The Social Theory Of Durkheim's Sociological Theory

“There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which makes its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments”( Durkheim 1912/1995:474–75; as cited in Sociological theory in the Classical Era, p.94).

Have you ever been to a professional stadium of sports full of fans? Or to religious services and taken a communion? How did it feel? What things did these experiences have in common? Is it possible to feel the same if/when alone? Why or why not?
The purpose

A fundamental problem, for Durkheim, was the need to explain both the way in which the various parts of society related to one another and why societies developed in different ways. In this latter respect, Durkheim was raising a fundamental problem for all forms sociological analysis, namely, what is it that holds people together as a society?

In simple terms, Durkheim wanted to explain the "social glue" that seemed to bind individuals together as a society and the answer to this problem (what is it that holds thousands / millions of individuals together in some form of common bond?). Was to see social systems as "moral entities"; things to which people feel they morally belong. For Durkheim, society took-on the appearance - to its individual members - of a "thing". That is, society appeared to be something that existed in its own right, over and above the ideas, hopes and desires of its individual

The Suicide of his very close friend at the Ecole, Victor Hommay, clearly affected him deeply and may not have only influenced his interest but the very explanation of it (Lukes, n.d.). Conversely, there were less personal reasons of his interest in exploring and studying suicide.

Durkheim’s analysis in Suicide (1897) presents both social facts (are the values, cultural norms and social structures which are able to transcend and exercise a social constraint) and a practical application he espouses for the discipline of sociology. Suicide is both methodological and exemplar. In the book Le Suicide, Durkheim maintains to uncover the social facts that affect the rates of suicides in different countries at different times. To forward this position, Durkheim examines and demonstrates that suicide is a social act and challenged the view of psychologists of that time who were of this opinion that it could be explained by individual psychological characteristics. He approached this by analyzing the rates of suicides between societies and historical periods and between different social groups within the same social structure. By linking suicides rates of different social groups and societies to particular characteristics of that society or a social group, he establishes that this individual pathology is not rooted in the psychological conditions, but is a result of a social condition. In addition, he also distinctly stresses upon on how sociologists