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domestic, being of interest both to classes and to clans and families. They are religious; they concern true religion, animism, magic and diffuse religious mentality. They are economic, for the notions of value, utility, interest, luxury, wealth, acquisition, accumulation, consumption and liberal and sumptuous expenditure are all present...
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These phenomena are at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological and so on. They are legal in that they concern individual and collective rights, organized and diffuse morality; they may be entirely obligatory, or subject simply to praise or disapproval. They are at once political and
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Durkheim's studies are graphic demonstrations of how careful the social researcher must be to ensure that data gathered for analysis are accurate. Durkheim's reported suicide rates were, it is now clear, largely an artifact of the way particular deaths were classified as "suicide" or "non-suicide" by
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Durkheim laid out a theory of sociology as "the science of social facts". He considered social facts to "consist of representations and actions" which meant that "they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, nor with physical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual
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Durkheim's discovery of social facts was significant because it promised to make it possible to study the behaviour of entire societies, rather than just of particular individuals. Durkheim points to individual actions as instances or representations of different types of actions in society. Some
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defined the term, and argued that the discipline of sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. For
Durkheim, social facts "consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they
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Durkheim's examples of social facts included social institutions such as kinship and marriage, currency, language, religion, political organization, and all societal institutions we must account for in everyday interactions with other members of our societies. Deviating from the norms of such
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reflect socially embedded practices of classification? But if the alleged discoveries of perceptions of social facts aren't therefore dubious, it is hard to see why the original claims about the social facts
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His studies are also an entry point into the study of social meaning—and the way that apparently identical individual acts often cannot be classified empirically. Social
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which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations".
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Shaffer, L. S. (2006). "Durkheim's aphorism, the
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do very similarly because the socialized community that they belong to has influenced them to do these things.
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Edgar, Andrew. (2002). "Mauss, Marcel (1872–1950)". in Edgar, Andrew and
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are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise
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Edgar, Andrew. (1999). "Cultural
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Philosophy of Science and the Sociology of Knowledge: Creating an Intellectual Niche
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He viewed it as a concrete idea that affected a person's everyday life.
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in different districts, Durkheim demonstrated that the suicide rate of
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institutions makes the individual unacceptable or misfit in the group.
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consciousness." Durkheim says that a social fact is a thing that many
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The gift; forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies
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