He used statistics to argue that suicide, the most personal act imaginable, was a social phenomenon.
Émile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858, in Épinal, a town in the Lorraine region of northeastern France. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all rabbis, and the young Durkheim initially prepared for the same vocation before turning to secular scholarship.1 He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1879, where his classmates included the future philosopher Henri Bergson and the socialist leader Jean Jaurès.
In 1887, Durkheim received an appointment at the University of Bordeaux to teach social science and pedagogy, the first course of its kind ever offered in a French university.2 He would use that position to establish an entirely new academic discipline.
His doctoral thesis, published in 1893 as The Division of Labor in Society, laid out the central problem that would occupy his career: what holds a modern society together when traditional bonds of religion, community, and shared custom have weakened.3 Durkheim distinguished between mechanical solidarity, the cohesion of small communities whose members share the same beliefs and occupations, and organic solidarity, the interdependence created when specialization makes individuals rely on one another.
Two years later, he published The Rules of Sociological Method and in 1895 founded the first European department of sociology at Bordeaux.4
His 1897 study Suicide demonstrated the method in full force. Durkheim analyzed suicide rates across Catholic and Protestant populations, among married and unmarried individuals, in wartime and peacetime, and found consistent social patterns where others had seen only individual despair.5 He identified four types: egoistic suicide, arising from weak social integration; altruistic suicide, from excessive integration; anomic suicide, from the collapse of moral regulation; and fatalistic suicide, from its excess.
The concept of anomie, a condition of normlessness in which individuals lose their sense of moral direction, became one of the most influential ideas in social science. Durkheim saw it as the characteristic ailment of industrial societies, where rapid economic change outpaced the capacity of institutions to provide meaning.6
In 1896, Durkheim founded L'Année Sociologique, the first journal devoted to social science in France. In 1902, he moved to the Sorbonne, where his lectures on education became the only ones mandatory for all students.7 His final major work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, appeared in 1912, arguing that religion itself was a social phenomenon, a way for communities to represent their own collective power to themselves.
Durkheim's son André was killed on the Bulgarian front in December 1915.7 Durkheim died on November 15, 1917, in Paris, at the age of fifty-nine.7