Emile Durkheim Quotes on Knowledge
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the founder of the French sociological school whose Rules of the Sociological Method (1895) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) shaped the discipline's twentieth-century self-understanding, gave the sociology of knowledge its most ambitious early statement in the long Conclusion of the Elementary Forms. The framework treats the Kantian categories of the understanding — space, time, causality, totality — not as a priori structures of any rational mind whatever but as collective representations whose specific content reflects the social organization of the group within which the individual mind has been formed. The Primitive Classification (1903, with Marcel Mauss) supplies the earlier programmatic statement.
Quotes
-
“For if society lacks the unity that derives from the fact that the relationships between its parts are exactly regulated, that unity resulting from the harmonious articulation of its various functions assured by effective discipline and if, in addition, society lacks the unity based upon the commitment of men's wills to a common objective, then it is no more than a pile of sand that the least jolt or the slightest puff will suffice to scatter.”
Émile Durkheim (1903/1961, p. 102); Quoted in: Kenneth Allan (2012). Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World: Seeing the Social World p. 151 -
“There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.”
Émile Durkheim, Debate on Explanation in History and Sociology (1908). -
“This work had its origins in the question of the relations of the individual to social solidarity . Why does the individual, while becoming more autonomous, depend more upon society ? How can he be at once more individual and more solidary? Certainly, these two movements, contradictory as they appear, develop in parallel fashion. This is the problem we are raising. It appeared to us that what resolves this apparent antinomy is a transformation of social solidarity due to the steadily growing development of the division of labor .”
Preface -
“The division of labour is not of recent origin, but it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that social cognizance was taken of the principle. though, until then, unwitting submission had been rendered to it. To be sure, several thinkers from earliest times saw its importance; but Adam Smith was the first to attempt a theory of it. Moreover, he adopted this phrase that social science later lent to biology .”
p. 39; Lead paragraph -
“p. 39; Lead paragraph”
The division of labour is not of recent origin, but it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that social cognizance was taken of the principle. though, until then, unwitting submission had been rendered to it. To be sure, several thinkers from earliest times saw its importance; but Adam Smith was the first to attempt a theory of it. Moreover, he adopted this phrase that social science late