send mail to support@abhimanu.com mentioning your email id and mobileno registered with us! if details not recieved
Resend Opt after 60 Sec.
By Loging in you agree to Terms of Services and Privacy Policy
Claim your free MCQ
Please specify
Sorry for the inconvenience but we’re performing some maintenance at the moment. Website can be slow during this phase..
Please verify your mobile number
Login not allowed, Please logout from existing browser
Please update your name
Subscribe to Notifications
Stay updated with the latest Current affairs and other important updates regarding video Lectures, Test Schedules, live sessions etc..
Your Free user account at abhipedia has been created.
Remember, success is a journey, not a destination. Stay motivated and keep moving forward!
Refer & Earn
Enquire Now
My Abhipedia Earning
Kindly Login to view your earning
Support
In 1887, the first chair in social science for Durkheim was created by the French Government at the University of Bordeaux. Durkheim was therefore, explicitly concerned with outlining the nature and scope of Sociology. Durkheim considered social sciences to be distinct from natural sciences because social sciences dealt with human relationships. However the method used in the natural sciences could be used in the social sciences as well.
Durkheim accepted the general evolutionary theories of his day and Comte’s presumption that laws guide human progress. Durkheim also embraced Comte’s belief that a science of society, based upon empirical observation, was possible and necessary for the creation of a better social order.
Indeed, Durkheim provided sociology with some of its first examples of sound methodological and statistical analysis. Sociology was just emerging as a distinctive discipline in Durkheim’s lifetime.
In his book Montesquieu and Rousseau, published in 1892, Durkheim laid down the general conditions for the establishment of a social science (which also applies to Sociology).
Science, he pointed out, is not coextensive with human knowledge or thought. Not every type of question the mind can formulate can be tested by science. Thus, science deals with a specified areas- or a subject matter of its own, not with total knowledge.
Science is concerned with things, objective realities. For social science to exist it must have a concrete subject matter. So it is important to look to things as they appear in this world.
Science does not describe individuals but types or classes of subject mater. If human societies be classified then they help us in arriving at general rules and discover regularities of behaviour.
The subject matter of a science yields general principles or ‘laws’. If societies were not subject to regularities, no social science would be possible.
Finally, to discern the uniformities, types and laws of society we need a method. The methods of science applicable in the field of the natural sciences are valid within the social field.
The criteria of a social science, which Durkheim set forth at the beginning of his first published world, remained to the end of his life the fundamental criteria of social science and the identifying attributes of the field he called ‘sociology’.
Therefore, drawing heavily from his predecessors Durkheim aims at establishing sociology as scientific discipline. Durkheim’s methodology essentially flows from his views on sociology as a science and his definition of sociology, where he says, “sociology is a study of social facts”. Further in this direction he devises methods of comparative analysis, indirect experiment, statistical techniques, typologies, causal functionalism and objective manifestations. All these must be considered components of Durkheim’s methodology.
The ‘subject’ of sociology, according to Durkheim must be specific. And it must be distinguished from the ‘subjects’ of all other sciences and must be such as to be observed and explained. In his book “The Rules of Sociological Method published in 1895” Durkheim is concerned with the second task and calls social facts the subject matter of sociology. He defines social facts as “ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of correction by reason of which they control him”.
Therefore, For Durkheim ‘subject’ of sociology is the social fact, and that social facts must be regarded as ‘things’. Durkheim based his scientific vision of sociology on the fundamental principle, i.e., the objective reality of social facts. In order to understand the social facts it is important to understand clearly the characterstics of social facts.
Social facts, according to Durkheim, exist external to individual consciences. For example domestic or civic or contractual obligations are defined, externally to the individual, in laws and customs. Religious beliefs and practices exist outside and prior to the individual. An individual takes birth in a society and leaves it, however social facts are already given in society. For example language continues to function independently of any single individual.
There are two related senses in which social facts are external to the individual.
First, every individual is born into an ongoing society, which already has a definite organisation or structure. There are values, norms, beliefs and practices which the individual finds readymade at birth and which he learns through the process of socialization. Since these social phenomena exist prior to the individual and have an objective reality, they are external to the individual.
Secondly, social facts are external to the individual in the sense that any one individual is only a single element within the totality of relationships, which constitutes a society.
