“‘Social fact is to be treated as a thing.’ Discuss.” (2012)
“The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things.” With this rule in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Émile Durkheim set out to give sociology its own object and a scientific method. Social facts are ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to individuals, exercise constraint over them, and are general throughout a society.
What “thing” means, and what it does not
Durkheim’s critics took him to mean that society is a material object. In the preface to the second edition (1901) he clarified that a thing is anything that cannot be known by introspection, and must be approached from outside through observation and experiment. The rule is a mental attitude of the observer, not a claim that ideas are physical.
Why social facts must be treated as things
- They are real and sui generis: law, language, currency and religious beliefs exist before the individual and survive them. They cannot be changed by an act of will.
- Against lay notions (prénotions): words like “democracy” or “family” carry vague sentiment. Science begins by breaking with common sense.
- Against reductionism: social facts cannot be explained by individual psychology or by Herbert Spencer’s utilitarian self-interest. A social fact must be explained by other social facts.
- Against speculative philosophy: Auguste Comte reasoned about “progress” as an idea. Durkheim demanded observable indicators.
The rules that follow
- Eradicate preconceptions and adopt emotional neutrality.
- Define by external characteristics: solidarity, which cannot be seen, is indexed by the type of law, repressive or restitutive (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893).
- Study social facts apart from their individual manifestations: statistical rates isolate the collective current. In Suicide (1897) Durkheim explained varying suicide rates by degrees of integration and regulation, not by individual motives.
Indian illustration
- Caste endogamy meets every test. India Human Development Survey data show only about 5% of marriages are inter-caste, a stable pattern that no individual chose and few can defy without sanction.
- Dowry: the Dowry Prohibition Act has been law since 1961, yet NCRB recorded 6,450 dowry deaths in 2022. That a practice persists against law is Durkheim’s point about constraint. The rate is the social fact, independent of any single family’s intentions.
Criticisms
- Max Weber and the interpretive tradition held that social action is meaningful and must be understood (Verstehen), not just observed from outside.
- Alfred Schutz and Peter Winch (The Idea of a Social Science, 1958) argued that social reality is made of shared meanings, not thing-like facts.
- Jack Douglas (The Social Meanings of Suicide, 1967) showed that suicide statistics are themselves social constructions by coroners and police. The same caution applies to NCRB dowry figures.
- Reification: the rule risks turning society into an agent over and above people. Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory treats structure as both constraining and enabling, reproduced through action.
Conclusion
“Social facts as things” is best read as a methodological discipline: suspend prejudice, find observable indicators, and explain the social by the social. Its limits show when meaning is ignored, as Durkheim’s own later work on collective representations admits, but its core insight still underwrites quantitative sociology in India, from NFHS to NCRB.