Émile Durkheim: The Pathologies of the Social Order

France in the late nineteenth century

Like Comte's time, experienced major upheavals and sharp political divisions: the Franco-Prussian War's defeat, the Paris Commune (1871), which killed 20,000 workers, the fall and capture of Emperor Napoleon III (Napoleon I's nephew), the establishment of the Third Republic, and the Dreyfus Affair. This probably influenced Durkheim's sociology, which emphasised issues of moral anarchy, decadence, division, and disorganisation. For Durkheim, sociology was both a scientific and a "moral calling," and one of the sociologist's primary responsibilities was to uncover "the causes of the general temporary malajustment being experienced by European societies and remedies which may relieve it" (1897).

His father was the ninth in a series of rabbis who were fathers and sons. Despite being the second son, Émile was chosen to follow his father's profession and received a thorough religious and secular education. However, he abandoned the goal of a religious or rabbinical vocation and adopted a rather secular viewpoint. His sociological examination of religion in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) is one example of this. In this study, he was not concerned in theological concerns about God's presence or purpose, but rather in establishing a highly secular, sociological question: Whether or not God exists, how does religion operate socially in society? He maintained that the capacity of all religions to meet basic social and human needs lies behind their irrationalism and "barbarous and fantastic rites"—a trait shared by both the most ancient and the most contemporary. He stated, "There are no false religions" (Durkheim, 1912). The primary role that religion plays in a society is to foster social unity. The belief in supernatural beings, worship of icons, and rituals "excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states" (Durkheim, 1912) that unite people and serve as a ceremonial and symbolic focus. The functionalist perspective in sociology was founded on this kind of study. He used religion's essential role in bringing society together to explain its existence and continued existence.

Durkheim played a significant role in the advancement of positivist sociology

Because positivism was associated with Comte's quasi-religious sociological cult, he chose not to embrace the term. But he defined sociology as the study of objective social truths in Rules of the Sociological Method. Social facts are those things that are defined externally to the individual, such as laws, customs, morals, language, religious beliefs and practices, money systems, credit and debt, business or professional activities, etc. Social data

preceded the person and will endure long after they are gone.
consist of specifics and responsibilities that people are usually ignorant about
possess the ability to compel others externally, which allows them to manipulate people

Durkheim treated social truths similarly to natural science facts.

They might be researched without regard for the subjective experiences of individuals. Durkheim maintained that "social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual" (1895). Individuals perceive them as responsibilities, duties, and limitations on their actions, which operate independently of their will. When people agree to them, they are barely perceptible, but when they disagree, they elicit a reaction.

Durkheim had a significant impact in defining the subject matter of the nascent field of sociology. Durkheim believed that sociology was primarily concerned with phenomena that were solely social in nature. It was not about the biological or psychological aspects of existence, for instance, but rather the social realities that shaped people's lives. Furthermore, the aspect of human experience that social facts represented needed to be clarified in its own words. Biological urges or individual psychological traits could not account for it. It was a sui generis (of its own sort, unique in its qualities) dimension of reality. Its most crucial characteristics would be lost if it were broken down into its constituent parts. "A social fact can only be explained by another social fact," as Durkheim stated (Durkheim 1895).

This serves as the foundation for Durkheim's well-known suicide study. In Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897), Durkheim looked at suicide rates across various police districts in an effort to show how efficient his principles of social research were. Among all acts, suicide is arguably the most unique and intimate. Its motivations appear to be wholly specific to each individual and their particular case of psychopathology. Durkheim did note, however, that statistics suicide rates stayed mostly unchanged from year to year and from region to region. The prevalence of psychopathology and suicide did not correlate. However, there was a variation in suicide rates based on the social environment of the deaths, including the suicides' religious affiliation. Protestants had greater suicide rates than Catholics, whereas Catholics had higher suicide rates than Jews. Durkheim argued that the key factor explaining the difference in suicide rates (i.e., the statistical rates, not the purely individual motives for suicides) was the different levels of social integration of the various religious communities, as measured by the amount of ritual and mutual involvement in religious practice. Durkheim linked high suicide rates to varying degrees of anomie, or normlessness, among religious communities. Durkheim's research was unusual and insightful because he did not attempt to explain suicide rates in terms of individual psychopathology. Instead, he regarded the regularity of suicide rates as a factual order, implying "the existence of collective tendencies exterior to the individual" (Durkheim 1897), and explained their variation with respect to another social fact: "Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part" (Durkheim 1897).