The other characteristic of social fact is that it exercises a constraint on individuals. Social fact is recognized because it forces itself on the individual. For example, the institutions of law, education, beliefs etc. are already given to everyone from without. They are commanding and obligatory for all. When the individual attempts to resist social facts they assert themselves. The assertion may range from a mild ridicule to social isolation and moral and legal sanction. According to Durkheim sometimes in the case non- institutionalized collectivities, there is constraint, when in a crowd, a feeling or thinking imposes itself on everyone. Such a phenomenon is typically social because its basis, its subject is the group as a whole and not one individual in particular. According to Giddens , in most circumstances individuals conform to social facts and therefore do not consciously feel their constraining character.
While discussing Constrain as a characteristic of Social fact Durkheim counters the utilitarian viewpoint, For social order, it was necessary for society to exercise some control or pressure over its members.
A social fact is that which has more or less a general occurrence in a society. Also it is independent of the personal features of individuals or universal attributes of human nature. Examples are the beliefs, feelings and practices of the group taken collectively.
Durkheim adds that social facts cannot be defined merely by their universality. Thus a thought or movement repeated by all individuals is not thereby a social fact. What is important is the corporate or “collective aspects of the beliefs, tendencies and practices of a group that characterize truly social phenomena”. Social facts is characterized by general features of a phenomenon and not specific to an individual or a group.
Therefore, they are real and exist independent of this individual’s will or desire. They are external to individuals and are capable of exercising constraint upon them. In other words they are coercive in nature. Further social facts exist in their own right. They are independent of individual manifestations. The true nature of social facts lies in the collective or associational characteristic inherent in society. Legal codes and customs, moral rules, religious beliefs and practices, language etc. are all social facts.
In his anaysis different type of social facts can be identified. Durkheim saw social facts as lying along a continuum.
First, on the one extreme are structural or morphological social phenomena. They make up the substratum of collective life. By this he meant the number and nature of elementary parts of which society is composed, the way in which the morphological constituents are arranged. In this category of social facts are included: the distribution of population over the surface of the territory, the forms of dwellings, nature of communication system etc.
Secondly, there are institutionalized forms of social facts. They are more or less general and widely spread in society. They represent the collective nature of the society as a whole. Under this category fall legal and moral rules, religious dogma and established beliefs and practices prevalent in the society.
Thirdly, there are social facts, which are non-institutionalized. Such social facts have not yet acquired crystallized forms. They lie beyond the institutional norms of society. Also these categories of social facts have not attained a total objective and independent existence comparable to the institutionalized ones. Also their externally to and ascendancy over and above individuals is not yet complete. These social facts have been termed as socio-currents. For example, sporadic currents of opinion generated in specific situations: enthusiasm generated in a crowd; transitory outbreaks in an assembly of people; sense of indignity or pity aroused by specific incidents, etc.
All the above-mentioned social facts form a continuum and constitute a social milieu of society.
Durkheim made an important distinction in terms of normal and pathological social facts. A social fact is normal when it is generally encountered in a society of a certain type at a certain phase in its evolution. Every deviation from this standard is a pathological fact. For example, some degree of crime is inevitable in any society. Hence according to Durkheim crime to that extent is a normal fact. However, an extraordinary increase in the rate of crime is pathological. A general weakening in the moral condemnation of crime and certain type of economic crisis leading to anarchy in society are other examples of pathological facts.
Durkheim also describes the method to study it. His sociological method rests firmly on the experience of biology, which had emerged by then as a science of living beings. In his book “The Rules of Sociological Method published in 1895”, he describes various rules to be followed by social investigators.
The first rule the Durkheim gives is: “consider social facts as things”. While studying social facts as ‘things’ three rules have to be followed in order to be objectives:
All preconceptions must be eradicated. The sociologist must adopt an emotionally neutral attitude towards what he sets out to investigate.
The sociological has to formulate the concepts precisely. At the outset of the research the sociologist is likely to have very little knowledge of the phenomenon in question. Therefore he must proceed by conceptualizing his subject matter in terms of those properties, which are external enough to be observed. Thus in Division of Labour the type of solidarity in a society can be perceived by looking at the type of law-repressive or restitutive, criminal or civil-which is dominant in the society.
When the sociologist undertakes the investigation of some order of social facts he must consider them from an aspect that is independent of their individual manifestations. The objectivity of social facts depends on their being separated from individual facts, which express them. They exist in the form of legal’ rules, moral regulations, proverbs, social conventions, etc. It is these that the sociologist must study to gain an understanding of social life.
