Home > Emile Durkheim
David Emile Durkheim ( April 15, 1858 - November 15, 1917) is known as the founder of modern sociology. He was also the founder of the first journal devoted to social science, the Année Sociologique, which is also the name used to refer to the group of students who developed his sociological program.1 Biography
Durkheim was born in Epinal, France, which is in Lorraine. He came from a long line of devout French Jews -- both his father and grandfather had been Rabbis. Durkheim himself lived a completely secular life. Much of his work, in fact, was dedicated to demonstrating that religious phenomenon stemmed from social rather than divine factors. His Jewish background did, however, shape his sociology - many of his students and collaborators were fellow Jews, and often blood relatives.
A precocious student, Durkheim entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1879. His entering class was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his classmates, such as Jean Jaurès and Henri Bergson would go on to become major figures in France's intellectual life. At the ENS Durkheim studied with Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook. At the same time, he read Auguste ComteAuguste Comte (full name Isidore Marie Auguste Francois Xavier Comte ( February 17 (recorded February 19), 1798 September 5, 1857) was a founder of the discipline of sociology. His life He was born in Montpellier. After attending school there, Comte was a and Herbert SpencerHerbert Spencer ( 27 April 1820 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher. He was born in Derby. Educated mostly at home, Spencer worked first as a railways civil engineer beginning at age 16, writing in his spare time. In 1848, Spencer became a sub-edi. Thus Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his career. This meant the first of many conflicts with the French academic system, which had no social science curriculum at the time. Durkheim found humanistic studies uninteresting, and he finished second to last in his graduating class when he agregatedIn France, the agregation is a civil service competitive examination for some positions in the public education system. The laureates are known as agreges . A similar system exists in other countries. There are actually two different agregations Secondary in philosophy in 1882.
Durkheim's interest in social phenomena was also spurred on by politics. France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian WarMars-la-Tour, August 16, 1870 The Franco-Prussian War ( July 19, 1870 May 10, 1871) was waged between the Empire of France and the Prussian led North German Confederation allied with the south German states of Baden, Bavaria and Wurttemberg. The conflict had created a backlash against secular, republican rule and many considered a Catholic, vigorously nationalistic France the only way rejuvenate France's fading power on the continent. Durkheim, a Jew and socialist, was thus in the political minority, a situation which galvanized him politically. The Dreyfus affairThe Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal which divided France for many years during the late 19th century. It centered on the 1894 treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus a Jewish artillery officer in the French army. Dreyfus was, in fact, innocent: the co of 1894Events January 8 A fire at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago causes a good deal of damage. January 9 New England Telephone and Telegraph installs the first battery-operated telephone switchboard ( Lexington, Massachusetts). February 15 04:51 GMT only strengthened his activist stance.
There was no way that a man of Durkheim's views could receive a major academic appointment in Paris, and so after spending a year studying sociology in Germany he traveled to BordeauxBordeaux (Bordeu in Gascon) is a port city in the south-west of France, and is the prefecture (administrative capital) of the Gironde departement and the Aquitaine region''. Its inhabitants are called Bordelais''. The population of the metropolitan area ( in 1887, which had just started France's first teacher's training center. There he taught both pedagogy and social science (a novel position in France). From this position Durkheim reformed the French school system and introduced the study of social science in its curriculum. Again, his tendency to reduce morality and religion to mere social facts earned him his fair share of critics.
The 1890s were a period of remarkable creative output for Durkheim. In 1893 he published The Division of Labor in Society, his fundamental statement of the nature of human society and its development. In 1895 he published Rules of the Sociological Method, a manifesto stating what sociology was and how it ought to be done. In 1896 he founded the journal Année Sociologique in order to publish and publicize the work his what was by then a growing number of students and collaborators. And finally, in 1897, he published Suicide, a case study which provided an example of what the sociological monograph might look like.
In 1902 Durkheim finally achieved his goal of attaining a prominent position in Paris when he became the chair of education at the Sorbonne. Because French universities are technically institutions for training secondary school teachers, this position gave Durkheim considerable influence - his lectures were the only ones that were mandatory for the entire student body. Despite what some considered, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, to be a political appointment, Durkheim consolidated his institutional power by 1912 when he was permanently assigned the chair and renamed it the chair of education and sociology. It was also in this year that he published his last major work, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
WWI was to have a tragic effect on Durkheim's life. Durkheim's leftism was always patriotic rather than internationalist - he sought a secular, rational form of French life. But the coming of the war and the inevitable nationalist propaganda that followed made it difficult to sustain this already nuanced position. While Durkheim actively worked to support his country in the war, his reluctance to give in to simplistic nationalist fervor (combined with his Jewish background) made him a natural target of the now-ascendant French right. Even more seriously, the generation of students that Durkheim had trained were now being drafted to serve in the army, and many of them perished as France was bled white in the trenches. Finally, Durkheim's own son died in the war - a mental blow from which Durkheim never recovered. Emotionally devastated and overworked, Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in 1917.
