Durkheim starts from Comte’s fundamental idea that society should be seen as a living organism. He also agreed with the assumption that societies only hold together when they somehow share common feelings and beliefs. However, he criticizes Comte in his evolutionist perspective, as he understands that the peoples that succeed the previous ones are not necessarily superior, they are just different in their structure, their values, their knowledge, their organizational form. He understands that the sequence of societies is better adapted to the likeness of a tree whose branches are oriented in opposite directions than an evolutionist geometric line. Spencer was also criticized by Durkheim who, in general, extended this criticism to a number of other thinkers. According to Durkheim, many sociologists did not work on the object itself, but according to the pre-established idea about the phenomenon. Thus, he understood that Spencer’s perspective of analysis did not define society, but contemplated his particular view of how societies effectively were. He also pondered how it was possible to find the supreme formula of social life when the different types of societies, their main functions and their laws were still ignored. How then to undertake a study of their evolution when one does not know exactly what they are and where they came from.
However, first I would like to map out some points that seem fundamental to understanding Durkheim’s thought, whose basis is based on some fundamental assumptions or notions to be detailed below:
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Social facts must be treated as things;
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The analysis of social facts requires prior reflection and avoidance of preconceived ideas;
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The set of collective beliefs and feelings are the basis of society’s cohesion;
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Highlights the study of the moral of individuals; It is
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Society itself creates internal coercion mechanisms that make individuals accept the established rules in one way or another (the explanation of social facts must be sought in society and not in individuals – psychic states, in fact, are consequences and not causes of social phenomena)
DURKHEIM’S SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD
Central ideas of Durkheim’s sociological method
We can say that Durkheim’s sociological method presents some central ideas, which run through the entire range of his sociological vision. Are they:
1) Contraposition to the philosophical knowledge of society: Philosophy has a deductive method of knowledge, which starts from the attempt to explain society from the knowledge of human nature. That is, for philosophers, knowledge of society can be done from within, from knowledge of the nature of the individual. As society is formed by individuals, philosophy has the practice of explaining society (and social facts) as a common expression of these individuals. On the other hand, if there is an individual nature that is collectively expressed in social organization, then it can be said that the history of humanity has a meaning, which must be the continuous search for expression of this human nature. For Adam Smith, for example, given that man is, by nature, selfish, motivated by economic factors and prone to exchanges, the free market society would be the full realization of this nature. For Hegel, human history tended to increasingly affirm the human spirit of individuation and freedom. For Marx, the history of society was the history of domination and class struggle, and the tendency would be the historical affirmation, through successive revolutions, of human freedom and equality, through socialism.
For Durkheim, these conceptions were unbearable, as they were deductions and had no scientific validity, they were beliefs based on conceptions about human nature. Durkheim believed that knowledge of sociological facts must come from outside, from the empirical observation of facts.
2) Social phenomena are external to individuals: society would not simply be the realization of human nature, but, on the contrary, what is considered human nature is, in fact, a product of society itself. Social phenomena are considered by Durkheim as external to individuals, and must be known not through psychological means, through the search for reasons internal to individuals, but externally to society itself and in the interaction of social facts. Making an analogy with biology, life, for Durkheim, would be a synthesis, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, in the same way that society is a synthesis of individuals that produces phenomena different from those that occur in individual consciousnesses (that is, justify the difference between sociology and psychology).
3) Social facts are an objective reality: that is, for Durkheim, social facts have an objective reality and, therefore, are subject to external observation. They must therefore be treated as «things».
4) The group (and the group conscience) exerts pressure (coercion) on the individual: Durkheim reverses the philosophical view that society is the realization of individual consciences. For him, individual consciences are formed by society through coercion. The formation of the social being, done in large part by education, is the assimilation by the individual of a series of norms, moral, religious, ethical, behavioral principles, etc. that guide the conduct of the individual in society. Therefore, man, more than a maker of society, is a product of it.
is a «social fact»?
