“Write short note: Subject-matter of Sociology, according to Emile Durkheim.” (2009)
In the late nineteenth century sociology was still dissolved into philosophy of history (Auguste Comte), biology and psychology. Émile Durkheim secured its autonomy by giving it a distinct subject-matter, the social fact, and a method suited to it (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895).
Society as a reality sui generis
- Just as life emerges from the combination of inert molecules, association produces a reality that is more than the sum of individuals. It has its own properties, which cannot be deduced from individual minds.
- Sociology is therefore not applied psychology. “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it”, not in states of individual consciousness. Its central content is collective representations: shared ideas, symbols and sentiments.
The social fact
- Definition: every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exerting external constraint on the individual, and general throughout a given society while existing independently of its individual expressions.
- Tests: externality, constraint (felt when resisted, through ridicule, isolation or legal sanction), generality, and independence.
- Types, arranged on a continuum:
- Morphological: the “substratum” of collective life, such as population size and density, settlement pattern, dwellings and communication routes.
- Institutionalised norms: law, morality, religious dogma, financial systems, language.
- Social currents: non-crystallised waves of opinion or enthusiasm, measured through rates of marriage, birth and suicide.
Branches of the discipline
Durkheim organised sociology, as in the plan of his journal L’Année sociologique (from 1898), into:
- Social morphology: the material form and population base of societies.
- Social physiology: the functioning of institutions, subdivided into sociology of religion, morals, law, economic life, language and aesthetics.
- General sociology: synthesis of the laws discovered by the special branches.
Method implied by the subject-matter
- Treat social facts as things, set aside preconceptions, and define them by observable features.
- Separate causal from functional explanation, and normal from pathological facts relative to a social type. Crime, in some measure, is normal.
- Comparative method as indirect experiment. For Durkheim comparative sociology is sociology itself.
Illustration
His Suicide (1897) applied this programme to the most individual of acts. Indian data show why the approach still works. NCRB recorded 14,488 student suicides in 2024, 8.5% of all suicides, up from 8,032 in 2014. A rate that climbs this steadily reflects a social current of pressure and weak regulation, not merely private despair.
Conclusion
Max Weber made meaningful social action, not external facts, the object of sociology, and later interpretive sociologists accused Durkheim of reifying society. Yet by fixing a specific object open to observation, Durkheim gave sociology its institutional footing and much of its empirical tradition. Through A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, that programme shaped structural-functional social anthropology, including M. N. Srinivas’s study of the Coorgs.