Roshchenko Maryna
Institute
of Sociology, Psychology and Social Communications, student
Petko Lyudmila
Ph.D., Associate Professor,
Dragomanov
National Pedagogical University (Ukraine,
Kyiv)
"Father
of sociology": Emile
Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim (French: [emil dyʁkɛm]
or [dyʁkajm] April 15, 1858, Épinal in Lorraine, France November 15, 1917, Paris) was a French
sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher. He formally established the
academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the
principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology [10].
He
came from a long line of devout French Jews; his father, grandfather, and
great-grandfather had all been rabbis. Durkheim
became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his
career, which 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, turning his attention from psychology and
philosophy to ethics and eventually, sociology [8; 1].
Durkheim
was a brilliant student at the College d'Epinal and was awarded a variety of
honors and prizes. His ambitions thus aroused, he transferred to one of the
great French high schools, the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Here he prepared
himself for the arduous admission examinations that would open the doors to the
prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, the traditional training ground for the
intellectual elite of France [2].
Emile
Durkheim was the first French academic sociologist. His life was dominated
throughout by his academic career, even though he was intensely and
passionately involved in the affairs of French society at large. In his
well-established status he differed from the men dealt with so far, and his
life may seem uneventful when compared with theirs. Undoubtedly their personal
idiosyncrasies had a share in determining their erratic course. But in
addition, they were all devoted to a calling that had not yet found recognition
in the university. In their attempts to defend the claim to legitimacy of the
new science of sociology, they faced enormous obstacles, which contributed in
large measure to their personal difficulties [2; 11, 103138].
It
is Durkheim who clearly established the logic of the functional approach to the
study of social phenomena, although functional explanations, it will be
recalled, play a major part in Spencer's approach, and the lineaments of
functional reasoning were already discernible in the work of Comte. In
particular, Durkheim set down a clear distinction between historical and
functional types of inquiry and between functional consequences and individual
motivations.
The
concept of function played a key part in all of Durkheim's work from The Division of Labor, in which he sees
his prime objective in the determination of "the functions of division of
labor, that is to say, what social needs it satisfies," to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which
is devoted to a demonstration of the various functions performed in society
through religious cults, rites, and beliefs. An additional illustration of
Durkheim's functional approach is his discussion of criminality [6; 14].
The main thrust of Durkheim's overall doctrine is his insistence that
the study of society must eschew reductionism and consider social phenomena sui
generis. Rejecting biologistic or psychologistic interpretations, Durkheim
focused attention on the social-structural determinants of mankind's social
problems [12].
Durkheim presented a definitive critique of reductionist explanations of
social behavior. Social phenomena are "social facts" and these are
the subject matter of sociology. They have, according to Durkheim, distinctive
social characteristics and determinants, which are not amenable to explanations
on the biological or psychological level. They are external to any particular
individual considered as a biological entity. They endure over time while
particular individuals die and are replaced by others. A social fact can hence
be defined as "every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on
the individual an external constraint."
Social
phenomena arise, Durkheim argued, when interacting individuals constitute a
reality that can no longer be accounted for in terms of the properties of
individual actors. A political party, for example, though composed of
individual members, cannot be explained in terms of its constitutive elements;
rather, a party is a structural whole that must be accounted for by the social
and historical forces that bring it into being and allow it to operate. Any
social formation, though not necessarily superior to its individual parts, is
different from them and demands an explanation on the level peculiar to it [3].
Durkheim
was concerned with the characteristics of groups and structures rather than
with individual attributes. He focused on such problems as the cohesion or lack
of cohesion of specific religious groups, not on the individual traits of
religious believers. He showed that such group properties are independent of
individual traits and must therefore be studied in their own right. He examined
different rates of behavior in specified populations and characteristics of
particular groups or changes of such characteristics. For example, a
significant increase of suicide rates [7; 13] in a particular group indicates
that the social cohesion in that group has been weakened and its members are no
longer sufficiently protected against existential crises. For Durkheim, one of
the major elements of integration is the extent to which various members
interact with one another.
"Suicidal
tendency is great in educated circles, this is due, to the weakening of
traditional beliefs and to the state of moral individualism."
"Man seeks to learn and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion
in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. It
is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the
desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized. Knowledge is
not sought as a means to destroy accepted opinions but because their
destruction has commenced. To be sure, once knowledge exists, it may battle in
its own name and in its own cause, and set up as an antagonist to traditional
sentiments [9]".
The difference
between value consensus and structural integration can now be more formally
approximated in terms of Durkheim's own terminology. He distinguished between
mechanical and organic solidarity. The first prevails to the extent that
"ideas and tendencies common to all members of the society are greater in
number and intensity than those which pertain personally to each member. This
solidarity can grow only in inverse ration to personality." In other
words, mechanical solidarity prevails where individual differences are
minimized and the members of society are much alike in their devotion to the
common weal. Each element in a differentiated society is less strongly tied to
common collective routines, even though it may be bound with equal rigor to the
differentiated and specialized tasks and roles that characterize systems of
organic solidarity. While the individual elements of such a system have less in
common, they are nevertheless much more interdependent than under mechanical
solidarity [3].
To Durkheim, men
were creatures whose desires were unlimited. Unlike other animals, they are not
satiated when their biological needs are fulfilled. When social regulations
break down, the controlling influence of society on individual propensities is no longer effective and
individuals are left to their own devices. Such a state of affairs Durkheim
calls anomie, a tern that refers to a condition of relative normlessness in a
whole society or in some of its component groups. Anomie does not refer to a
state of mind, but to a property of the social structure. It characterizes a
condition in which individual desires are no longer regulated by common norms
and where, as a consequence, individuals are left without moral guidance in the
pursuit of their goals [14].
Durkheim's
program of study, the overriding problems in all his work, concerns the sources
of social order and disorder, the forces that make for regulation or
de-regulation in the body social. His work on suicide, of which the discussion
and analysis of anomie forms a part, must be read in this light. Once he
discovered that certain types of suicide could be accounted for by anomie, he
could then use anomic suicide as an index for the otherwise unmeasurable degree
of social integration. Suicides may be considered a "normal," that
is, a regular, occurrence. However, sudden spurts in the suicide rates of
certain groups or total societies are "abnormal" and point to some
perturbations not previously present. "Abnormally" high rates in
specific groups or social categories, or in total societies, can be taken as an
index of disintegrating forces at work in a social structure [5].
Though Durkheim
stressed that in modern societies a measure of integration was achieved through
the intermeshing and mutual dependence of differentiated roles, he came to see
that these societies nevertheless could not do without some common integration
by a system of common beliefs. In earlier social formations built on mechanical
solidarity, such common beliefs are not clearly distinct from the norms through
which they are implemented in communal action; in the case of organic
solidarity, the detailed norms have become relatively independent from overall
beliefs, responding as they do to the exigencies of differentiated role
requirements, but a general system of overall beliefs must still exist [5].
Durkheim's sociology of knowledge is intimately tied to his sociology of religion. In the latter, he
attempts to show that man's religious commitments ultimately can be traced to
his social commitments (the City of God is but a projection of the City of
Man). His sociology of knowledge postulates that the categories of man's
thought--his ways of conceiving space and time, for example--can be traced to
his mode of social life [4].
Bibliography
[Web site]. Access
mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNHmnH-sXXg
11. Explorations in Classical
Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World / red. Kenneth
Allan. Pine Forge Press, 2010. 451 p. [Web site]. Access mode: http://books.google.com.ua/books?id=w64nblF532cC&sitesec=buy&hl=ru&source=gbs_vpt_read
[Web site]. Access mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T43GDLpbeqU