Émile Durkheim

1. Émile Durkheim April 15, 1858 - November 15, 1917

2. Life and Influences • Born April 15, 1858 in France. • Father, Grandfather, and Great-Grandfather were all rabbis. • He believed religion could be explained from social rather than divine factors. • Entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1879. • Read and studied with classicists with a social scientific outlook while in school. • The French academic system had no social science curriculum at the time, and he finished second to last in this graduating class in 1882. • Spent a year studying sociology in Germany.

3. Life and Influences • 1887 - went to Bordeaux to teach pedagogy and social science to new teachers. • Through his new position, he reformed the French school system and introduced social science into its curriculum. • 1893 - published The Division of Labor in Society. • 1895 - published Rules of the Sociological Method, and founded the European Department of Sociologique at the University of Bordeaux. • 1896 - founded the journal L'Année Sociologique, the first journal of sociology in France.

4. Life and Influences • 1897 - published Suicide • 1902 - awarded a prominent position in Paris as the chair of education at the Sorbonne. • 1912 - published Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. His position became permanent and he renamed it the chair of education and sociology. • His son died in World War I, and he never recovered emotionally. • Suffered a stroke in Paris in 1917, briefly recovered and resumed work but later that year, on November 15, he died at age 59 from exhaustion.

5. Contributions and Theories • He sought to construct one of the first scientific approaches to social phenomena. • Said that traditional societies were held together by the fact that everyone was more or less the same. • Along with Herbert Spencer, he was one of the first to conceptualize the idea of social functionalism: • Functionalism views society as a system of interdependent parts whose functions contribute to the stability and survival of the system as a whole. • Thought that society was more than the sum of its parts, and coined the term social facts: • Social Facts have an existence all their own, and are not bound to the action of individuals.

6. Contributions and Theories • Durkheim’s Anomie: • Anomie is the breakdown of social norms regulating behavior. • Durkheim and other sociological theorists coined the term anomie as ‘a reaction against, or retreat from, the social controls of society.’ • All deviant behavior stems from a state of anomie, including suicide. • Durkheim on Crime: • Crime serves a social function, meaning that it has a purpose in society. • He saw crime as being able to release certain social tensions and so have a cleansing or purging effect in society. • His views on crime were unconventional at the time.

7. Contributions and Theories • Durkheim on Education: • Believed that education served many functions: • To reinforce social solidarity • Pledging allegiance: makes individuals feel part of a group and therefore less likely to break rules. • To maintain social roles • School is a society in miniature: it has a similar hierarchy, rules, expectations to the “outside world,” and trains people to fulfill roles. • To maintain division of labor • School sorts students into skill groups, encouraging students to take up employment in fields best suited to their abilities. He was professionally employed to train teachers, so he used his ability to shape France’s curriculum to spread the instruction of sociology.

8. 1893 1893

9. The Division of Labor • In The Division of Labor in Society Durkheim examined how social order was maintained in different types of societies. • Traditional societies were held together by the fact that everyone was mostly similar to one another. The collective consciousness is highly isomorphic with individual consciousness. • In modern societies, the highly complex division of labor resulted in people with different occupational specializations. This created dependencies that tied people to one another since no one person could fill all of his/her needs by themselves. • Increasing division of labor leadsto rapid change in a society. This can produce a state of confusion regarding norms and a growing impersonality in social life. This, in turn, may lead to a breakdown in the norms regulating behavior and a sense of anomie.

15. Human Dualism “There are in each of us…two consciences: one which is common to our group in its entirety…the other, on the contrary, represents that in us which is personal and distinct, that which makes us an individual” - Division of Labor in Society (1893) “Because society surpasses us, it obliges us to surpass ourselves, and to surpass itself, a being must, to some degree, depart from its nature—a departure that does not take place without causing more or less painful tensions.” - Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1914).

16. Human Dualism “It is not without reason, therefore, that man feels himself to be double: he actually is double….In brief, this duality corresponds to the double existence that we lead concurrently; the one purely individual and rooted in our organisms, the other social and nothing but an extension of society.” - Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1914) Our purely individual side seeks satisfaction of all wants and desires. It knows no boundaries. Without being constrained by the collective conscience, this side of human beings may lead to the condition that Durkheim labels as “anomie.”

17. 1895

18. Social Facts According to Durkheim, social facts are the subject matter of sociology. Social facts are “sui generis” (meaning of its own kind; unique) and must be studied as distinct from biological and psychological phenomenon. Social facts can be defined as patterns of behavior that are capable of exercising some coercive power upon individuals. They are guides and controls of conduct and are external to the individual in the form of norms, mores, and folkways.

