Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was born in Epinal, France. He studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure and later in his career became the first professor of sociology at the Sorbonne. Durkheim founded sociology as a distinct discipline within the social sciences. He achieved this by identifying a new object of study, social facts, and by applying to this object the methods of a positivistic science. Durkheim's work can be divided into two categories: those works attending to the foundations and methods of sociology, and those works in which he applies these methods to particular social facts.

Durkheim was not the first to attempt to study society in a scientific manner. His own acknowledged intellectual predecessors, Auguste Comte, Charles de Montesquieu, and Herbert Spencer, studied some aspect of social organization and cohesion without generalizing their method and extending the scope of their analysis. Durkheim was, however, the first to resist systematically the idea that social phenomena were to be explained and accounted for by their reduction to other phenomena. For example, he rejected the notions that economic activity was nothing more than transactions between individual agents; that religious custom could be explained as nothing more than psychological events taking place inside people's heads; that the state or nation is nothing more than the aggregate of its individual members. In these and other cases, Durkheim insisted that there was a distinct social fact to be examined and explained in the same way that there were distinct psychological, economic, and biological facts. Thus the subject matter of sociology is the objectively existing social facts of such phenomena as trade, suicide, religious practice, and so on. What makes all these facts social is their connection within the social organism, the social solidarity that institutions and practices confer, and the external coercive power that they exercise over the lives of individuals and groups. There is, therefore, for Durkheim, a nonreducible connectedness between social facts and a normativeness to them. With this idea of society in hand, Durkheim categorized and explained differences between tribal, traditional, and modern societies, most notably referring to social solidarity of traditional societies as mechanical.

Durkheim's understanding of scientific method was standardly positivistic. What is important is how he applied these methods to society and how he drew significant conclusions from the results.

First, he argued that sociological explanation is functional rather than causal. By this he meant that to understand a social fact, one must understand it in relation to the social whole--one must know how it functions within the web of social relations. Social facts are thus explained by reference to other social facts rather than being explained by nonsocial, say biological or economic, facts. This idea of functional explanation goes together with a regard for the importance and significance of empirical data. For example, by collecting empirical data on suicide rates in different countries and between kinds of individuals, Durkheim drew conclusions about the social and moral character of different forms of society.

Second, by employing the notion of functional explanation, Durkheim introduces the idea of normal and pathological social facts. In this regard, Durkheim's notion of "Anomie" identified a pathological characteristic of modern societies where the division of labor so isolates individuals from the organic social network that society loses its capacity to check and influence their perspective and desires. . .

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