Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheimwas 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...
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth15 April 1858
character names historical
There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
men class luxury
It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.
science individual type
Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.
order voice giving
Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves.
pain cry socialism
Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
feelings variables limits
It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
taken character sadness
Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.
suicide order hallucinations
Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
men meditation he-man
The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.
liberty economic profit
I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty.
exercise personality definitions
This solidarity can grow only in inverse ratio to personality.... Solidarity which comes from likenesses is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it.... when this solidarity exercises its force, our personality vanishes, as our definition permits us to say, for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective life.
sad sorrow world
Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
men moral disappear
Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.
religious loss men
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.