Reading Guide Emile Durkheim C&M, Ch. 6: "Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim" and associated online readings Note: Not all of these questions can be fully answered from the readings, but they raise issues worth thinking about that will be more fully covered in the lectures.

1. What was going on in French society in the late nineteenth century that helps explain Durkheim's preoccupation with the question of social order?  What did Durkheim mean by saying that he wanted find a scientific basis for social order?

2. What is Durkheim's argument about precontractual solidarity in The Division of Labor in Society?

3. What is the difference between mechanical and organic solidarity?  What did Durkheim feel about the transition from one to the other?

4. What did Durkheim mean by the "abnormal division of labor?"  What did he think had to happen for society to reestablish a sound moral basis for the new division of labor?

5. How did Durkheim define sociology?  How did he define social facts?

6. What did Durkheim mean when he said: "Consider social facts as things"? How were social facts to be explained?

7. What did Durkheim mean when he said that deviance and crime are important to the well-being of society? What are the three basic arguments he makes about this? What does it mean to say that anomie is a property of the social structure?

8. Why did Durkheim choose suicide as a subject to study?  What made him think that a sociological explanation of suicide was possible?

9. What two variables did Durkheim use to develop his explanation of variations in suicide rates?  What were the four types of suicide that he defined?

10. What conclusions did Durkheim draw from his study of suicide about how to address the problems of modern society? What does Lewis Coser mean when he says that Durkheim was trying "to establish a balance between the claims of individuals and those of societies?"

11. What are Durkheim's main arguments in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life?  According to Durkheim, what was religion and what was "God"?

12. According to Collins and Makowsky, what were Durkheim's main shortcomings?

August 19, 2008