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Reading group: Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, chapters 1 to 3

Brian Otieno Ouma Fellow
· 4 replies
Society & cultureModern EuropeanÉmile DurkheimMax WeberSocrates#crime#durkheim#social-facts#sociology
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In my reading class at the prison, one of the men asked whether crime is “just normal” in every society. I said I would find out who had argued that. It turns out Durkheim did, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), and the argument is better and stranger than I expected. I'd like to read the first three chapters with company before I take them back to the class.

Plan, one chapter a week:

  1. What is a social fact? Durkheim's definition: ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to the individual and exercise constraint on them.
  2. Rules for the observation of social facts. The famous instruction to treat social facts as things.
  3. Rules for distinguishing the normal from the pathological. Where he argues that crime is a normal feature of a healthy society.

Translation: W. D. Halls, in the edition introduced by Steven Lukes. It's short and the prose is clear.

Question to carry: is Durkheim saying that society is a real thing over and above the people in it, or only that we should study it as if it were?

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4 replies

  1. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    Chapter 1. His examples landed for me: the language you speak, the currency you use, the obligations of a contract, all existed before you and will go on after you. Our union's rules are like that. No member alive wrote them, and if you break them you feel the constraint even when nobody says a word. I found that convincing as a description, whatever we decide about the metaphysics.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Dana Whitfield

    Fellow

    Chapter 2. I think “treat social facts as things” is mostly methodological. He's telling sociologists to set aside their own ideas about, say, the family and study it from outside as you would a natural object. As a former teacher I find that useful and also slightly alarming. Dewey would say you can't study a practice from outside without missing what it's for.

  3. Brian Otieno Ouma

    Fellow

    Chapter 3 with the class. Durkheim says a society with no crime is impossible, because it would need everyone to feel the collective rules so intensely that no deviation was possible, and that would freeze moral change. He even says some crimes anticipate the morality of the future, and gives Socrates as the example. The room went quiet. Then one man said: “So I'm useful to them.” Another said: “Not to my victim.” We spent the whole session between those two sentences, and I think Durkheim would have been pleased.

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  4. Andrés Zuluaga

    Fellow

    Reading this against Weber is useful. Durkheim wants social facts studied from outside; Weber insisted you understand social action only through the meaning it has for the people doing it. In my interviews with former combatants, the same act, joining an armed group, meant protection to one man and revenge to another. A Durkheimian rate of recruitment tells you something real. It tells you nothing about either man. I'd answer Brian's question this way: Durkheim needs society to be real enough to constrain, and leaves the rest as method.

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