Social facts can also be seen as “currents of opinion”, which, impel certain groups either to more marriages, for example, or to more suicides, or to a higher or lower birth rate, etc. These currents are plainly social facts. At first sight they seem to be individual cases, but statistics furnish us with the means of establishing them as social facts. They are, in fact, represented with considerable exactness by the rates of births, marriages and suicides...”. It must be noted here that the case of the ‘suicide rates’ is the best example given by Durkheim of the way in which these social currents can be studied.
Having given us rules for the observation of social facts, Durkheim makes a distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ social facts. Durkheim explains that a social fact is considered to be normal when it is understood in the context of the society in which it exists. He further adds that a social fact, which is ‘general’ to a given type of society, is ‘normal’ when it has utility for that societal type, an illustration he cites the case of crime. We consider crime as pathological. But Durkheim argues that though we may refer to crime as immoral because it flouts values we believe in, from a scientific viewpoint it would be incorrect to call it abnormal. Firstly because crime is present not only in the majority of societies of one particular type but also in all societies of all types. Secondly, if there were not occasional deviances or flouting of norms, there would be no change in human behaviour and equally important, no opportunities through which a society can either reaffirm the existing norms, or else reassess such behaviour and modify the norm itself. To show that crime is useful to the normal evolution of morality and law. Durkheim cites the case of Socrates, who according to Athenian law was a criminal, his crime being the independence of his thought. But his crime rendered a service to his country because it served to prepare a new morality and faith, which the Athenians needed. Therefore, He considered crime and punishment both as normal.
But when the rate of crime exceeds what is more or less constant for a given social type, then it becomes an abnormal or pathological fact. Similarly, using the same criteria, suicide is a normal social fact (though it may be regarded as ‘wrong’ or ‘immoral’ because it goes against a set of values that makes preservation of life absolute). But the sudden rise in the suicide rate in Western Europe during the nineteenth century was a cause for concern for Durkheim and one of the reasons why he decided to study this phenomenon.
Durkheim speaks of social species or social types. Though there is so much of diversity in social facts, it does not mean that they cannot be treated scientifically i.e. compared, classified and explained. Durkheim uses the term ‘social morphology’ for the classification of social types. The question is, how are social types constituted? The word “type” means the common characteristics of several units in a group e.g. “bachelors” and married persons” belong to two types, and Durkheim was able to show that suicide rates are found more among the ‘bachelors’. Other examples being Classification of societies into types , types of social fact etc.
Durkheim asked, “Is it not the rule in science to rise to the general only after having observed the particular and that too in its entirety?” In order to know whether a fact is general throughout a species or social type, it is not necessary to observe all societies of this social type; only a few will suffice. According to Durkheim , “Even one well made observation will be enough in many cases, just as one well constructed experiment often suffices for the establishment of a law.” Durkheim wants societies to be classified according to their degree of organisation, taking as basis the ‘perfectly simple society’ or the ‘society of one segment’ like the ‘horde’. Hordes combine to form aggregates which one could call ‘simple polysegmental’. These combine to form polysegmental societies simply compounded’. A union of such societies would result in still more complex societies called ‘polysegmental societies doubly compounded’ and so on.
There are two approaches, which may be used in the explanation of social facts - the causal and the functional. The former is concerned with explaining ‘why’ the social phenomenon in question exists. The latter involves establishing the “correspondence between the fact under consideration and the general needs of the social organism, and in what this correspondence consists”.
Durkheim’s next concern is to determine the method by which they may be developed. The nature of social facts determines the method by which they may be developed. The nature of social facts determines the method of explaining these facts. Since the subject matter of sociology has a social character-it is collective in nature-the explanation should also have a social character.
The final point about Durkheim’s logic of explanation is his stress upon the comparative nature of social science. To show that a give fact is the cause of another “we have to compare cases in which they are simultaneously present or absent, to see if the variations they present in these different combinations of circumstances indicate that one depends on the other”. Since sociologists normally do not conduct laboratory-controlled experiments but study reported facts or go to the field and observe social facts, which have been spontaneously produced, they use the method of indirect experiment and the comparative method.
The comparative method is the very framework of the science of society for Durkheim.
Durkheim was very much against the view held by some scholars that everything in society should be reduced to human volition. Categories of human will and volition, he points out, belong to psychology not social science. If social science is really to exist, societies must be assumed to have a certain nature, which results from the nature and arrangement of the elements composing them.
Durkheim’s whole sociological works i.e. Division of labour, suicide and religion must be seen in the light of his suggestion of causal functionalism, comparative analysis, indirect experiment.
Access to prime resources
New Courses