SOC 2112 Lecture 1: Lect. 1 - Emile Durkheim

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 2112
• Professor: William Flynn

Document Summary

Durkheim was born and lived in france for all his life. France was going through a period of transitions, uprisings, and industrialization which created economical, social, and political changes. The world of agriculture was turning into a world of factories. He published four books: the division of labour in society (1893, the rules of sociological method (1895, suicide (1897, the elementary forms of religious life (1912) During the time that he wrote, it was only the beginning of sociology as a discipline. His second book laid out the basis of sociology and was concerned about setting the rules about this new concept. His main concern was to establish sociology as a separate discipline/science. Durkheim was influenced by the thoughts comte, even though comte died one year before durkheim was born, and positivism which says that knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and verified by empirical sciences.