Émile Durkheim turned suicide statistics into the founding case for sociology
The son of eight generations of rabbis, Émile Durkheim chose a secular path and argued that society is more than the sum of its members. By comparing suicide rates among Catholics and Protestants, he showed that even the most private act has social patterns, and he built France's first sociology department to study them.
Durkheim was born in Épinal, Lorraine, on 15 April 1858, into a devout Alsatian Jewish family; his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were rabbis. He began at a rabbinical school but soon switched, and lived a secular life while keeping close ties to family and community. He got into the École normale supérieure in 1879 on his third try, in a remarkable intake that included Jean Jaurès and Henri Bergson, and wrote his Latin thesis on Montesquieu.
French universities then had no place for social science, so he taught philosophy in provincial schools. A year studying in Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig in 1885 to 1886 taught him to value concrete empirical detail over tidy Cartesian abstraction, and he admired Wilhelm Wundt. In 1887 Bordeaux gave him the country's first course in social science, and the same year Louise Dreyfus became his wife; their children were Marie and André.
The 1890s were astonishingly productive. The Division of Labour in Society appeared in 1893, The Rules of Sociological Method and a new sociology department in 1895, Suicide in 1897, and the journal L'Année sociologique in 1898. His rules demanded that a social fact be explained by other social facts, not by the individual studying it, and that comparison take priority. Like Herbert Spencer, he likened society to an organism whose parts serve functions, which makes him a forerunner of functionalism. His phrase collective consciousness has passed into everyday speech.
In 1902 he reached the Sorbonne, and his lectures became compulsory for all students there, giving him wide sway over future teachers. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, which traced religion to social rather than divine sources, came out in 1912. The First World War killed many of his former students, and his son André died at the front in December 1915. Durkheim never recovered; he suffered a stroke and died on 15 November 1917.
Source: Émile Durkheim
