e in a great while a textbook comes a

atcontemptuousgesture,hesummeduphisfeelingsaboutthemanandtheissue:"Well,afterall,hewasjustl

IntroductionSomeyears

Such an aim draws him beyond himself; impersonaland disinterested, it is above all individual personalities; like everyideal, it can be conceived of only as superior to and dominatingreality.

something

Since human personality is the only thing that appeals unanimouslyto all hearts, since its enhancement is the only aim that can becollectively pursued, it inevitably acquires exceptional value in theeyes of all. It thus rises far above all human aims, assuming areligious nature

individual differences multiply

In the first, the indi-vidual is forbidden to destroy himself on his own authority; but theState may permit him to do so. The act is immoral only when it iswholly private and without collaboration through the organs of collect-ive life. Under specific circumstances, society yields slightly andabsolves what it condemns on principle. In the second period, con-demnation is absolute and universal. The power to dispose of a humanlife, except when death is the punishment for a crime, 28 is withheld notmerely from the person concerned but from society itself. It is hence-forth a right denied to collective as well as to private disposition.

This is an error. Society is injuredbecause the sentiment is offended on which its most respected moralmaxims today rest, a sentiment almost the only bond between itsmembers, and which would be weakened if this offense could becommitted with impunity

How couldwe have such a right if society, the existence greater than ourselves,does not have it?

Because we have animmortal soul in us, a spark of divinity, we must now be sacred toourselves. We belong completely to no temporal being because we arekin to God

The publicconscience, while reproving it as a general rule, reserved the right toauthorize it in certain cases

cult of humanpersonality

This is not true of suicide, which,beyond 10 or 15 years, is common to all ages

, buta general, vague aptitude

psychologists

health

fate

way

inclination

result

were insane.

apprehended

effect

Thus it would depend essentially on individual causes

ccordingly, the difference observed betweenthem under other circumstances is not one of race

Austria

Let us see whether the German retains thissad primacy outside Germany, in the midst of the life of other peoplesand acclimatized to different civilizations

suicide

nationality

“race” no longer corresponds to anything def-inite.

social phenomena

ving factors of historical developmen

A society does not depend for its number of suicides onhaving more or fewer neuropaths or alcoholics

alcoholism

suicide-rate

Such an ambiguous power 30 could not therefore accountfor so definite a social fact as the suicide-rate

Disgust with life andinert melancholy will readily germinate amongst an ancient and dis-oriented society, with all the fatal consequences which they imply;contrariwise, in a youthful society an ardent idealism, a generous pros-elytism and active devotion are more likely to develop

insanity

But even by combining them no regular parallel-ism is found between the extent of mental alienation and that of sui-cide.

; for idiots are much more numerous in thecountry than in the city, while suicides are much rarer in the country

But thisis because, first, he has combined the insane proper and idiots underthe common name of alienated

religion

moment

centers

proportion

person

generality

freely

purpose

average

immediately

impulse

character

destruction

groups

insanity

task

but as interdependent functions;thus one cannot suffer lesion without the others being affected

invades

Clinical experience has never been able to observe adiseased mental impulse in a state of pure isolation;

Thus, ambition, from beingnormal, becomes morbid and a monomania of grandeur when itassumes such proportions that all other cerebral functions seem para-lyzed by it

suicidal insanity

persons

environment

In this regard, both pursue the same goal; scientific thought is only a moreperfected form of religious thought. Hence it seems natural that religionshould lose ground as science becomes better at performing its task.

In short, the former gods are growing old or dying, and others have notbeen born.

Its pity forthe downcast seems to us too platonic. We would like one that is more vig-orous but do not yet see clearly what it should be or how it might be realizedin fact.

uitenaturally, the corresponding mythological personages are of the same charac-ter; their sphere of influence is not definite; they hover above the individualtribes and above the land. These are the great international gods

Except by reachingoutside himself, how could the individual add to the energies he possesses

have shown that precisely this is often true of ritual activityand mythological thought.

