SOCI 100A Lecture 4: Intro to Durkheim
Document Summary
Comes out of comte"s time but is the first serious sociologist. He believed in social factors made up of 3 things: external, coercive, objective. Durkheim says we will never know what moving from animal to human looked like (suggesting indirectly that we will never know how our brain developed) He said there was a threshold we passed through to make that transition from instinct to social. Said what we became was a result of social factors. Said we think in collectives and we are a product of the social force. For durkheim the smallest unit is family and you become human (social) because of a family. When he talked about coercion he meant social coercion. Durkheim shows that the rates of suicide are higher amongst protestants. Nature gave us the ability to receive the brain, but nurture gave us socialization. This is because catholics are more tightly knit as compared to protestants.