““Not all facts about human behavior are necessarily social facts.” State the meaning of ‘social facts’ and the methods of studying them with reference to this statement.” (1999)
Émile Durkheim, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), wanted sociology to have a subject matter that biology and psychology could not claim. The statement captures his point: much of human behaviour is organic or psychic, and only a specific class of facts belongs to sociology.
Meaning of social facts
Durkheim defined a social fact as “every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint”, general throughout a society while existing independently of its individual expressions.
- Externality: language, law, currency and moral codes exist before the individual is born and outlive him.
- Constraint: their force is felt when resisted, through ridicule, sanctions or failure.
- Generality with independence: a fact is general because it is collective, not collective because it is general.
Types include material (morphological) facts such as population density, and non-material facts such as collective conscience, norms and “social currents” like waves of enthusiasm.
Why not every fact is social
- Everyone eats, sleeps and reasons, yet these are organic or psychological facts. Durkheim’s own example shows that frequency alone does not make a fact social.
- A single person’s grief or a private habit lacks externality and constraint.
- What makes behaviour social is the collective mould on it: what we eat, when we mourn, whom we marry. A person’s hunger is biological, but the Navratri fast is social.
- The statement therefore guards sociology against both reductionism (explaining society through individual minds) and imperialism (claiming all behaviour).
Methods of studying social facts
- Rules of observation: treat social facts as things. Discard preconceptions (prenotions), define phenomena by observable external traits, and use objective indicators. Law, for instance, indexes solidarity.
- Normal and pathological: a fact is normal when it is general to a social type at a given stage. Crime in moderate measure is normal; a sudden surge is pathological.
- Classification of social types: societies are ranked by their degree of composition, from the simple horde to polysegmental societies.
- Explanation: separate the efficient cause from the function. The cause of a social fact must be sought among antecedent social facts, not individual states of consciousness.
- Proof: the comparative method of concomitant variation. In Suicide (1897), rates varied with religious affiliation, marital status and economic cycles, independent of individual motives.
Illustration from India
The Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India 2024 report records 1,70,746 suicides (12.2 per lakh). Each act is personal, but the rate is a social fact. Daily-wage earners make up about 31% of cases, and student suicides (14,488) rose 4.3% over 2023. These stable patterns point to labour precarity and competitive-examination pressure, which no individual psychology explains.
Limits
- Max Weber held that sociology must grasp the subjective meaning of action.
- Gabriel Tarde accused Durkheim of reifying society.
- Jack Douglas (The Social Meanings of Suicide, 1967) and J. Maxwell Atkinson (Discovering Suicide, 1978) showed that official statistics are themselves social constructions.
Conclusion
The statement is Durkheim’s boundary-marker: behaviour becomes sociological only when it is external, constraining and collective. His rules are open to the interpretive critique, but they still underpin quantitative sociology, from NCRB-based studies of distress to epidemiology of social determinants.