So what are the ways in which this work is still relevant? The themes Durkheim outlined in The Division of Labour; the conscience collective, education, anomie, and methodology ran right throughout the rest of Durkheim’s work, but also entered other disciplines. Durkheim’s notion that a crime is simply a social reaction which “shocks the conscience collective” (McIntosh 1997: pp186), had great impacts in the subject’s criminology and sociology of deviance. Durkheim’s theory on the division of labour was one of the first of its kind after which the phenomena became widely recognised. Today it helps to explain the ever-refined division of labour and specialisation of work tasks, the interdependence in the world economy and the international division of labour (McIntosh 1997). Overall his theories in The Division of Labour are still relevant because it is still one of the most relevant divisions in society and it has as he predicted it has grown as the population has grown.
One of the most remembered things about Durkheim is the way that he believed we could understand the human world, through the principles of positivism. Here we look at Durkheim’s Rules of the Sociological Method (1895) and Suicide: A Sociological Study (1897) together, as the two both look at how we should understand the human world, one being the pretext for the other.
In The Rules Durkheim expresses many original ideas that have great influences on the study of sociology. He firstly expresses that social phenomena is in itself objective because we do not create it, we learn to do things through our education, i.e. we are born into a society which dictates how we should act “their existence prior to his own implies their existence outside of himself” (Durkheim 1895 in Marsh 1998: pp289). Durkheim in wanting to separate sociology from psychology and biology, argued that although all aspects of life are social, and therefore could come under the study of sociology; we should only study things that have an external influence on the individual, because the influence they have can constrain, controlling our behaviour. So the subject matter for sociology should be the social organisations and ‘social currents’ in which social facts exist (Durkheim 1895).
The themes outlined in this book ran through all of Durkheim’s work, but particularly in his next piece of work Suicide: A Sociological Study. Suicide was a subject that most people would be surprised that Durkheim would choose to study, since it is seen as one of the most individual and personal acts possible. However he wanted to prove, as he stated in The Rules, that things which seem to be individual acts are really affected by social phenomena. Durkheim firstly showed that suicide rates are fairly stable over time, he also found consistent variations in the suicide rate between different groups within society, if suicide was a personal act this would not be the case (Durkheim 1898). For example, psychologists often thought that insanity was linked with suicide rate, however Durkheim showed this not to be the case. Jews have some of the highest rates of insanity, but one of the lowest rates of suicide, therefore common understandings must be kept out of sociological analysis and statistics used to prove hypotheses (underling a point he bought about in The Rules) (Craib 1997). Briefly, he found that unmarried people and protestants, were more likely than other groups to commit suicide, also times of political upheaval were more likely to cause suicide rates to rise. From these findings Durkheim used multivariate analysis to conclude causality, and determine which were the most important factors that caused suicide. To Durkheim the major social factor in the rates of suicide is the level of integration an individual a person has, from this he developed a typology of four factors which affect the suicide rate: Egoistic suicide where the person is insufficiently integrated into the social group; Altruistic, where the person is too integrated into society; Anomic suicide where society was insufficient in regulating its members; and finally Fatalistic suicide, where the person becomes too regulated within that society.