It rests on conditions that can be uncovered through observa-tion. It is a natural product of social life.

In short, upon the real world where pro-fane life is lived, he superimposes another that, in a sense, exists only in histhought, but one to which he ascribes a higher kind of dignity than he as-cribes to the real world of profane life.

since what defines the sacred is that thesacred is added to the real.

his persistent idealization is a fundamental fea-ture of religions.

n the end, the point is not to exerta kind of physical constraint upon blind and, more than that, imaginaryforces but to reach, fortify, and discipline consciousnesses.

religion

hus it is action that dominates religious life, for the very rea-son that society is its source.

have shown what moralforces it develops and how it awakens that feeling of support, safety, and pro-tective guidance which binds the man of faith to his cult.

properties

Thecultisnotmerelyasystemof signsbywhichthefaithisoutwardlyexpressed;itisthesumtotalofmeansbywhichthat faithiscreated andrecreatedperiodically

he is a man who is stronger.

Indeed, they sense that thetrue function of religion is not to make us think, enrich our knowledge, or addrepresentations of a different sort and source to those we owe to science. Itstrue function is to make us act and to help us live.

hether there is room alongside scientific knowledge for another form ofthought held to be specifically religious.

single idea cannot express one reality here and a dif-ferent one there unless this duality is merely apparent.

the truths thus obtained would be applicable to allliving things, including the most advanced, even if this case was the simplestprotoplasmic being imaginable.

But it is noless true that when a law has been proved by a single well-made experiment,this proof is universally valid.

ollective consciousness is the highest form of psychic life, forit is a consciousness of consciousnesses. Being outside and above individualand local contingencies, collective consciousness sees things only in theirpermanent and fundamental aspect,* which it crystallizes in ideas that can becommunicated.

single causal relation

time

other

Thesewould be sufficient for man as well if his movements had to satisfy individualneeds alone. In order to recognize that one thing resembles others withwhich we are already acquainted, we need not arrange them in genera andspecies.

way

For the same reason, the rhythm of collective life governs and con-tains the various rhythms of all the elementary lives of which it is the result;consequently, the time that expresses it governs and contains all the individ-ual times. It is time as a whole.

The concept of totality is but the concept ofsociety in abstract form.

Since the universe exists only insofar as it is thought of and since it isthought of in its totality only by society, it takes its place within society; itbecomes an element of society’s inner life, and thus is itself the total genusoutside which nothing exists.

But that state of personal expectancy can-not be assimilated to the conception of a universal order of succession thatimposes itself on all minds and all events.

But all these relationships are personal to the indi-vidual who is involved with them, and hence the notion he can gain fromthem can in no case stretch beyond his narrow horizon.

e category of genus was at firstindistinct from the concept of human group; the category of time has therhythm of social life as its basis; the space society occupies provided the rawmaterial for the category of space; collective force was the prototype for theconcept of effective force, an essential element in the category of causality

definition

t is also to subsume the variable under thepermanent and the individual under the social.

But that faith is not essentially different from reli-gious faith. The value we attribute to science depends, in the last analysis,upon the idea we collectively have of its nature and role in life, which is tosay that it expresses a state of opinion.

The method I follow in the study of religiousphenomena is based on exactly this principle.

Concepts

t is in the form of collective thoughtthat impersonal thought revealed itself to humanity for the first time, and bywhat other route that revelation could have come about is hard to se

his is why we have somuch difficulty understanding one another, and why, indeed often, we lie toone another unintentionally. This happens because we all use the same wordswithout giving them the same meaning

society

crystallized

the concept must be defined by other traits.

