Birth of Émile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim was born on 15 April 1858 in Épinal. A French sociologist, Durkheim helped establish sociology as an academic discipline separate from philosophy and psychology. His books, The Division of Labour in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, argued that social facts such as norms and institutions shape individual behavior and can be studied empirically. In Suicide he showed that rates varied with social integration, and he introduced the concept of anomie. He taught at Bordeaux and the Sorbonne and trained a generation of scholars, and he is considered one of the founders of the modern social sciences.

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