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Emile Durkheim
Observation & Theory
Central Questions Durkheim tries to answer.
How are individuals made to feel part of a large social collective?
How are their desires and wants constrained in ways that allow them to participate in the collective?
How are individuals? and other social units? activities coordinated and adjusted to each other?
Legacy & Criticism
Legacy
Functionalism
Structuralism
Sociolinguistics
Postmodernism
?the whole is more important than the sum of its parts.?
?CRITICISM?
Individuals in Durkheim?s theory are not involved in changing ideas and symbols.
Doesn?t explain which groups produce which specific values.
Did not address the problem of Power, Conflict and Change.
Epistemology and Ontology
?the whole is more important than the sum of its parts.? (Durkheim)
Comte?s influence on Durkheim was that sociology had to adopt the methods of the natural sciences,
in particular biology, as the basis for a positivist social science. (A. Swingwood, 1999)
So Durkheim was a Positivist in terms of epistemology but?
Durkheim also believed that observation must firstly be directed and then interpreted by a Theory so today he is viewed in terms of his ontology as a social realist. Theory is needed to study unobservable concepts and phenomena.
Durkheim also felt that social inquiry should be about social structures rather than on the individuals that comprise society.
The facts that sociology studies are not merely objects but external , collective phenomena which are general throughout society, like law and religion. (A.Swingwood.)
These external phenomenon are what constrained or controlled individual behaviour but the phenomena could not be reduced to individuals. (A. Swingwood.)
Durkheim was therefore not a reductionist. He did not reduce reality to that of individuals.
Put in simple terms, when an individual dies, the language, the laws and customs do not die. They live on independently of the individuals who have constructed them.
Durkheim does however reduce the control of individuals to the these social forces. Social forces that he doesn?t claim to be for the self interest of any group, merely a function of social order.
Social order is needed to keep us out of a State of Nature as T. Hobbes had outlined.
Even such a personal decision such as SUICIDE is not a private and individual act but shows the individual in the grip of social forces.
To understand social phenomenon we must not, according to Durkheim refer to individual motivations, (psychology), but try to uncover how the individual was programmed by social forces to commit suicide.
Social Facts
"A social fact is every way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint; or which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence if its own, independent of its individual manifestations."
(Durkheim, 1982, p.59)
Emile Durkheim continued..
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