In this regard, our ownconcepts and those of science differ only in degree

ne can affirm nothing that science denies, deny nothing that science af-firms, and establish nothing that does not directly or indirectly rest on prin-ciples taken from science.

the formulas tobe pronounced and the movements to be executed would lose efficacy if theywere not exactly the same as those that had already proved successful

role

in innumerable religions.

life

death

he is uninterested in whether gods exist

through

Spiritual beings” must be understood to mean con-scious subjects that have capacities superior to those of ordinary men, whichtherefore rightly includes the souls of the dead, genies, and demons as well asdeities, properly so-called.

lower races,

advanced

forth

Religious conceptions aim above all to express andexplain not what is exceptional and abnormal but what is constant and reg-ular.

To have the idea of the supernatural, then, it is notenough for us to witness unexpected events; these events must be conceivedof as impossible besides—that is, impossible to reconcile with an order thatrightly or wrongly seems to be a necessary part of the order of things. It isthe positive sciences that have gradually constructed this notion of a neces-sary order. It follows that the contrary notion cannot have predated those sci-ences

t is in this form, Jevons claims,that the idea of the supernatural was born at the beginning of history; and itis in this way and at this moment that religion acquired its characteristic ob-ject.

but they were not regarded as glimpses intoa mysterious world where reason could not penetrate.

o long as what is immovable and inflexible about the or-der of things was unknown, and so long as it was seen as the work ofcontingent wills, it was of course thought natural that these wills or otherscould modify the order of things arbitrarily.

Itpresupposes an idea that is its negation, and that is in no way primitive. To beable to call certain facts supernatural,

he forces he brings into play by these various means do not seem tohim particularly mysterious.

What is certain, in any case, is that this idea appears very late in the his-tory of religions.

Faith effortlesslyreconciled itself with science and philosophy; and thinkers like Pascal, whofelt strongly that there is something profoundly obscure in things, were so lit-tle in harmony with their epochs that it was their fate to be misunderstoodby their contemporaries.

Besides, we have seen that the preference for studying religion among themost civilized peoples is far from being the best method.”

Religion can be defined onlyin terms of features that are found wherever religion is found.

If taking this step is to yield the results it should, we must begin by free-ing our minds of all preconceived ideas.

I willtake advantage of all the opportunities that present themselves to capture atbirth at least some of those ideas that, while religious in origin, were boundnevertheless to remain at the basis of human mentality.

they appear as ingenious instruments of thought, which humangroups have painstakingly forged over centuries, and in which they haveamassed the best of their intellectual capital.2

of time, space, genus, cause, and personality are constructedfrom social elements should not lead us to conclude that they are stripped ofall objective value. Quite the contrary, their social origin leads one indeed tosuppose that they are not without foundation in the nature of things.

greatercomplexity

ewouldthusreturntonominalismandempiricismbyanotherroute

Outsideus,it isopinionthatjudgesus;morethanthat,becausesocietyisrepresentedinsideusaswell,itresiststheserevolutionary impulses fromwithin.Wefeelthatwe cannotabandonourselvestothem withoutourthought’s ceasingtobe trulyhuman.

heydoindeedexpressthemostgeneralrelationshipsthatexistbe-tweenthings;having broaderscopethanallourideas,theygovernalltheparticularsofour intellectuallife.If,ateverymoment, mendidnotagreeonthesefundamentalideas,iftheydidnothaveahomogeneousconceptionoftime, space, cause,number,andsoon.Allconsensusamongminds,andthusallcommonlife,wouldbecomeimpossible.

Aspartofsociety,theindividualnaturallytranscendshimself,bothwhenhethinksandwhenheacts.

hat beingthecase,weunderstandhowreasonhasgainedthepowertogobeyondtherangeofempirical cognition.Itowesthispowernottosomemysteriousvirtuebutsimplytothefact that,asthewell-knownfor-mulahasit,manisdouble.Inhimaretwobeings:anindividual beingthathasitsbasisinthebodyandwhosesphereofactionisstrictlylimitedbythisfact,andasocialbeingthatrepresentswithinusthehighestrealityinthein-tellectualandmoral*realmthatisknowablethroughobservation:

Therepresentationsthatexpresssocietythereforehaveanal-togetherdifferentcontentfromthepurely individual representations,andonecanbecertaininadvancethat theformeraddsomethingtothelatter.

