Émile Durkheim

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 fro…