David emile Durkheim: Father of Sociology

Throughout his life David Emile Durkheim managed to write about many aspects of life, however his most influential work had to do with sociology. Today he is known as the father of sociology for the innovative and revolutionary work he did. However, his works are not always easily understandable, but once understood its reach is endless. One of the questions that comes from Durkheim’s works is how the individual developed a sense of autonomy, how the individual was able to break out of the mold of centuries in the making. Durkheim explained how they were able to become individually autonomous in his many works.
Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858 in Epinal, France. His mother was a merchant’s daughter and a Chief Rabbi. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all had been rabbis and thus he went to rabbinical school at a young age, grooming to become a rabbi later in his life. To his father’s grief, Durkheim was not meant to become a rabbi and that became apparent when he moved to Paris to go to school and broke away from the Jewish faith. He attended the Collège d'Epinal majoring in Letters and Sciences, and became intent on a future in teaching. He attended to the Ecole Normale Supérieure for higher education, accepted in 1879 after two failed attempts (Emile Durkheim, 2013).
Durkheim’s generation was in at that school produced some of the most influential minds of the time, including socialist Jean Jaurès, and philosophers Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel among many others. For part of his time at the school he was filled with feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, however he began to participate in many political and philosophical debates and became an advocate of the teachings of Léon Gambetta, the brilliant orat...

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...ociety and has their role in it. Durkheim believes that society is not a place but really a thing, a living entity, and lives on its own aside from the individual while molding the individual in the meantime. The individual has an impact on the society, but the society molds the individual from birth, the way the act, think, and behave are all because of how the society affected them. In the earlier forms of societies based on solidarity demanded a great level of regimentation. However, as time went society was dependent on the organic solidarity through the individual and to go on further social solidarity occurred because of individual autonomy. At the end of his life Durkheim was described as a secular pope, and those who did not like him believed he was puppet for the government and trying to corrupt the youth, however he was in it for the people and not himself.