In the words of Durkheim himself
«A social fact is every way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exercising an external constraint on the individual; or again, every way of acting that is general throughout a given society and, at the same time, has an existence itself, regardless of its individual manifestations».
Or yet
«The social fact is everything that is produced in and by society, or even, what interests and affects the group in some way».
Social facts, for Durkheim, exist outside and before individuals (outside individual consciences) and exert a coercive force on them (eg beliefs, ways of acting and thinking exist before individuals and coercively condition their behavior) .
Durkheim argues, contrary to much philosophical thought, that «we are victims of the illusion that makes us believe that we ourselves elaborate what is imposed on us from the outside». And, responding to those who do not believe in this social coercion that individuals suffer because one cannot feel it, he argues that «the air is still heavy even though we do not feel its weight». For Durkheim, the social fact is a result of common life, and he proposes to isolate them in order to study them. In this way, sociology should be essentially concerned with the study of social facts, in an objective and scientific way.
On the observation of social facts:
For Durkheim, science should explain, not prescribe medicine. This, for him, was the problem of philosophy, it tried to understand human nature, because then, everything that was in accordance with this nature was considered good, and everything that was not was considered bad.
For Durkheim, the observation of social facts should follow certain rules, such as:
A. Social facts must be treated as THINGS.
For Durkheim, «everything that is given and that imposes itself on observation is a thing». Neither the existence of human nature nor the sense of progress in time, as admitted by Comte for example, made sense, according to Durkheim, within the sociological method. They are a conception of the spirit. Durkheim, in this sense, is essentially an objectivist, empiricist and inductivist, unlike Comte, the founder of sociology, who was considered by him to be subjectivist and philosophical.
B. A second important conception in Durkheim’s sociological method is that, for him, the sociologist, when studying social facts, should strip himself of all feelings and all pre-notions in relation to the object.
C. Third, the researcher should define precisely the things the study is about so that it is known, and he knows, well what is at issue and what he must explain.
D. And fourth, sensation, the basis of the inductive and empiricist method, can be subjective. For this reason, any sensitive data that runs the risk of being too personal to the observer should be removed.
On the construction of social types
Another important issue in Durkheim’s method stems from the need to group societies into social types, according to their similarity. For the sociological method, neither the perspective of historians, who saw a very large diversity of societies in history, nor the philosophical perspective, which grouped all historical evolution in the idea of humanity, through which the realization of human nature permeated. According to Durkheim, we escape this alternative as soon as we recognize that, between the confused multitude of historical societies (the infinity of different societies described by historians) and the single, but ideal, concept of humanity (of philosophers), there are intermediaries who are the social species.
The constitution of these social types, of paramount importance for sociology since Durkheim stated that the conception of normal and pathological is relative to each social type, should follow a method: (a) study each society individually; (b) constitute accurate and detailed monographs; (c) compare them finding similarities and differences; (d) classify peoples into groups according to these similarities and differences.
This would be, for Durkheim, a method only admissible for a science of observation. The study and representation of these social types was described by him as a specific area of sociology, called Social Morphology, in a clear allusion to similar studies in biology.
On the explanation of social facts
Durkheim claimed that his predecessors in sociology (Comte and Spencer) explained social facts by their usefulness. Thus, for Comte, progress exists to improve the human condition, or for Spencer, to make man happier. The family, for Spencer, had been transformed by the need to reconcile the interests of parents, children and society more and more perfectly. Thus, sociologists normally tended to deduce the fact from the ends, that is, the supreme explanation of collective life would consist in showing how it derives from human nature in general. For Durkheim, however, this method was wrong. According to him
«Showing how a fact is useful does not explain how it came to be or how it is what it is». «To explain a social phenomenon, it is necessary to research separately the efficient cause it produces and the function it fulfills» . Despite this, «to explain a fact of a vital order it is not enough to explain the cause on which it depends, it is also necessary, at least in most cases, to find the part that fits it in the establishment of this general harmony».
For Durkheim, instead of…