“What are the problems in observing social facts in Durkheim’s views?” (2020)
For Émile Durkheim, social facts are ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to individuals and constraining on them. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) he asked that they be treated as things. Yet he admitted such facts are hard to observe, and critics found the difficulty deeper still.
Difficulties Durkheim himself recognised
- Prenotions: the observer is also a member of society and carries common-sense ideas about family, crime or religion. Durkheim’s first rule, eradicate all preconceptions, concedes that the observer contaminates the observed.
- Invisibility of the collective: a social fact exists apart from its individual expressions, yet can only be seen through them. The sociologist must therefore seek external indicators: types of law for solidarity (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893) and suicide rates for integration and regulation (Suicide, 1897).
- Definition by external characteristics: classifying phenomena by visible traits risks grouping unlike things together, as when he defined crime simply as whatever provokes punishment.
- Normal and pathological: a fact is normal only relative to a social type at a given phase. In transitional societies such as his own, the average itself is unstable, so crime or suicide rates are hard to judge.
Problems raised by critics
- Meaning: Max Weber held that social action must be understood through the actor’s subjective meaning (Verstehen). External observation misses what the act means to its participants.
- Official statistics as social constructions: Jack D. Douglas (The Social Meanings of Suicide, 1967) showed that suicide statistics depend on how coroners, doctors and families decide to classify a death. Integrated families may conceal suicides, so Durkheim’s “integration” findings could be artefacts of reporting.
- J. Maxwell Atkinson (Discovering Suicide, 1978) went further: coroners use commonsense theories (a note, a manner of death, a troubled biography). The “facts” are products of interpretation, not things out there.
- Phenomenology and ethnomethodology: Alfred Schutz and Harold Garfinkel see social order as continually accomplished in interaction.
- Durkheim’s own practice: Douglas also noted that Suicide slides into imputing mental states to Protestants or bachelors, contradicting the rule of externality.
Indian illustration
West Bengal reported zero farmer suicides to the National Crime Records Bureau, while RTI replies in 2022 recorded 122 such deaths in Paschim Medinipur district alone. Who counts as a “farmer”, and who records a death, shapes the social fact.
Conclusion
Durkheim’s rules made sociology empirical and comparative, and indicators such as rates remain indispensable. But observation of social facts is never theory-free or meaning-free. The best practice today combines his structural indicators with interpretive checks on how the data were produced.