Sociological Perspectives

Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method has never enjoyed the same reputation as his major books, in part because the book is uncongenial to standard interpretations of Durkheim. In particular, its attacks on teleology do not fit his reputation as a functionalist The papers in this special issue address the work historically. Both Porter and Stedman Jones deal with aspects of the context in which Durkheim worked and transformed. Schmaus and Nemedi deal with problems of interpreting Durkheim's development, and Platt discusses the reception of The Rules. The papers shed light on such important questions as the meaning of Durkheim's slogan “society is made of representations.” Durkheim, it appears, was not only what would now be called a constructionist, he went on to ask whether the fact that constructions are real in their consequences did not imply the reality causal reality of constructions and, therefore, a specific kind of “social realism.” The problem The Rules poses, of what is the fundamental stuff of society, is “classic” in significance, and Durkheim's answer is classically radical

The Rules of Sociological Method is most famous for its definition of the social fact Seen in relation to previous statistical writings on topics like suicide, though, Durkheim's work appears more to limit the domain of social facts than to create one. For Quetelet, Wagner, and Morselli, if suicide or marriage varied by age, sex, religion, climate, or race, that was enough to make a statistical fact Durkeim, rejecting their positivism, refused to speak of facts except in alliance with a distinctively sociological form of explanation.

This article concerns the relation between Durkheim's “rules” for sociological method and Charles Renouvier's Logique. It identifies each chapter of Durkheim's book as relying in a specific way on features of Renouvier's logical and scientific system. Certain of the puzzles of Durkheim's thought can be elucidated, if not fully explicated, by an analysis of Renouvier's Logique.

This paper gives an overview of Durkheim's ideas concerning knowledge in the broad sense in the period indicated It shows that the notion of collective consciousness was abandoned, and the principle of morphological determinism was retained, largely for rhetorical purposes. Durkheim's contradictory statements attest to a slow drift away from the conception which divides society into two parts, one determining the other. It is shown that the notion of collective representation replaces earlier conceptualizations. Durkheim considered collective representations as constituting a realm of social facts—indeed, the social sphere par excellence. The notion of collective representations played a crucial role in Durkheim's attempts to demonstrate the independence of sociology.

In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim tried to remove the ambiguity of The Division of Labor in Society that arose from his essentialist model of explanation, in which causes and effects are both necessary and sufficient conditions of each other. The resulting confusion of effects with causes made possible the materialist interpretation of the latter work, in which increasing population density was mistaken for the cause rather than the sign of changes in the social environment associated with an increase in specialization. The Rules tried to defeat this misinterpretation through clarifying such key concepts as cause, function, and social environment Durkheim's readers had failed to see that he had provided only a functional and not a causal explanation of the division of labor, which he took to be an adaptation to, not a result of, factors in the social rather than the physical environment.

Durkheim has not always been treated by U.S. sociology as obviously important, as the career of The Rules shows. Initially, its social realism was strongly criticized. Gradually, however, more specialized study of Durkheim was done, which led to more contextualized understandings of his work. As U.S. sociology became more empirical the character of interest in The Rules shifted; by the 1960s, it was read in the light of Suicide, then newly translated, and interpreted as an ancestor of functionalism. The meanings imputed to key ideas such as the treatment of social facts as things also shifted. It is argued that his, then newly won, status as a founding father promoted more favorable interpretation of his meanings and that various factors in the social structure of the discipline also contributed to this change.