Evaluate Durkheim's claim that interpersonal forces control human behaviour. Illustrate your answer with reference to either his study of suicide or religion.

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Social Theory Essay

Evaluate Durkheim's claim that interpersonal forces control human behaviour. Illustrate your answer with reference to either his study of suicide or religion.

In this essay I will look at Durkheim’s claim that interpersonal forces control human behaviour, with an emphasis on his study of suicide, as it pertains to feelings of social solidarity and integration. Durkheim’s work will be criticised on the grounds that, arguably, the suicide statistics used may be full of serious inaccuracies and subject to cultural bias, and that circular reasoning was used in his analysis. It will be concluded that Suicide is a vital work, as it was the first effective combination of sociological theory and empiricism to explain a social phenomenon.

Introduction

   Durkheim saw individuals as creatures whose desires were unlimited. (Suicide: A Study In Sociology,1897)   Hence, it follows that this natural instability can only be held in check by external controls, that is, by societal controls.

   When social regulations break down, the controlling influence of society on the individual propensities, is no longer effective; leaving individuals to their own devices. Durkheim called such a state anomie, a condition of relative normlessness in a whole society.

   While complete anomie is empirically impossible, societies may be characterised by greater or less degrees of normative regulation, or the level of which interpersonal forces control human behaviour. Any rapid movement in the social structure (‘boom’ or ‘bust‘), that upsets the previous network, in which lifestyles are embedded, carries with it a chance of anomie.

   Durkheim’s work on suicide, of which the discussion and analysis of anomie forms a part, concerns the sources of social order and disorder; and, the forces that make for regulation, or de-regulation, in the body of the social structure (some of which where outlined above.)

Suicide

   Durkheim (The Rules Of The Sociological Method, 1895) stressed that sociology, as a science, would be characterised by observation (rather than abstract theory), the study of social (rather than psychological) facts, and provide both functional and causal explanations. These principles where applied to the complex and multi-dimensional argument of Suicide (1897), in which he seeks to demonstrate that this, apparently, most personal and individual of acts is, ultimately, determined by society.

   Suicide employed an aetiological explanation, in which the effects (suicides) are evidence of the underlying social currents (the interpersonal forces controlling human behaviour.) Such a theoretical position was an extension of Durkheim’s depiction of mechanical and social solidarity (The Division Of Labour In Society, 1893)

Social Solidarity

   Durkheim discussed social solidarity, the bond between all individuals within a society, in considerable depth.

   He first described the social cohesion particular to pre-industrial societies. This mechanical solidarity occurred when all members of a society performed similar tasks as all others in society. Consequently, the collective conscience, of a mechanical society, is identical among members, and the bond derives not from dependence on other individuals, but from dependence on the total social system.

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   Durkheim’s primary interest was what happened as societies began to modernise, due to industrialisation and labour specialisation. A new form of solidarity, which is called organic solidarity, develops here. Individuals no longer perform the same tasks, have the same interests, nor, necessarily, share the same perspective on life. However, this does not cause a society to fall or disintegrate.

   Modern society seems to contain, according to Durkheim, the potentials for individualism within social regulation. It is this, the relation of the actor in his society, based on the degrees of imbalance of the social forces of integration and ...

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