To answer thesequestions, it has sometimes been imagined that, beyond the reason of indi-viduals, there is a superior and perfect reason from which that of individualsemanated and, by a sort of mystic participation, presumably acquired its mar-velous faculty: That superior and perfect reason is divine reason. But, at best,this hypothesis has the grave disadvantage of being shielded from all experi-mental control, so it does not meet the requirements of a scientific hypothe-sis. More than that, the categories of human thought are never fixed in adefinite form; they are ceaselessly made, unmade, and remade; they vary ac-cording to time and place.

erely to say it is inher-ent in the nature of human intellect is not to explain that power.

Under these conditions,to reduce reason to experience is to make reason disappear—because it is toreduce the universality and necessity that characterize reason to mere appear-ances, illusions that might be practically convenient but that correspond tonothing in things. Consequently, it is to deny all objective reality to that log-ical life which the function of the categories is to regulate and organize. Clas-sical empiricism leads to irrationalism; perhaps it should be called by that name

Durkheim seems to have been acutely aware that his active participationin the university and in the educational affairs of the Third Republic broughtwith it the danger that his sociological work would be overshadowed by politi-cal commitments

The Durkheimian spirit of civic morality had conquered the primaryschools, and both the Catholic Right and the Marxist Left felt threatenedsince they feared that their potential sources of recruitment might now dry up.All this helps us understand the feelings of the Catholic sociologist JeanIzoulet when he wrote:

philosopher Louis Liard, who in 1884 had become Director of HigherEducation at the Ministry of Public Education

neo-positiv-ism

But contemporaries testified that each issue of the Annee wasindeed an intellectual event for historians or social psychologists, as well as forsociologists

cle to "infiltrate" sociological ideas and approaches into other,older fields of scholarship

Suicide

The first, he writes, "initiated and defendedthe claim of sociology to intellectual legitimacy." Once the claim was heard,the true founders of modern sociology "pressed [this] claim to institutionallegitimacy, by addressing themselves to those institutionalized status-judges ofthe intellect: the universities."^^ Comte and Spencer had spent much of theirenergies in convincing the public that the new science deserved a hearingamong the educated. Their successors, though still continuing this struggle,faced the additional task of giving sociology an institutionalized strongholdwithin the confines of the academy

omte, Marx,and Spencer.

to replace the religious values with which he himself had been brought up.

French republican and secular society be-came for him a passionate object of love, replacing his attachment to the re-ligious community of his native home.

of communal prestige if not the powers that their forebears had onceenjoyed. Through them Durkheim belonged to the elite of the community.His break with the Jewish tradition of his father consequently must have beena traumatic and decisive event in his life

hand had their own courts of law and generally attempted to regulatetheir own affairs with only minimal interference by royal authority

he method and style of scientific work done there seemed exemplary to himand provided him with a model of how scientific research ought to be con-ducted in other fields of the social sciences

Morality must, then, be not only obligatorybut also desirable and desired.

subject matter of the study of religious phenomena.

antecedent general norms

Spencer's individualistic premises

he many polemical exchanges between them un-doubtedly helped Durkheim sharpen and refine his own views; as a result,Tarde,

everberations in Durkheim's work.

Andre had followedhis father to the Ecole Normale and had begun a most promising career as asociological linguist.

After more than three quarters of acentury, Comte's brainchild had finally gained entry at the University of Paris.

philosophy

hat he considered impera-tive was to construct a scientific sociological system, not as an end in itself,but as a means for the moral direction of society.

Philosophy, atleast as it was then taught, seemed to him too far removed from the issues ofthe day, too much devoted to arcane and frivolous hairsplitting

Republic

Son of a rabbi and descending from a long line ofrabbis, he decided quite early that he would follow the family tradition andbecome a rabbi himself.

