Emile Durkheim 1858 – 1917

Emile Durkheim was a French sociologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the modern discipline of sociology. His Rules of Sociological Method established the autonomy of social facts as a domain of inquiry irreducible to individual psychology, while The Division of Labor in Society, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life developed wide-ranging analyses of solidarity, anomie, and the social origins of religion. He held the first chair of sociology in France, at the Sorbonne, and shaped a school of French social thought that included his nephew Marcel Mauss. He died of grief and exhaustion during the First World War.

Emile Durkheim was born in 1858 in Epinal in Lorraine, the son of a rabbi from a long line of rabbis; he abandoned the rabbinical path while remaining marked by Jewish communal experience throughout his life. After the Ecole normale superieure and the agregation in philosophy in 1882 he taught in provincial lycees, spent a formative year in Germany, and in 1887 was appointed to the new lectureship in social science and education at Bordeaux — the first such position in France.

His major works are The Division of Labor in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), supported by an enormous output of essays and reviews and the journal L'Annee sociologique, which he founded in 1898 and around which he built the durkheimian school. In 1902 he moved to a chair at the Sorbonne, where he became one of the dominant intellectual presences of the Third Republic.

Durkheim insisted that social facts must be treated as things irreducible to the psychology of individuals, and that the study of moral cohesion — what he analyzed under the rubrics of mechanical and organic solidarity, anomie, the sacred, and collective effervescence — is the proper object of sociology. Devastated by the death of his son Andre at the front in 1916, he died at Paris in November 1917.