Émile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim (1858 to 1917) was a French sociologist and philosopher, one of the founders of the modern discipline of sociology. His Rules of Sociological Method argued that social facts are a domain of inquiry that cannot be reduced to individual psychology, and The Division of Labor in Society, Suicide and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life developed analyses of solidarity, anomie and the social origins of religion. Born in Épinal, the son of a rabbi from a long line of rabbis, he studied at the École normale supérieure, passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1882 and in 1887 took the first lectureship in social science and education in France, at Bordeaux. He founded the journal L'Année sociologique in 1898, moved to a chair at the Sorbonne in 1902, and died in Paris in 1917, a year after the death of his son André at the front.