Émile Durkheim

From Geography

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) is a French sociologist. Durkheim is one of the most important social scientist together with Weber, Giddens, Marx and Bordieux. He can be seen as a founding father of social science and is known for his notion of social facts and methods in modern social sciences (Zierhofer, 2002).

Life

Emile Drukheim was born in Lorraine in the east of France and came from a Jewish family. At secondary school Drukheim was already an outstanding student. He followed his further education at a prestigious school in Paris. During his further live he thaught in different cities throughout Europe and wrote several important works in social science (Jones, 1986). He became a very influential sociologist in Paris and the rest of France. Emile Durkeim died at the age of 59 in 1917, just after the first world war.

Work and Theories

Durkheim wrote four major works, namely: “The division of labor in society”, "The Rules of Sociological Method", “Suicide”, “The elementary forms of the religious Life” and (Jones, 2011). The division of labor is based on the work of Adam Smith, in which method plays a important role as well. Durkheim questions in this work for example whether laws described in the work of Adam Smith can be seen as natural laws as well as moral laws. In his second work, the rules of sociological method, Durkheim discusses social facts. His major influence was on this writing on social facts and methodology. Durkheim defines a social fact as following: "a social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations". He also describes them as: states of collective minds (Jones, 1986). In the two other important works of Durkheim he also focusses on methodology and the behavior of human in the case of suicide and religious life.

References

Appelrouth, S. Desfor Edles, L. (2007). Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory: Text and Readings. Pine Forge Press.

Zierhofer, W. (2001) Speech act and Space(s): Language pragmatics and the discursive constitution of the social. Environment and planning 34

Jones, A. (1986) Emile Durkheim, an introduction to four major works. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications

Contributers

Created by --MathijsLammers 22:02, 22 October 2012 (CEST)

Enhanced by Koen Molenaar