Crime was normal in that no society could enforce total conformityto its injunctions, and if society could, it would be so repressive as to leave noleeway for the social contributions of individuals

To explain a social fact it is not enough to show thecause on which it depends; we must also, at least in most cases, show its func-tion in the establishment of social order

it is important to recognize his pioneering contribution to the studyof the correlations between specific systems of thought and systems of socialorganization.

et, being eager as they were to give moralunity to a disintegrating society, he urged men to unite in a civic moralitybased on the recognition that we are what we are because of society.

ocietyis the father of us all; therefore, it is to society we owe that profound debt ofgratitude heretofore paid to the gods. The following passage, which in itsrhetoric is rather uncharacteristic of Durkheim's usual analytical style, revealssome of his innermost feelings

In contrast to WilliamJames, for example, Durkheim was not concerned with the variety of religiousexperience of individuals but rather with the communal activity and the com-munal bonds to which participation in religious activities gives rise.

maintained without religious sanctions.

In this respect he was in quest of what would today be described•as functional equivalents for religion in a fundamentally a-religious age.

Hence Durkheim turned, in the last periodof his scholarly life, to the study of religious phenomena as core elements ofsystems of common beliefs.

modern types oforganization rest on organic solidarity obtained through the functional inter-dependence of autonomous individuals. In modern societies, social solidarity isdependent upon, rather than repressive of, individual autonomy of conduct

No trade or barter can take place without social regulationand some system of positive and negative sanctions

Durkheim was indeed a thinker in the conservative tradition to the extentthat he reacted against the atomistic drift of most Enlightenment philosophyand grounded his sociology in a concern for the maintenance of social order.As Robert Nisbet^" has shown convincingly, such key terms as cohesion,solidarity, integration, authority, ritual, and regulation indicate that his sociol-ogy is anchored upon an anti-atomistic set of premises. In this respect he waslike his traditionaUst forebears, yet it would be a mistake to classify Durkheimas a traditionalist social thinker. Politically he was a liberal—indeed, a defenderof the rights of individuals against the state. He also was moved to warnagainst excesses of regulation over persons even though the major thrusts ofhis argument were against those who, by failing to recognize the requirementsof the social order, were likely to foster anomie states of affairs. Anomie, heargued, was as detrimental to individuals as it was to the social order at large.

Durkheim's treatment of altruistic suicide indicatesthat he was trying to establish a balance between the claims of individualsand those of society, rather than to suppress individual strivings

anti-individualistic philosophy

To put the matter differently, when therestraints of structural integration, as exemplified in the operation of organicsolidarity, fail to operate, men become prone to egoistic suicide; when thecollective conscience weakens, men fall victim to anomic suicide.

Hence, "abnormally" high rates in specific groups or socialcategories, or in total societies, can be taken as an index of disintegrating forcesat work in a social structure.

When social regulations break down, the controlling influence of societyon individual propensities is no longer effective and individuals are left totheir own devices.

could moral unity be assured.

mechanical and organic solidarity

Protestantism "concedes a greater freedom to individual thought thanCatholicism ... it has fewer common beliefs and practices."'

People who are well integratedinto a group are cushioned to a significant extent from the impact of frustra-tions and tragedies that afflict the human lot; hence, they are less likely toresort to extreme behavior such as suicide

Concern with the rates of occurrence of specific phenomena rather thanwith incidence had an additional advantage in that it allowed Durkheim toengage in comparative analysis of various structures.

For ex-ample, a significant increase of suicide rates in a particular group indicatesthat the social cohesion in that group has been weakened and its membersare no longer sufficiently protected against existential crises

e showed that such group propertiesare independent of individual traits and must therefore be studied in their ownright.

According to this formulation, constraint is nolonger a simple imposition of outside controls on individual will, but rathera moral obligation to obey a rule. In this sense society is "something beyondus and something in ourselves."

every way of acting, fixed or not, capable ofexercising on the individual an external constraint.