France was far from tranquil in the post-revolutionary era. Durkheim thus became concerned with social order and cohesion, much as had Comte in the early part of the 19th century. This concern for social stability underlies all of his works. Durkheim continued the French collectivist tradition with the assertion that society is an emergent reality, sui generis, and must therefore be understood in terms of its  own  unique  principles. Durkheim declared. “Society is a reality sui generis; it has its own particular characteristics, which are not met with again in the same form in all the rest of the universe. This emphasis on society as an entity in itself dictated for Durkheim a causal analysis of social phenomena that emphasized. “The determining cause of a social fact should not be sought among the states of the individual consciousness.”

Implicit in this tradition of course, is the view that society is an organic whole or “body social,” as Durkheim was often to argue. But the functional implications of this position were not, we contend, originally a part of the French Tradition. Rather they were borrowed from Spencer, thus supplementing Durkheim’s French heritage with ideas from the British Tradition. But Durkheim’s rejection of Spencerian utilitarianism is often viewed as evidence of his dismissal of Spencer’s sociology. We must remember, however, that Spencer wore two intellectual hats. On the one side  was  Spencer’s staunch utilitarian philosophy as it became translated in libertarian doctrines and social Darwinism. And, on the other side, was Spencer’s organicism as it developed into the law of evolution, the organismic analogy, and a concern with structure and function. Most of this latter tradition Durkheim embraced.

The coalescence of the French and British Traditions, as they were synthesized in Durkheim’s creative mind, created the functional orientation. Durkheim first borrowed Spencer’s distinction between structure and function. For example, in his first important work, The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim asked: What is the function of the division of labor for society? Here Durkheim starts with a question, that is, what does a society need to survive? Durkheim’s answer was clear:  a society must be integrated, or reveal solidarity among its component parts. Thus, most of Durkheim’s work concerned the analysis of how a given structure meets the integrative needs of society, Therefore after analysis he concludes that division of labor provides new basis solidarity in rapidly differentiating societies. Unlike Spencer, Durkheim used the mode of analysis in a number of empirical studies, such The Division of Labor in Society and The Elemental Forms of the Religious Life. While Comte and Spencer must be credited with bringing the organismic analogy, and its functional trappings, into sociology, Emile Durkheim was the first to advocate an explicitly functional set of assumptions. His important assumptions include

A social system must reveal some degree of internal integration among its constituent parts.

The important theoretical task is to determine the consequences, or functions, of a constituent part for the integration of the systemic whole.

The “causes” of a part must be analyzed separately from its “functions” for social integration.

The need for social integration operates as a selective mechanism for the persistence of those parts that promote integration of the social whole.

In his functional analysis Durkheim recognized a potential problem. This is the problem of illegitimate teleology i.e. to discover the need that a structure functions to meet does not necessarily reveal its cause. How, for example, does a need for solidarity cause a division of labor to emerge? It other words, how can the results of an event he its, cause. This problem led Durkheim to show cause and function separately. Causal analysis asks: Why does the structure in question exist and reveal certain properties? Functional analysis asks:  What need of the larger system does the structure meet? To confuse the two questions to invite an illegitimate teleology where consequences cause the events producing them. Thus, Durkheim emphasis that the causes of social phenomena must be distinguished from the ends that they serve. This distinction between cause and function owes its origin to Durkheim’s French heritage. On the one hand Durkheim followed Comte’s pleas for an objective science of society, because an analysis of cause and effect would uncover the laws of human organization. On the other hand, Durkheim, like Comte, Saint Simon, and other French thinkers, was a moralist: He wanted to create the “good” society. Functional analysis thus has its origins in the perpetual dilemma facing most social scientists; objective analysis of events and a desire to create a better society. While Durkheim’s mandate that causal and functional analysis be separate is praiseworthy, it is a distinction that is often difficult to maintain in actual practice. As we will see in our examination of many functionalists’ work in the pages to follow, cause and function are not easily separated. They often become subtly confused, creating logical problems for “the science of society.” Durkheim’s two great functional works, The Division of Labor in Society and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Reflects a classical  application  of  his  functional orientation.

His carefully drawn ‘distinction-between cause and function, when coupled with Spencer’s separation of structure and function, presented sociology and anthropology  with the basic elements of the functional orientation.  His empirical investigations influenced the next generation of functional theorists in sociology and anthropology. Particularly in anthropology, Durkheim’s functional analysis of religion was to stimulate the two great anthropologists, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski. As a method and theoretical orientation, functional has been the subject of severe criticism. While a few early commentaries on the deficiencies of functionalism can be found, the intense, and often vitriolic, critiques emerged in the 1950s and 1960s.  In the end the questions raised by these criticisms have caused a sharp drop in the use of functional methods and theoretical concepts in both sociology and anthropology. Durkheim’s functionalism has been criticized to be conservative in nature, as it seems to have bias for “status quo”. The change is also understood in the context of function only.

While Durkheim makes a useful contribution in presenting ideas concerning the source of societal solidarity, this often appears to be his only concern. One difficulty with Durkheim and the structural functional approach is that the latter almost completely ignore conflict and power differences. Durkheim may have constructed his approach in part to negate the Marxian or conflict approach to the study of society. Durkheim treats the anomic and forced forms of the division of labour as unusual, and devotes little time to their analysis.