Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.
For Durkheim, social facts were like the facts of the natural sciences. They could be
studied without reference to the subjective experience of individuals. He argued that
“social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual”
(Durkheim 1895). Individuals experience them as obligations, duties, and restraints
on their behavior, operating independently of their will. They are hardly noticeable
when individuals consent to them but provoke reaction when individuals resist.
In this way, Durkheim was very influential in defining the subject matter of the new
discipline of sociology. For Durkheim, sociology was not about just any phenomena
to do with the life of human beings but only those phenomena which pertained
exclusively to a social level of analysis. It was not about the biological or
psychological dynamics of human life, for example, but about the social facts
through which the lives of individuals were constrained. Moreover, the dimension
of human experience described by social facts had to be explained in its own terms.
It could not be explained by biological drives or psychological characteristics of
individuals. It was a dimension of reality sui generis (of its own kind, unique in its
characteristics). It could not be explained by, or reduced to, its individual
components without missing its most important features. As Durkheim put it, “a
social fact can only be explained by another social fact” (Durkheim 1895).
This is the framework of Durkheim’s famous study of suicide. In Suicide: A Study
in Sociology (1897), Durkheim attempted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his
rules of social research by examining suicide statistics in different police districts.
Suicide is perhaps the most personal and most individual of all acts. Its motives
would seem to be absolutely unique to the individual and to individual
psychopathology. However, what Durkheim observed was that statistical rates of
suicide remained fairly constant year by year and region by region. There was no
correlation between rates of suicide and rates of psychopathology. Suicide rates did
vary, however, according to the social context of the suicides: namely the religious
affiliation of suicides. Protestants had higher rates of suicide than Catholics, whereas
Catholics had higher rates of suicide than Jews. Durkheim argued that the key factor
that explained the difference in suicide rates (i.e., the statistical rates, not the purely
individual motives for the suicides) were the different degrees of social integration
of the different religious communities, measured by the amount of ritual and degree
of mutual involvement in religious practice. The religious groups had differing levels
of anomie, or normlessness, which Durkheim associated with high rates of suicide.
Durkheim’s study was unique and insightful because he did not try to explain suicide
rates in terms of individual psychopathology. Instead, he regarded the regularity of
the suicide rates as a factual order, implying “the existence of collective tendencies
exterior to the individual” (Durkheim 1897), and explained their variation with
respect to another social fact: “Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration
of the social groups of which the individual forms a part” (Durkheim 1897).
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