Critique of Positivism: I Durkheim

Abstract

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) has the distinction of being the first professional, academic French sociologist to be appointed to a Chair in Sociology (Paris, 1913). For Durkheim, sociology was a vocation. Almost single-handed he forced the academic community to accept sociology as a rigorous and scientific discipline. In his teaching and in his research Durkheim laid down the standards whereby sociology was to be judged. In 1895 he published the first major methodology study of sociology in which he observed that none of the nineteenth-century sociologists — Comte, Mill, Spencer — ‘hardly went beyond generalities concerning the nature of societies, the relationships between the social and the biological realms’ and were largely ‘content … to make a cursory inquiry into the most general resources that sociological research has at its command’ (Durkheim, 1982, p. 48.) Durkheim set himself the task of defining the object of sociology and the methods appropriate to it. His contributions to the study of industrialisation, suicide, religion, morality and the methodology of social science aroused enormous controversy, but their influence on the development of sociology as well as other areas of social science, especially anthropology, have been far-reaching.