Thinkers Timeline

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) was a French scholar who is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern sociology. He was born in Épinal, in the Lorraine region of north-eastern France, into a Jewish family. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been rabbis, and his family expected him to follow this path. As a young man he turned away from religious study but remained deeply interested in why religion mattered to societies. He studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where his classmates included the philosopher Henri Bergson and the socialist leader Jean Jaurès. He did not immediately find his direction. Early teachers found him brilliant but hard to place. He taught philosophy at several secondary schools while developing his own approach to studying society. In 1887 he became a professor at the University of Bordeaux, where he taught the first sociology course in a French university. He moved to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1902, where he taught for the rest of his life. He founded one of the first major sociology journals, L'Année Sociologique, which brought together a group of brilliant young scholars — his nephew Marcel Mauss, the philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, and others — who became known as the Durkheimian school. His major books include The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Each became foundational for a different area of sociology. He was a passionate patriot who believed sociology could help France become a more just and integrated society. The First World War devastated him. His son André was killed at the Front in 1915, and many of his brightest students died in the trenches. He never recovered from these losses. He died in Paris in 1917 at the age of fifty-nine, two years after his son's death. His influence on sociology has been enormous. His work has shaped how the field studies religion, education, crime, suicide, work, and the relationships between individuals and the societies they live in.