Zitate von Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
Geburtstag: 15. April 1858
Todesdatum: 15. November 1917
David Émile Durkheim [eˈmil dyʀˈkɛm] war ein französischer Soziologe und Ethnologe. Er war 1887 als Lehrbeauftragter für Soziologie und Pädagogik in Bordeaux der erste mit einer akademischen Stelle an einer französischen Universität. Er gilt heute als ein Klassiker der Soziologie, der mit seiner Methodologie die Eigenständigkeit der Soziologie als Fachdisziplin zu begründen gesucht hat, und dessen empirische Studie zum Thema Selbsttötung zum Paradigma empirischer Soziologie wurde.
Zitate Émile Durkheim
„Every society is a moral society.“
— Émile Durkheim
Context: Every society is a moral society. In certain respects, this character is even more pronounced in organised societies. Because the individual is not sufficient unto himself, it is from society that he receives everything necessary to him, as it is for society that he works.
p. 228
„When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.“
— Émile Durkheim
in: et al. (1993), Readings in renewing American civilization, p. 54
„In the name of the dogma of struggle for existence and natural selection, they paint for us in the saddest colors this primitive humanity whose hunger and thirst, always badly satisfied, were their only passions; those sombre times when men had no other care and no other occupation than to quarrel with one another over their miserable nourishment. To react against those retrospective reveries of the philosophy of the eighteenth century and also against certain religious doctrines, to show with some force that the paradise lost is not behind us and that there is in our past nothing to regret, they believe we ought to make it dreary and belittle it systematically. Nothing is less scientific than this prejudice in the opposite direction. If the hypotheses of Darwin have a moral use, it is with more reserve and measure than in other sciences. They overlook the essential element of moral life, that is, the moderating influence that society exercises over its members, which tempers and neutralizes the brutal action of the struggle for existence and selection. Wherever there are societies, there is altruism, because there is solidarity.“
— Émile Durkheim
p. 153
„With reference to practical social doctrines, our method permits and commands the same independence. Sociology thus understood will be neither individualistic, communistic, nor socialistic in the sense commonly given these words. On principle, it will ignore these theories, in which it could not recognize any scientific value, since they tend not to describe or interpret, but to reform, social organization.“
— Émile Durkheim
p. 75
„This work had its origins in the question of the relations of the individual to social solidarity. Why does the individual, while becoming more autonomous, depend more upon society? How can he be at once more individual and more solidary? Certainly, these two movements, contradictory as they appear, develop in parallel fashion. This is the problem we are raising. It appeared to us that what resolves this apparent antinomy is a transformation of social solidarity due to the steadily growing development of the division of labor.“
— Émile Durkheim
Preface
„For if society lacks the unity that derives from the fact that the relationships between its parts are exactly regulated, that unity resulting from the harmonious articulation of its various functions assured by effective discipline and if, in addition, society lacks the unity based upon the commitment of men's wills to a common objective, then it is no more than a pile of sand that the least jolt or the slightest puff will suffice to scatter.“
— Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim (1903/1961, p. 102); Quoted in: Kenneth Allan (2012). Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World: Seeing the Social World p. 151
„There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.“
— Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim, Debate on Explanation in History and Sociology (1908).
„Kant postulates God, since without this hypothesis morality is unintelligible. We postulate a society specifically distinct from individuals, since otherwise morality has no object and duty no roots.“
— Émile Durkheim
Sociology and philosophy (1911), D. Pocock, trans. (1974), p. 51.
„A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.“
— Émile Durkheim
p. 10
