state naturally arises from the common CONSENTof the
people provided an early SOCIAL-CONTRACTview of poli-
tics and government.
Further Reading
Harris, C. R. S. Duns Scotus.Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press,
1927.
Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917) Philosopher of
science and founder of sociology
Durkheim founded sociology as a distinct discipline
within the social sciences. He achieved this by identi-
fying a new object of study, social facts, and by apply-
ing to this object the methods of a POSITIVISTICscience.
Durkheim’s work can be divided into two categories:
those works attending to the foundations and methods
of sociology, and those works in which he applies
these methods to particular social facts.
Durkheim was not the first to attempt to study
society in a scientific manner. His own acknowledged
intellectual predecessors, Auguste COMTE, Charles de
Montesquieu, and Herbert Spencer, studied some
aspect of social organization and cohesion without
generalizing their method and extending the scope of
their analysis. Durkheim was, however, the first to
resist systematically the idea that social phenomena
were to be explained and accounted for by their reduc-
tion to other phenomena. For example, he rejected the
notions that economic activity was nothing morethan
transactions between individual agents; that religious
custom could be explained as nothing morethan psy-
chological events taking place inside people’s heads;
that the state or nation is nothing morethan the aggre-
gate of its INDIVIDUAL members. In these and other
cases, Durkheim insisted that there was a distinct
social fact to be examined and explained in the same
way that there were distinct psychological, economic,
and biological facts. Thus the subject matter of sociol-
ogy is the objectively existing social facts of such phe-
nomena as trade, suicide, religious practice, and so on.
What makes all these facts socialis their connection
within the social organism, the social solidarity that
institutions and practices confer, and the external
coercive power that they exercise over the lives of indi-
viduals and groups. There is, therefore, for Durkheim,
a nonreducible connectedness between social facts and
a normativeness to them. With this idea of society in
hand, Durkheim categorized and explained differences
between tribal, traditional, and modern societies, most
notably referring to social solidarity of traditional soci-
eties as mechanical.
Durkheim’s understanding of scientific method was
standardly positivistic. What is important is how he
applied these methods to society and how he drew sig-
nificant conclusions from the results.
First, he argued that sociological explanation is
functional rather than causal. By this he meant that to
understand a social fact, one must understand it in
relation to the social whole—one must know how it
functions within the web of social relations. Social
facts are thus explained by reference to other social
facts rather than being explained by nonsocial, say bio-
logical or economic, facts. This idea of functional
explanation goes together with a regard for the impor-
tance and significance of empirical data. For example,
by collecting empirical data on suicide rates in differ-
ent countries and between kinds of individuals,
Durkheim drew conclusions about the social and
moral character of different forms of society.
Second, by employing the notion of functional
explanation, Durkheim introduces the idea of normal
and pathological social facts. In this regard,
Durkheim’s notion of “Anomie” identified a pathologi-
cal characteristic of modern societies where the divi-
sion of labor so isolates individuals from the organic
social network that society loses its capacity to check
and influence their perspective and desires.
Durkheim was born in Épinal, France. He studied
philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and later
in his career became the first professor of sociology at
the Sorbonne. He died at the age of 59.Further Reading
Lukes, S. Émile Durkheim.New York: Harper & Row, 1973.Durkheim, Émile 89