19. Social Facts “A social fact is identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or is capable of exerting upon individuals” - Rules of Sociological Method  (1895)Through socialization and education these rules become internalized in the consciousness of the individual. These constraints and guides become moral obligations to obey social rules.

23. Languages are Social Facts

24. Social Facts… …are notself-evident

25. Money exists as a core Social Fact…. ….and here is someone who disturbs its reality

29. A poem byMaroslov Holub

32. 1897

33. “Suicide” (1897): Key Concepts Suicide as a Social Fact Anomic Division of Labor (leftover from “Division of Labor”) Integration Regulation Four Types of Suicide: Altruistic Egoistic Anomic Fatalistic Anomie

34. Suicide • Suicide may be caused by weak social bonds. • Social bonds are made up of social integration and social regulation. • Durkheim’s 4 types of suicide: • Egoistic Suicide: Individual is weakly integrated into a society so ending their life will have little impact on the rest of society. • Altruistic suicide: Individual is extremely attached to the society and because of this has no real sense of autonomy. But alternatively, a freely chosen act of self-sacrifice. • Anomic suicide: a weak social regulation between society’s norms and the individual, most often brought on by dramatic economic or social changes. • Fatalistic suicide: Social regulation is completely imposed upon the individual. With no hope of countering the oppressive discipline of the societythe only way to escape is to take one’s own life.

35. Suicide • Defined suicide as the act of severing social relationships. • Goal was to show that an individual act is actually the result of the social world that he would show the usefulness of sociology. • He explored the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics. He explained how socially controlled Catholics had a lower suicide rate. • Social integration: the integration of a group of people into the mainstream of society. • He concluded that abnormally high or low levels or social integration may result in increased suicide rates. • Results he found include: • Suicide rates are higher for widowed, single or divorced people rather than those who are married. • Rates are higher for those who have no children rather than those who do . • Rates are higher among Protestants than Catholics. • Coroners in a Catholic country are less likely to record a suicide as the reason of death because in Catholicism it is a sin.

36. Suicide as a Social Fact • Suicide rate is a social fact– social cause/social effect • Rates are stable across time • Durkheim found low rates of suicide: • When religious integration is high (Catholics < Protestants) • When domestic integration is high (Married < Unmarried) • When political integration is high (Rural < Urban) Example of US suicide rate:fairly stable over time.

37. Durkheim’s Argument in “Suicide” • Unlike animals, human desire is “unlimited,” – there is no internal check on needs and desires. • The “passions… must be limited,” but this must be done by some force exterior to the individual. • This exterior force must be the common (collective conscience) because it is the “only moral power superior to the individual, the authority of which he accepts.” • Regulation through collective conscience is required to ensure that people will accept their position in life, because true social equality is impossible. • Anomie occurs when societies break down or “pass through some abnormal crisis,” people are “not adjusted to the conditions forced on them,” and social bonds/collective conscience fail to do work of regulating.

39. Anomic Division of Labor • How can we be more bonded to one another when we are further splintered by division of labor and specialization? • Rules emerge from the DOL because it sets up definite ways of acting that are repeated on a daily basis, turning into regular, stable habit. “Then the habits, as they grow in strength, are transformed into rules of conduct.” • This produces a real form of solidarity, interdependence built on shared, regular expectations (duties, rights, obligations) that are built up and extended across time. • “If the division of labor does not produce solidarity, it is because the relationships between the organs are not regulated; it is because they are in a state of anomie.”

43. Altruistic Suicide – Excessive Integration Jonestown Massacre, 1978 Kamakazi pilots, 1945 Suicide bombers, 2013

44. Egoistic Suicide – Low Integration

45. Fatalistic Suicide – Excessive Regulation 1838 issue of American Anti-Slavery Almanac, which illustrated a passage from Charles Ball’s “Slavery in the United States” (New York, 1837) that describes Ball’s encounter with the slave Paul. Paul had “suffered so much in slavery, that he chose to encounter the hardships and perils of a runaway.” Unnamed slave woman, who on Dec. 19, 1815, jumped out of the garret window of a three-story brick house and survived.

46. Anomic Suicide – Low Regulation Anomic Suicide – Low Regulation

47. COMPARATIVE RATES OF ANOMIC SUICIDE Durkheim Modern Day

48. Anomic or Fatalistic Suicide? We are broke. Last April I was worth $100,000. Today I am $24,000 in the red.

49. ANOMIE-a lack of regulation occurring with breakdown of (mostly economic) order in modern life- • Anomie is a constant feature of modern life • “Since this disorder is greatest in the economic world, it has most of its victims there.” • Industrial and commercial functions have the greatest number of suicides – and – “the possessors of most comfort suffer most.” • Durkheim’s general argument: When economic order is functional, it “reins in individual passions” by setting limits on desires and socializing people to be comfortable in their position

50. 1912