SOCIAL FACTS – EMILE DURKHEIM

UPSC SOCIOLOGY – Paper 1 – Chapter 4 – SOCIOLOGICAL THINKERS – Emile Durkheim- Division of labour, social fact, suicide, religion and society.

• One of the pioneers of the discipline of Sociology.
• Founder of functionalist tradition in Sociology.
• Laid a scientific foundation for the new discipline.
• He gave a macro view of society.
• Individual is subordinate to society and is also governed by it.
• Defined the subject matter of Sociology and attempted to develop a science of society.
• He often used methods of multivariate analysis.
• According to him, a social science should
  • Deal with specific subject matter and not total knowledge that is around.
  • Aim at identifying general types rather than describing individual types.
  • Study objective reality.
  • Yield general principles or laws.
  • Use methods similar to natural sciences.

SOCIAL FACTS

• Tried to understand society in terms of some universal laws.
• Social facts are visualised as akin to natural facts.
• Just as behaviour of matter in nature can be regarded as a reaction to natural stimuli, behaviour of men can also be seen as a response to the external constraints of such social facts.
• Task of sociologist is to study social facts as things as we study things in the natural world.
• Social facts are ways of acting, thinking and feeling which are external to the individual and are endowed with the power of coercion by reason of which they control him.
• Social facts exist outside the individual as a force which cause the individual to think, act and feel in a particular manner.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIAL FACTS

• Externality – social facts exist outside the individual. They are sui-generis.
• Constraining – exercise constraining influence over the individual action.
• Generality – He rejects the study of exceptions and focuses upon identification of the general types.
• Independence – social facts are independent of the will of the individuals and individuals cannot change the social facts.

TYPES OF  SOCIAL FACTS

• Culture, social institutions, morality, collective concience and social currents are examples of non-material social facts.
• Styles of architecture, forms of technology, division of labour and legal codes are examples of material social facts.

SOCIAL FACTS AS OBJECTIVE REALITY

• Social facts should be studied as things.
• Rules of Classification
  • Structural or morphological facts – the facts which gives a particular society its appearance.
  • Institutional social facts – includes religion, division of labour, rate of suicide, etc
  • Non-institutional social facts – may rise spontaneously and may not sustain like crowd behaviour or social currents.
• Social facts are considered normal when they are present in their original form and fulfill functions for society.
• They can be considered dysfunctional in their pathological state.

CRITICISMS

• Heildleman considers that Durkheim is more concerned about making a society rather than describing a methodology for it.
• Merton discarded the universalistic and general theories and recommended middle range theories.
• Stephen Lukes condemns that Durkheim has glorified empiricism and neglected individual subjectivity.
• Weber says that social facts lie inside an individual and their influences are on the basis of individual’s own interpretation of the social fact.