Durkheim's Vision of Sociology

Durkheim's most basic contribution to sociology was to give it a subject matter of its own, distinct from psychology, biology or philosophy: what he called social facts. His central insight was that when individuals come together in sufficient numbers to form a group -- a team, a religious community, a nation -- something is produced that exists at a level above and different from any single individual: an 'emergent' level of reality. A cricket team is more than eleven separate people; a nation is more than a collection of its citizens. It is this emergent, collective level -- institutions like religion or the family, or shared values like patriotism -- that sociology, in Durkheim's view, should study, and no other discipline studies it in quite this way. His second major claim was more difficult to establish: that sociology could be a properly empirical, scientific discipline, on a par with the natural sciences, even though its subject matter -- collective entities and shared beliefs -- cannot be directly seen or touched the way a tree or a person can. Durkheim's answer was that although social facts are not directly observable, they are indirectly observable through the regular patterns of behaviour they produce. His own famous study of suicide illustrates this: any single suicide is a deeply individual, seemingly unpredictable event, but the suicide rate of a whole community, calculated across hundreds of thousands of cases, turns out to be a stable, patterned social fact that can be studied scientifically. This is what allowed Durkheim to define a social fact precisely: it is external to any individual (it exists befor …