Émile Durkheim - Collected Quotes

"Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description." (Émile Durkheim, "Montesquieu's Contribution to the Rise of Social Science", 1892)

"A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations." (Émile Durkheim, "The Rules of Sociological Method", "The Rules of Sociological Method", 1895)

"Even one well-made observation will be enough in many cases, just as one well-constructed experiment often suffices for the establishment of a law." (Émile Durkheim, "The Rules of Sociological Method", "The Rules of Sociological Method", 1895)

"Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics. [...] The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group." (Émile Durkheim, "The Rules of Sociological Method", 1895)

"A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt." (Émile Durkheim, "Suicide: A Study in Sociology", 1897)

"An act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature." (Émile Durkheim, "Suicide: A Study in Sociology", 1897)

"For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy." (Émile Durkheim, "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", 1912)

"The categories of human thought are never fixed in any one definite form; they are made, unmade and remade incessantly; they change with places and times." (Émile Durkheim, "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", 1912)

"It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed." (Émile Durkheim, "The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions", 1914)