Emile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim ( 1858 – 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
Society as collective representation
Regarding the society itself, like social institutions in general, Durkheim saw it as a set of social facts. Even more than "what society is", Durkheim was interested in answering "how is a society created" and "what holds a society together". In his Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim attempted to answer the question of what holds the society together. He assumes that humans are inherently egoistic, but norms, beliefs and values (collective consciousness) form the moral basis of the society, resulting in social integration.Collective consciousness is of key importance to the society, its requisite function without which the society cannot survive. Collective consciousness produces the society and holds it together, and at the same time individuals produce collective consciousness through their interactions. Through collective consciousness human beings become aware of one another as social beings, not just animals.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness.

 

In Suicide (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. Overall, Durkheim treated suicide as a social fact, explaining variations in its rate on a macro level, considering society-scale phenomena such as lack of connections between people (group attachment) and lack of regulations of behavior, rather than individuals' feelings and motivations.

Strength and Weakness:

It is right to see Durkheim's work as a unity of thought, even though it shows development between works and within them. It is possible to see The Division of Labour, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life as phases, but...
It will not do, in short, to divide Durkheim's thought into mutant and disconnected phases labelled evolutionary, metaphysical, empirical and functional-institutional and to assert that these reflect, in order, his four major published works. What all four works have in common - and this applies also to the books posthumously published as well as the articles that appear in L'Année and elsewhere - is a social metaphysic and a methodology rooted in the conviction that took shape in Durkheim's mind as he wrote The Division of Labour: that all human behaviour above the strictly physiological must be regarded as emanating from, or else sharply conditioned by, society: that is, by the totality of groups, norms and institutions within which every human being consciously and unconsciously exists from the moment of his birth. (Nisbet, 1970, 87-88).
For Durkheim any need for reduction did not go beyond the social. The social is the concern of sociology, and if it wasn't then there was no sociology. The collective conscience, or the conscience collective, exists above and beyond individual psychology. This is our understanding of and commitment to society through its many norms. The Rules of Sociological Method (1982), itself an interesting title, argues the case for social facts. We are born into collective institutions and we face them in making ourselves individuals. Suicide (1951) is where he demonstrated the level of the social, that its rate of change is reflected in collective events. There is a more than a hint towards the symbolic (linguistic) too with collective representations, being the communication of general ideas and beliefs.
Social facts rise above individual circumstances and have their own existence. They meet us from the outside, as it were, and seem to strike everyone as being the same. Durkheim categorised them into mechanistic and organic, but did not give much in the way of a causal relationship of development, a legitimate area of sociological enquiry at the social level, but said more about how they functioned.
In The Division of Labour in Society (1982) Durkheim was interested in the moral density of society - how people interact. This "moral" meant the method of interaction.
Mechanistic society was self-same in its parts, well defined as a collective conscience and strongly disciplined.
Increasing specialisation and diversity leads to organic solidarity from mechanistic solidarity and a weakening in the collective conscience.
Nevertheless the collective conscience is important because it underpins the potential anarchy of individualistic economic contracts with shared assumptions and understandings. An example would be, "My word is my bond" in the City of London, which came from the British upper class society of gentlemen. The guiding collective conscience however is more far reaching than this example.