Émile Durkheim is read about 2,002 times a day, in 104 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He turned the study of society into a science. Before Durkheim, social thought was philosophy and speculation; after him, it was data, method, and structural analysis - the template every sociology department still follows.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
In their own words 10
, Kant postulates God, since without this hypothesis morality is unintelligible.
There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
This work had its origins in the question of the relations of the individual to social solidarity.
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About this person
Émile Durkheim was born 15 April 1858 in France and spent his career proving that collective life could be studied with the rigor of natural science. His 1893 work The Division of Labour in Society examined how modern economies hold together when old religious bonds fray. In 1895 he published The Rules of Sociological Method, set up Europe's first sociology department, and became France's first professor of the discipline. His 1897 monograph Suicide used statistics on Catholic and Protestant populations to show that even the most private act follows social patterns, splitting sociology off from psychology and philosophy. He founded the journal L'Année sociologique in 1898 and in 1912 published The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, a theory of religion built by comparing aboriginal and modern societies. He remained the dominant force in French intellectual life until his death on 15 November 1917, leaving behind concepts like "collective consciousness" that outlasted the academy.
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