DURKHEIM

Durkheim's approach to analysing social life



Durkheim's approach to analysing social life

Introduction

David Emile Durkheim was born in 1858, he was a French sociologist. He worked with Karl Marx and Max Weber for establishing academic discipline. The called as father of sociology and principal architect of social science. One of the most important works of Durkheim was about how societies can maintain peace and unity in the modern world. According to him the world was changing and there are no normal ties between religion and traditional socials. In the modern social institutions are taking places (Allan 2005 pp. 104).

He did his first work on the division of labour in society in the year 1893. He became the first professor of France in sociology and established European department of sociology. In the year 1897 he did study on suicide. In this study he compared the suicide rated between Protestant and Catholic. He did various researches on modern social and distinguished social science from philosophy and psychology (Allan 2005 pp. 104).

He also did work on religion and presented various theories on religion and compared cultural and social life in modern societies. . Durkheim's point view was that sociology is a justifiable science. He further did work on the previous researches like he refined the definition of positivism which was set by Auguste Comte. According to Durkheim sociology was an institute of science and his goal was to discover social facts which have structures.

He also worked as a major participant in the field of structural functionalism. He gave perspective in the fields of sociology and anthropology. According to him social science is a holistic field which means that sociology does not study the attributes on individual scale instead it studies societies at a large scale. He played a dominant role in the field of intellectual life in French till 1917. He presented many studies and research papers on different field like morality, religion, education, law and many other topics (Allan 2005 pp. 104).

Establishing sociology

Durkheim gave very good statements about sociology and even explained that how the work on these statements can be done. His main aim was to make sociology as a science. He struggled a lot to make sociology as a part of other sciences. For making sociology as a part of science he said that sociology is not to support the other sciences instead it itself is a science.

In order to give sociology place in science it was very necessary to make its objectives and concepts clear. So that they can be distinguish from philosophy and psychology. Sociology must have it own methodologies to become part of other sciences. For this also he wrote that there are groups of phenomena in each society which different from those which are studied at natural sciences (Bottomore 1978 pp. 8). 

According to him the basic aim of sociology is to find the structural social facts. Making sociology as an independent and make it recognize as a separate field is one of the most largest and ...