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Emile Durkheim: Sociology
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At Bordeaux, Durkheim was attached to the department of philosophy where he was charged with courses in both sociology and pedagogy. Some commentators seem to feel that the teaching of pedagogy was a kind of academic drudgery that Durkheim was forced to accept. This was not the case. He continued to teach in the field of education throughout his career, even when he was clearly free to determine for himself the courses he would offer. Education, as will be seen later in more detail, remained for Durkheim a privileged applied field where sociology could make its most important contribution to that regeneration of society for which he aimed so passionately.
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Durkheim was born in Épinal, France, a descendant of a distinguished line of rabbinical scholars. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1882 and then taught law and philosophy. In 1887 he began teaching sociology, first at the University of Bordeaux and later at the University of Paris.
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Durkheim presented a definitive critique of reductionist explanations of social behavior. Social phenomena are "social facts" and these are the subject matter of sociology. They have, according to Durkheim, distinctive social characteristics and determinants, which are not amenable to explanations on the biological or psychological level. They are external to any particular individual considered as a biological entity. They endure over time while particular individuals die and are replaced by others. Moreover, they are not only external to the individual, but they are "endowed with coercive power, by . . . which they impose themselves upon him, independent of his individual will." Constraints, whether in the form of laws or customs, come into play whenever social demands are being violated.
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During his lifetime Durkheim was severely criticized for claiming that social facts were irreducible, that they had a reality of their own. His ideas... are now accepted as the common foundations for empirical work in sociology. His concept of the collective consciousness, renamed "culture," has become part of the theoretical foundations of modern ethnography. His voice was one of the most powerful in breaking the hold of Enlightenment ideas of individualism on modern social sciences.
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The English translation ("Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena") is available in Pickering's Durkheim on Religion, pp.75-99. This is Durkheim's first attempt to delineate the scope of the sociology of religion. In this early essay, Durkheim proposed the following definition of religion: "phenomena held to be religious consist in obligatory beliefs, connected with clearly defined practices which are related to given objects of those beliefs" (Pickering, p.93). Much of the content of the essay is repeated in The Elementary Forms, although Durkheim's formal definition of religion underwent significant modifications. In The Elementary Forms, Durkheim acknowledged that this early definition was "too formal, and neglected the contents of the religious representations too much" (p.47 n.1).
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The 1890s were a period of remarkable creative output for Durkheim. In 1893 he published The Division of Labor in Society, his fundamental statement of the nature of human society and its development. In 1895 he published Rules of the Sociological Method, a manifesto stating what sociology was and how it ought to be done, and founded the first European Department of Sociology at the University of Bordeaux. In 1896 he founded the journal L'Année Sociologique in order to publish and publicize the work of what was by then a growing number of students and collaborators (this is ... the name used to refer to the group of students who developed his sociological program). And finally, in 1897, he published Suicide, a case study which provided an example of what the sociological monograph might look like.
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