Emile Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was a French sociologist regarded as one of the principal founders of modern sociology. His insistence that social facts are real phenomena, irreducible to individual psychology, established the discipline as an independent science.

Durkheim was born in Épinal, in Lorraine, into a family of rabbis. He turned away from a religious career and entered the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1879, training in philosophy. After teaching at provincial lycées he was appointed to a position in social science and pedagogy at the University of Bordeaux in 1887, the first such post in France, and moved to the Sorbonne in 1902.

His major books are The Division of Labour in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Suicide, published in 1897, used statistical comparisons across countries and confessions to argue that even an act as private as self-killing varies with the integration and regulation of the social groups to which a person belongs. He coined the term anomie for the condition of normative breakdown.

Durkheim founded and edited L'Année sociologique, training a generation of researchers including Marcel Mauss, Maurice Halbwachs, and Robert Hertz. His son André was killed in the First World War, a loss from which Durkheim never recovered; he died in Paris in 1917.

The given name Émile is the French form of the Latin Aemilius, the name of a major Roman gens whose origin is uncertain but often linked to aemulus, 'rival'. It became popular in nineteenth-century France through Rousseau's Émile. He carried it as the founder of a discipline.