Émile Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858, in Épinal, in the Lorraine region of France, into a family of devout Jews whose rabbinical lineage stretched back eight generations. He studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was influenced by Auguste Comte's positivism and Herbert Spencer's evolutionary sociology. In 1887, he was appointed to teach social sciences at the University of Bordeaux, becoming the first person to hold what was effectively a professorship in sociology at a French university.

His 1893 doctoral thesis, The Division of Labour in Society, introduced the distinction between mechanical solidarity, the cohesion of pre-industrial communities based on shared beliefs and sameness, and organic solidarity, the interdependence of specialized individuals in modern societies. Durkheim argued that the transition from one to the other was not guaranteed to go smoothly. When the division of labor advanced faster than social institutions could adapt, the result was anomie: a breakdown of shared norms, an absence of moral regulation, and a pervasive sense of rootlessness and meaninglessness.

In 1897, Durkheim published Suicide, a landmark study demonstrating that suicide rates varied not by individual psychology but by the degree of social integration and moral regulation in a society. He identified anomic suicide as the form most characteristic of modern industrial life, arising when rapid economic or social change left individuals without stable norms or expectations. Durkheim was appointed to the chair of the Science of Education at the Sorbonne in 1902, and in 1913 his title was expanded to include sociology, formalizing the discipline he had built.

The death of his son André in combat in December 1915 devastated Durkheim. He never recovered. He died of a stroke on November 15, 1917, in Paris, at the age of fifty-nine, leaving his final work on morality unfinished. The concept of anomie, the word he gave to the psychological cost of a society in transition, has outlived him by more than a century.