Émile Durkheim
French sociologist and philosopher (1858–1917), born in Épinal into a Jewish family of rabbis, trained at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and appointed in 1887 professor of pedagogy and social science at the University of Bordeaux, where he created the first European university course specifically devoted to sociology as an autonomous discipline. Regarded, alongside Marx and Weber, as one of the three great founders of modern sociology, Durkheim devoted his theoretical work to establishing sociology as a science with its own method and object, independent of both individual psychology and speculative philosophy. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) he formulates his central methodological principle: one must 'treat social facts as things', that is, as external, coercive realities upon the individual that cannot be explained by personal psychological motivations but only by other social facts. His work Suicide (1897), a pioneering empirical study based on comparative statistical data across countries and religious confessions, demonstrates that even an act apparently as intimate and individual as suicide follows measurable social patterns, distinguishing four fundamental types — egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic — according to the degree of the individual's social integration and regulation, and became a foundational methodological model for all subsequent empirical sociology. His concept of anomie, a state of social normative deregulation that arises when collective norms lose their capacity to regulate individual aspirations, especially in periods of accelerated social change, remains one of his most frequently cited contributions in contemporary sociology. In The Division of Labour in Society (1893) he analyses the transition from traditional societies, held together by a 'mechanical solidarity' based on the similarity of their members, to modern societies, held together by an 'organic solidarity' based on the functional interdependence generated by the division of labour. His final work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), analyses Australian Aboriginal totemism to propose a general theory of religion as the symbolic expression of society itself, worshipping itself in the form of the sacred.