In his Rules of the Sociological Method Durkheim offered a significant pioneering prescription for those wanting to study society empirically. Sociology, he insisted, is about understanding ‘social facts’. Such facts have distinctive characteristics: ‘they consist of ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him.’ Now there’s an original definition with a lasting bite. Social phenomena exterior to humans are seen as forces shaping much, even most, of their experience. Durkheim aspired to track down social facts, to discern the moral imperatives implicit in them, and to investigate transgressions against them (in a sense sociology for him was ‘a science of ethics’).
Social groups or collectives were for Durkheim more than the sum of their (individual) parts. He is therefore often described as a methodological holist (rather than a methodological individualist like Weber). He deployed positivistic, statistical methods to identify social facts.
The Division of Labour in Society (his doctoral thesis) was Durkheim’s first book. Charting the transition from agrarian to industrial societies, he argued that capitalist societies heralded new moral as well as new economic institutions. Whereas traditional or agrarian societies were characterized by a ‘conscience collective’ (that is, a shared or mutual view of the world) and ‘mechanical solidarity’ (that is, they displayed the social cohesiveness of small, undifferentiated collectivities), industrial societies were characterized by ‘organic solidarity’ (that is, they were differentiated by a relatively complex division of labour). Departing from Marx – and a Marxian focus on alienation – Durkheim identified new social facts in the guise of social solidarity, collective consciousness and legal systems.
Durkheim’s study of Suicide represented a breakthrough in various ways. Suicide, he contended, was/is not the individual act it is typically represented as. It is rather a ‘social phenomenon’. He substituted anomie for Marx’s alienation. Anomie is defined in terms of normlessness, unrootedness and, in contemporary parlance, a sense of disenchantment, detachment, of not belonging. Durkheim discriminated between four types of suicide: egoistic suicide is a function of (fatally) weakened forms of social integration and the sense that one’s life/death just doesn’t matter; altruistic suicide is the product of overly strong forms of integration (and the notion that one’s own life is worth less than the ‘cause’ one represents); anomic suicide is a function of too little normative regulation and ‘feeling lost’; and fatalistic suicide occurs when people sense their lives are over-regulated (maybe they are incarcerated in prisons). Thus, for most commentators, egoistic and anomic suicides are associated with weak integration/regulation, and altruistic and fatalistic suicides with the obverse. But, as ever, there are critics. The important point is that Durkheim compellingly argued (empirically showed) that suicide requires study as a social phenomenon.
Durkheim proffers a moralistic theory of society. His notion of the individual, and his or her role in society, is based on that of ‘conformity’. Lack of conformity results in the likes of egoistic and anomic suicide. It is the duty of the individual to be a ‘good’ citizen, also a ‘good’ and ‘productive’ worker, which translates into tolerating a certain amount of oppression. He writes: ‘the less one has the less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely. Lack of power, compelling moderation, accustoms men to it … (Poverty) is actually the best school for teaching self-restraint. Forcing us to constant self-discipline, it prepares us to accept collective discipline with equanimity.’
Society is something over and above the individuals comprising it. It is superior to and determines the behaviour of the individuals that make up the whole. Thus the individual must subordinate him or herself to the larger community ‘if society is to function properly’. Society, defined in this way, is a ‘sacred’ entity, embodied in group symbols or ‘totems’ and bearing testimony to unity and conformity. The ‘profane’, on the other hand, involves mundane individual concerns. Note that Durkheim does not equate the sacred with good, and the profane with evil. The sacred can be good or evil, as can the profane.
The primary function of religion, in fact, is to contribute to the integration of society and to precipitate an abiding sense of conformity. ‘Religion’, ‘god’, ‘society’ are as one. Without the shared, unifying experience this provides, individuals face the danger of anomie, and societies face the possibility of widespread social breakdown.
It is possible to detect a family of highly significant aspects of Durkheim’s startlingly original sociology. First, he introduces and explores a concept of ‘the social’ that defies reductionism (ie. that resists definition in terms of the individuals that it subsumes). Second, he uses positivistic, statistical techniques to uncover ‘social facts’. Put differently, he uses, rather than being used by, statistical associations. This is nowhere more apparent than in his study of suicide (eg. he found higher rates of suicide in Protestant societies (with their characteristic properties of individualism and lower social integration, and a tendency towards egoistic and anomic suicide) than in Catholic societies (with their characteristic properties of collectivism and higher social integration, and a tendency towards altruistic and fatalistic suicide).
Third, Durkheim modelled a proto-functionalist theory of society. His influence on Parsons is particularly clear. He not only saw society as something over, beyond and above the individual, as possessing attributes of its own, but asserted the necessary ‘moral’ preparation – by means of education systems – of individuals for societies to remain orderly and to flourish rather than collapse.
It is difficult to resist picking up on Dawe’s notorious dichotomy between ‘two sociologies’ at this point, the one stressing agency and the other structure. Durkheim, like Parsons and the American structural-functionalists, is typically linked to the sociology of structure rather than that of agency. The trick remains to find a way to do justice to both.
I usually close these brief outlines with a personal comment or two, no less commonly protesting that it’s my blog, so why not. I have always respected Durkheim’s breaking of new ground while rarely drawing on his theories. For me, his work has been as a catalyst. I am attracted to holism versus individualism; to the irreducibility of social facts, interpreted via critical realism as generative mechanisms; and to credible and theory-guided quantitative (as well as qualitative) sociology. Durkheim more than punched his weight and remains one of our more serious mentors.