These two pieces have been criticised by many. In general the popularity of the positivist approach adopted by Durkheim went thorough a period of severe criticism during the 1960’s and 1970’s, in terms of its use of statistics, its lack of validity etc. They argued that the reasons for suicides couldn’t be determined by statistics, only by ethnographic studies (Baechler 1979 in Giddens 1997). Durkheim and sociology never properly recovered from this period, and any positivistic methods now used in research can meet with severe criticisms from interpretivists. Many would now argue that Durkheim’s use of positivistic method is no longer relevant to produce a piece of valid research, statistics can identify trends but they cannot infer meaning to an event. Giddens (1986) shows that it is mistaken of Durkheim to dismiss non-social factors as an attributing cause for suicide, Durkheim’s theory seems to state that phenomena is influenced only by social factors or non-social factors, e.g. psychology, it cannot be a combination of both. Nowadays sociological theories take into account other factors, to provide a more comprehensive theory. Durkheim’s wish to avoid associations with all other disciplines is now out of date. One of the biggest arguments is that the statistics he uses are themselves social constructions, and that certain factors affect the validity of statistics. For example suicide rates may be low in catholic communities because coroners may be unwilling to identify suicide because it is a sin (Douglas 1967 in Craib 1997). Even when Durkheim was writing suicide the use of statistics in studies of suicides were greatly debated, which is something he failed to account for in his work (Collins 1994). Regarding his theory of the four types of suicide, these are seen to have been greatly flawed. When reading Durkheim it can be seen that he uses stereotypical views of, for example women, e.g. “…woman can endure life in isolation more easily than man.” (Durkheim 1897 in Marsh 1998 pp66) In his writings he also associates women with “lower societies”. Douglas (1967) also points out it is unrealistic to group suicides into causes in this way, without investigating the meaning the person attaches to suicide.
Despite these criticisms, Durkheim’s findings in Suicide can be replicated and other sociologists have found similar findings. Other sociologists e.g. Taylor (1990 in Giddens 1997) have responded with similar theories of suicide. Without Durkheim’s studies The Rules and Suicide, sociology would not be where it is today. His work has been widely read and his explanation that sociology can be studied as a science gave it more respect in the academic world and indeed the funding it needed to be established as its own discipline (Tiryakian 1979). Although its methodology is perhaps slightly less popular today than it was when it was written, its principles are still the most used form of methodology, many sociologists using it to establish trends in social phenomena whilst also adopting other methodologies too. Most studies adopt at least some form of scientific method. In this way these pieces are still relevant today
This essay has looked at three pieces of Durkheim’s work in turn, giving a brief description of the theories outlined, to see how Durkheim understood the human world. His themes in The Division of Labour ran throughout the rest of his work. Principally he believed that a state of anomie is avoided because people share collective sentiments, and a common understanding of what is and what is not appropriate. His next two books however are regarded as more influential, and perhaps more relevant today. In The Rules he argued that rigorous scientific methodology should be used, creating statistics which can be analysed and compared between variables. In Suicide he used these methods and provided a theory of suicide, according to levels of integration. So in answer to the question: ‘What is the relevance of Emile Durkheim for our understanding of the human world?’ I would mainly argue his relevance is the legacy he has left within sociology, the way he understood the human world is still adopted today, and the methodology he used is also adopted, and much debated today. In The Division of Labour, Durkheim’s relevance is significant in some ways and not in others. In modern sociology inequalities are a major issue of which Durkheim pays little attention to. This however I believe, does not make his work irrelevant. I would argue that this piece of work is still relevant because some of his theories still hold true, for example the growth of the population has led to the growth of the division of labour, and his theories have importance in the International Division of Labour. However his theory on social solidarity isn’t as well thought out and is too simplistic. In The Rules his guidance was so important to the human world because it gave a whole new way of studying it, allowing social scientists after him to study parts of the human world that could not have been done so before and have since created theories in all areas of sociological focus. This has allowed us to understand a great amount of social phenomena in many cases, pushing for policy change; this is still very much the case today. The positivist philosophy is now more out of fashion and is no longer seen as the only or necessarily best way to study the human world. Suicide itself was influential in its subject matter, no one before had studied a social phenomena in this way, the theories he brought up about suicide have been extremely influential to the sociology of deviance, psychology, and his theories on integration have been influential in all fields of academic work (Giddens 1978). Since his work other theorists have provided perhaps a better and more modern understanding of the human world, but without his work this would not have been possible. For these reasons I feel that Durkheim’s understanding of the human world is still appropriate today, continuous amounts of literature are still being written a hundred years later on his work, and I am sure there is not one university course without some mention of his work. Until this ends Durkheim will be regarded as one of the most influential and relevant writers, despite his criticisms.
References
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