6. Emile Durkheim Flashcards
He spent fifteen years at Bordeaux and wrote some of his most famous books there: The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) and Suicide (____).
1897
Emile Durkheim was born on the 15th April ____ at Épinal in Alsace-Lorraine.
1858
Durkheim, set out to establish sociology as a strictly scientific, precise, empirical study of ‘the ____’.
social
Durkheim reasons that sociology in order to be deemed ‘____’ must study what he calls ‘social facts as things’. The fundamental rules for the study of social facts as things were set down in Durkhem’s famous book, The Rules of Sociological Method.
scientific
Durkheim is saying that a particular ____ ____ must be taken towards social facts like suicide and religion.
mental attitude
Social facts ought to be ____ in the same rigorous manner as objects and events in nature.
analysed
Social facts rendered as things are accessible through sense perception, that is, they can be subject to ____.
observation
Durkheim is saying that we can study a social phenomenon like suicide by analysing ____ ____, as distinct from the reasons and intentions that the individual may have for committing suicide.
statistical measures
The difficulty from Durkheim’s standpoint is that ____, ____, ____ and so on are not immediately apparent. They cannot be directly observed.
meanings, reasons, intentions
Durkheim goes on to define ____ ____ more precisely when he refers to the dual character of social facts as both external and constraining.
social facts
In respect of the exteriority of social facts, Durkheim contends that the facts observed by the sociologist are ____ to the individual.
external
Regarding the _____ nature of social facts, Durkheim reasons that these facts are endowed with coercive power in the sense that they can be imposed upon the individual independently of their will.
constraining
Individuals generally adhere to social norms because they either consider them ____ or they are habituated to obeying them.
legitimate
Durkheim differentiates between two types of social facts. ____ ____ are real material entities but they are not of the greatest significance in Durkheim’s sociological writings.
Material facts
Material facts include: ____ (eg. New Zealand society), structural components of society (eg. the state occupational associations) and morphological components of society (e g. the distribution of population).
society
____ _____ are at the core of Durkheim’s sociology.
Non-material facts
Non-material facts include: morality, collective conscience, social ____
currents
____ - notions of what is deemed right or wrong in a particular society.
morality
____ ____ - the shared values, beliefs, norms, and sentiments of specific collectivities such as a professional occupational association or a religious institution;
collective conscience
____ ____ - what Durkheim refers to as ‘the great movements of enthusiasm, indignation and pity in a crowd’.
social currents
Durkheim is an exponent of the Enlightenment thinkers’ notion of ____. Experience is considered as the source of all scientific knowledge.
empiricism
Scientific knowledge is acquired through sense perception. Sociology to be deemed scientific must begin with _____.
observation
Social facts like suicide are treated as ____ (an object) quite separate from the motives and intentions of the individuals being studied and from the sociological observer.
things
Caution: The sociologist cannot fully understand social life (unlike, for instance, the physicist studying atoms), if he totally ____ the meanings individuals bestow on their conduct or the motives and intentions grounding human action.
ignores
It is important to underline the fact that according to Durkheim, anything which is a source of solidarity is ____. Anything which compels the individual to take account of others is ____. The individual is deemed to be a ____ being only because they live in society.
moral
It is Durkheim’s contention that traditional pre-modern societies are characterised by ____ ____. The social structure of these societies can be aptly described as made up of small-scale, rural, agricultural units.
mechanical solidarity
It follows that solidarity between individuals is brought about through ____ ____. The fact that the different occupations are so similar, implies that concordance between individuals arises almost automatically; solidarity is mechanical.
social likeness
For Durkheim, the collective conscience in a society distinguished by mechanical solidarity is noted for its _____. The thoughts of individuals are almost interchangeable since they all share common beliefs, values, norms and sentiments.
homogeneity
In fact, the ____ ____ (what may aptly be called the group mind) is so pervasive that there is little room for individuality.
collective conscience
What Durkheim calls ____ ____ attests to the all-pervasive power of the collective conscience. Altruistic suicide is the normal type of suicide in simple, traditional, pre-modern societies.
altruistic suicide
Altruistic suicide is quite a ____ ____ in modern societies, but it does occur especially amongst the military In this context, suicide may express itself in acts of heroism as in the case of the kamikaze pilot or the Muslim fundamentalist killed by his own bomb.
rare event
____ ____ involve punishing the offender for violating a traditional societys moral codes. Punishment (eg- loss of an offenders life) represents an act of vengeance on the part of an outraged community whose moral codes have been transgressed.
Repressive sanctions
lt is worth noting that repressive sanctions in traditional, pre-modern European society up to the end of the eighteenth century often took the form of _____ ____. The torture and murder of those accused of violating the law was a public spectacle witnessed by many people.
public executions
It is the view of Durkheim that the division of labour in modern, large-scale, urban industrial societies is complex. Differences between occupations became clearly defined with the onset of _____.
specialisation
Solidarity in a society distinguished by a complex division of labour is grounded in ____ between individuals.
differences
Each individual performs a highly specialised task in the modern division of labour (eg. the division of labour in a government bureaucracy or business corporation) leading to increased ____ amongst individuals. The necessity for mutual co-operation is built into the highly complex division of labour in modern society.
interdependence
This is tantamount to saying that social solidarity is what Durkheim aptly calls ____ ____.
organic solidarity
The basis for solidarity in modern society is ____, since mutual interdependence is inherent in the highly specialised division of labour.
structural
Although the highly complex division of labour is in a structural sense leading to greater integration in modern society, Durkheim asserts that a ____ of the collective conscience is simultaneously occurring.
weakening
A uniform set of beliefs, values, norms and sentiments is no longer necessarily shared by all the members of modern, industrial society. And the weakened ____ ____, by the same token, undergoes a process of secularisation (ie, the decline of religious beliefs and values).
collective conscience
Durkheim maintains that the highly complex division of labour in modern society empowers the individual to develop a sense of ____ ____ and uniqueness and pursue independent thinking.
personal identity
The primary objective of ____ ____ is not punishment but the restoration of the relations between indmduals or groups disrupted by the violation of the law.
restitutive sanctions
In view of the fact that social cohesion in modern society ____ upon co-operation between individuals performing highly specialised tasks, restitutive sanctions refect this structural reality.
depends
____ is the term used by Durkheim to describe the widespread disorder, de-regulation and normlessness present in modern, industrial society. Anomie attests to a crisis of morality.
Anomie
