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Thinkers

Emile Durkheim

Positivist · Europe · 1858 to 1917

French thinker who founded sociology. He held that society is a real force, with facts of its own, that shapes the individual.

What it is

Émile Durkheim (1858 to 1917) was a French sociologist and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, one of the principal founders of modern sociology. His central claim is that society is a reality of its own kind. It is formed when individual minds interact and merge into something new that is more than the sum of its members, and it cannot be explained in biological or psychological terms alone.

He was born in Épinal in Lorraine into a devout Jewish family in which the men had been rabbis for generations, but he broke with tradition and studied philosophy at the École normale supérieure. In 1887 he was appointed at the University of Bordeaux, where he taught the first official course in sociology in France. He died in 1917, and the First World War had by then taken many of his most promising students.

The main ideas

  • Society is real. A society exists independently of any one person and has its own character. He summed up his method by telling sociologists to treat social facts as things.
  • A science of institutions. Morality, religion and custom are all part of the natural world and can be studied scientifically. Sociology, for him, is the study of institutions, the shared ways a group thinks, feels and acts.
  • Not reducible. The social cannot be explained away as psychology or biology. It arises when many minds interact, and it has properties none of them has alone.
  • Collective representations. The ideas and categories with which a society pictures the world are shared, so a person's way of seeing is shaped by their social surroundings. He also argued that logical thought itself arises out of society.
  • No view from nowhere. He rejected the idea of a "thing in itself" beyond all representation. The world, for us, exists as it is represented.
  • Modern ties. Much of his work asks how modern societies can hold together as traditional social and religious bonds weaken.

What it looks like in practice

Think of a custom such as queueing, which no one invented and which no single person controls, yet which pushes almost everyone to behave in a particular way. Durkheim would say that the custom is a social fact, and that to understand it we must look at the group, not only at what each person happens to feel. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • His study of religion asks both what religion is and how logical thought arises out of society.
  • Pragmatism and Sociology is a series of lectures published after his death in which he develops his views on knowledge.

Questions and criticism

  • Muted influence on philosophy. Compared with Marx and Weber, his influence has been somewhat muted, partly because his school was cut down by the war and partly because he took such pains to separate sociology from philosophy.
  • Is society a thing? If social facts are to be treated as things, it is fair to ask how far they can exist apart from the people who live them.
  • Can the individual be explained? His claim that the social cannot be reduced to the psychological invites the question of how individual choice fits into the picture.

Close neighbours

Karl Marx and Max Weber are the two thinkers named with him as founders of sociology, and Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were the earlier thinkers who most shaped his method.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Pierre Bourdieu · He built on Durkheim's view of society as a real force shaping thought.

Influenced by

  • Auguste Comte · He carried on Comte's aim of a science of society and gave it its first methods.

Other Positivist thinkers

Sources we used

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