Émile Durkheim
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic : they presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred (profane, sacré). This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought." --The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), tr. Joseph Ward Swain |
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Émile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist whose contributions were instrumental in the formation of sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology helped establish sociology within the academy as an accepted "science sociale" (social science). During his lifetime, Durkheim gave many lectures, and published numerous sociological studies on subjects such as education, crime, religion, suicide, and many other aspects of society. He is often referred to as "The Father of Sociology". His contemporary relevance is still quite high, being referenced in works on as diverse as midnight movies, sacred-profane dichotomy, subcultural theory and folk taxonomies.
See also
- Positivism
- Antipositivism
- Structural functionalism
- Social research
- Organic solidarity
- Anomie
- Normlessness
- Social structure
- Social fact
- Collective effervescence
- Collective consciousness
Selected works
- Montesquieu's contributions to the formation of social science (1892)
- The Division of Labour in Society (1893)
- Rules of the Sociological Method (1895)
- On the Normality of Crime (1895)
- Suicide (1897)
- The Prohibition of Incest and its Origins (1897), published in L'Année Sociologique, vol. 1, pp. 1–70
- Sociology and its Scientific Domain (1900), translation of an Italian text entitled "La sociologia e il suo dominio scientifico"
- The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)
- Who Wanted War? (1914), in collaboration with Ernest Denis
- Germany Above All (1915)
Published posthumously:
- Education and Sociology (1922)
- Sociology and Philosophy (1924)
- Moral Education (1925)
- Socialism (1928)