Émile Durkheim biography

Émile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917). Born in the town of Lorraine, France in 1858, a descendant of rabbis. In spite of this, from an early age, he was immersed in laicization processes which produced the abandonment of Judaism. During his development, he witnessed the period of great economic and industrial expansion of his country; the loss of the Franco-German war and the occupation of his native city in 1870 in the framework of the Franco-Prussian War. After finishing school and to change the hostile environment, he moved to Paris to prepare to enter the Normal Superior School, receiving the title of philosopher in 1882.

Soon after, he was a high school teacher and then of Pedagogy and Social Sciences at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Bordeaux. While lecturing he worked on his doctoral thesis based on the division of social work, and over time he theorized about the rules of the sociological method. This postulate was so important that in his Sociology courses he was an indispensable subject in the discipline. The following year, in 1897, he published Suicide.

Until that moment his contribution in the consolidation of sociology as an independent discipline was remarkable, following fully the positivist line undertaken by Auguste Comte. The illustration was an influence for his works, for example, interest in science and social reformism. Although he never lost the conservative tradition that characterized him. Emile Durkheim was closely related to the academic circles of France, legitimized sociology and his work was a dominant force in the development of sociology, and in particular, of sociological theory.

Emile Durkheim, like the Catholic counterrevolutionaries, feared social disorder. Maybe that’s why his works dealt with the disorders that produced social changes. He also studied issues of relevance in that period such as labor conflicts, the overthrow of the ruling class, discord between the church and the state and the birth of political anti-Semitism. His theory was that social disorders were not important or their results were not convincing in the modern world and could be treated by inducing social reforms. A postulate of the classical theorists.

His ideas opposed the theories of his contemporary Karl Marx, who postulated that these episodes of disorder were inherent in the problems that society contained. Therefore, Marx’s ideas about the need for social revolution were radically opposed to those of Emile Durkheim’s reformism. The theory of French was named after classical sociological theory, which predominated in it was the Durkheimian interest in order and reform.

Durkheim eventually began to analyze the influence of the macrostructures of society. He also analyzed the thoughts and actions of individuals, in a few words his intention was to analyze society itself. He contributed enormously to the formati on of the functional structural theory, which focuses on the analysis of social structure and culture, understanding that all social phenomena must be understood from social beliefs and practices; valuing the social over the individual.

This supposed the distance of sociology with philosophy because it gave a clear and particular identity to the sociological discipline. At that time the distinctive object of sociology was the study of social facts. The social facts then were the object of study, as social facts should be studied empirically and not philosophically.

Later, he built the differentiation of the concept. There were the social facts of material order and those of immaterial order. Emile in most of his works focused on intangibles, norms, and values, or in broader terms, culture. During his professional life, he also studied the division of social work, founded on two ideal types of society. A primitive type, characterized by a society with little or no division of labor. The other of modern character, characterized by organic solidarity, presents a division of labor.

During the study of the dynamics and functioning of complex societies, the category that Durkheim adopts in his thought emerges: anomie. When he begins to analyze the functioning of the two types of society he finds that classification, he understood it as the lack of social solidarity, applied to primitive society, he associated that this was due to an impact of modernization. Precisely, Durkheim found in the social contract a factor of anomie, since there is no guarantee of order.

This great sociologist who promoted several theories and research methods, has also been the basis for future sociological theories, left a fairly broad written legacy, the main works are:

l Social Work (1893), The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897) and The Elemental Forms of Religious Life (1912). Other works no less important are Lessons of Sociology (1912), Education and sociology (1924) and Education: its nature, its function (1928).

The impact of Emile Durkheim has been exceptional, his functionalist theory focuses on the functioning, regularities, and norms of society. In this theory, the function is a concept that expresses the existing relationships between the elements of a group and expresses the dependence produced between these elements. Applied to sociology, it is understood as follows: the changes that cause harmonious equilibrium in society are considered functional; but if it does not, it is dysfunctional; and if it does not produce changes, it is not functional.

Actually, while this man developed some of his theories and postulates, he suffered the disappearance of his son the linguist André Durkheim, who was fighting in the Bulgarian during the First World War. Finally, it was confirmed that he had died and it devastated the emotional and physical health of the father of sociology, from which he never recovered. He died on November 15, 1917, in the Parisian capital, at age 59.