Émile Durkheim
1858-1917 · Human Sciences · Prominent
Durkheim founded academic sociology in France and built it into a university subject with a subject matter of its own: social facts such as suicide rates and moral rules, which stand outside any one person, press on you and outlast you. Explain those by other social facts, he insisted, never by what goes on inside one head. Religion, on his account, is a community worshipping itself.
Signature
The position Durkheim is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Society
- leans Collectivism
- Ethics Basis
- Relational
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Society
- leans Collectivism (19 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (17 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Polity
- leans Illiberalism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
- Allegiance
- mildly between Local and Global (58 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Durkheim refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Representative Democracy
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Harmony
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Social Invention
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Conceptual Mediation
What do we directly perceive? - Ethics Basis
- Relational
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Social Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Phenomenological Time
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Collective Will
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Social Construction
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Role of Emotion
- Social Signaling
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Socially Constructed / Evolved Animal
What is human nature?