Émile Durkheim is one of the most influential thinkers of modern Sociology. Born in France in 1858, he is considered by many to be the ‘father of Sociology’. According to Allan (2005, p. 102), “the work of Durkheim lies at the heart of Sociology”. His work has been influential not only to Sociology, but also to Criminology, education and religious studies, Philosophy and the study of social movements, to name just a few (Calhoun, et al., 2007). In 1898, Durkheim was one of the founders of France’s first Sociological journal, L’Année Sociologique and was the first ‘Professor’ of Sociology (Milbrandt & Pearce, 2011).
Durkheim’s Aim
Durkheim dedicated his life to establishing Sociology as a robust, scientific study of society (Allan, 2005; Calhoun, et al., 2007; Milbrandt & Pearce, 2011). In this way, he saw Sociology as a science much like the natural sciences and believed it should conduct itself in the same manner.
…the sociologist should assume the state of mind of physicists, chemists and physiologists when they venture into an as yet unexplored area of their scientific field. As the sociologist penetrates into the social world he should be conscious that he is penetrating into the unknown.
(Durkheim, 1895, p. 37)
Of course, Sociology had to develop its own methodology, its own practices and approaches. Ultimately, however, the social world should be seen as the result of objective phenomena, much like the material word. The social world to Durkheim is sui generis – it is unique, of its own kind. Perhaps it is easiest here to considier society as a ‘thing’. All ‘things’ have their own properties. In the material world, those properties might include shape, colour, size, toughness, smell, etc. Durkheim’s goal was to establish a science which could objectively discover and explain the properties of the social world.
Social Facts
Those ‘things’ which Sociology should discover and explain were defined by Durkheim as ‘social facts’. Let’s start our discussion of these with a quote from the horse’s mouth:
[Social facts are] manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.
(Durkheim, 1895, p. 52)
What constitutes social facts are the beliefs, tendencies and practices of the group taken collectively .
(Durkheim, 1895, p. 54)
When I perform my duties as a brother, a husband or a citizen and carry out the commitments I have entered into, I fulfill obligations which are defined in law and custom and which are external to myself and my actions. Even when they conform to my own sentiments and when I feel their reality within me, that reality does not cease to be objective, for it is not I who have prescribed these duties; I have received them through education.
Moreover, how often does it happen that we are ignorant of the details of the obligations that we must assume, and that, to know them, we must consult the legal code and its authorised interpreters!
Similarly, the believer has discovered from birth, ready fashioned, the beliefs and practices of his religious life; if they existed before he did, it follows that they exist outside him.
The system of signs that I employ to express my thoughts, the monetary system I use to pay my debts, the credit instruments I utilise in my commercial relationships, the practices I follow in my profession, etc., all function independently of the use I make of them. Considering in turn each member of society, the foregoing remarks can be repeated for each single one of them…
Thus, there are ways of acting, thinking and feeling which possess the remarkable property of existing outside the consciousness of the individual.
(Durkheim, 1895, p 51)
In short, our norms and values – our beliefs and behaviours do not come from us as individuals but are instilled in us through our participation in society. We learn them. Social facts exist before the individual, even if they are ultimately created by individuals. And here is the really important bit:
Not only are these types of behaviour and thinking ,external to the individual, but they are endued with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him.
(Durkheim, 1895, p. 51)
Here, then, is a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.
(Durkheim, 1895, p. 52)
Social facts are considered to be coercive. They control and constrain individuals. In this way, Durkheim is taking a very deterministic approach to individual behaviour, suggesting that an individual is compelled, unconsciously forced to act, feel and believe in their value system as opposed to making a choice to do so.
Durkheim provides a useful example of how such coercion is achieved through education:
It is sufficient to observe how children are brought up… it is patently obvious that all education consists of a continual effort to impose upon the child ways of seeing, thinking and acting which he himself would not have arrived at spontaneously. From his earliest years we oblige him to eat, drink and sleep at regular hours, and to observe cleanliness, calm and obedience; later we force him to learn how to be mindful of others, to respect customs and conventions, and to work, etc.
(Durkheim, 1895, p. 54).
We are taught to be functioning adults. The education system teaches us how to dress appropriately, how to recognise and respect authority, the importance of punctuality and meritocracy, etc. This will be explored in much more detail in the ‘Education’ section of this website.
Durkheim believed statistics are a useful tool for discovering social facts as they express “a certain state of the collective mind” (Durkheim, 1895, p. 56). The ‘currents of opinion’ – the shared beliefs, ideas and practices which collectively drive the behaviour measured by statistics on rates of phenomena such as marriage, divorce, participation in religion, educational achievement and even suicide (Durkheim wrote whole book on suicide) are what Durkheim means by social facts.
To sum up, we will finish our discussion of social facts with a final definition (just as Durkheim does in Rules of Sociological Method):
A social fact is any 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 of its own, independent of its individual manifestations
(Durkheim, 1895, p. 59).
References
Allan, K. (2005). Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. London: Pine Forge Press.
Calhoun, C., Gerteis, J., Moody, J., Pfaff, S., & Virk, I. (2007). Classical Sociological Theory (2 ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Durkheim, E. (1895). The Rules of Sociological Method. London: The Free Press.
Milbrandt, T., & Pearce, F. (2011). Émile Durkheim. In G. Ritzer, & J. Stepnisky (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, Volume I: Classical Social Theorists (pp. 236-283). Oxford: Blackwell.