on Socialism

“…Mommsen ), it is much more difficult to claim Durkheim differed markedly from Weber in class position. Indeed, Durkheim has been termed a “staunch bourgeois democratic republican” (Milibrandt and Pearce : 241). Furthermore, as we have seen, Durkheim's approval of socialism was based upon an explicit rejection of its working class character.…”