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
religious reality representation
Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.
average creative belief
The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.
men historical analysis
It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.
suicide sadness people
Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;
environment relation contact
A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.
art political roles
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
goal unattainable definitions
To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
men taught difficult
It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
ideas soul essentials
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
independent exercise acting
A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.
men pressure social
Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
men causes groups
Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.
organization people different
There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.
thinking practice ideas
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.