description Émile Durkheim Overview
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) was a French sociologist who helped establish sociology as an independent academic discipline and treated social facts as realities that could be studied systematically. In The Division of Labour in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he examined social cohesion, institutions, religion, and anomie. His study of suicide used comparative statistics to connect individual acts with patterns of social integration and regulation.
insights Ranking position
Émile Durkheim ranks #1 of 245 in the Sociologist ranking, ahead of Max Weber.
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What did Durkheim mean by anomie?
Anomie is a condition in which social norms lose their regulating force, often during rapid economic or social change. Durkheim used it in Suicide to explain why apparently individual acts can vary with social conditions.
What were Durkheim's four types of suicide?
In Suicide, Durkheim distinguishes egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic suicide. The categories reflect different imbalances in social integration and social regulation.
Why did Durkheim study religion in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life?
He examined Australian Aboriginal totemism to investigate what he regarded as elementary forms of religious organization. His broader argument was that rituals bind a group together and express society's collective life.
How did Durkheim make sociology different from psychology?
In The Rules of Sociological Method, he argued that social facts should be studied as realities external to and coercive over individuals. Institutions, laws, and collective customs therefore required social explanations rather than reduction to personal motives.
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