Sociology: David Emile Durkheim

Sociology
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Born in the year 1858 on 15th April in an orthodox Jewish family, David Emile Durkheim, had been predestined to be a rabbi seeing that his great grandfather and even his grandfather had been rabbis. As a school boy, Emile dropped Judaism even though he had a strong back ground as an orthodox Jew. At the time that Emile dropped Judaism, he had been attending rabbinical training in one of the schools. In his scholarly works, Emile saw society in the likeness of an organism, which had many parts all of which functioned differently but optimally towards a single goal (University of Regina, 2003). However, he also felt that society is not a sum of the entire individuals but rather, it also has structure of its own apart from individual in the society. Further, society has influence on individuals.
One of the key contributions by Emile to sociology is through the definition of sociology and separating from other disciplines such as philosophy, economics and psychology. According to Emile, when sociologists are studying the aspects of the society, it should in as such a way that it is taken as a whole. To Emile, studying the social facts of the society required that features studied are taken from the entire society. As such, the social facts will relate to the influences that lean on the individual in the society. Some of the collective aspects of sociology according to Emile include the legal systems, religion, family values urban structures and the moral values that are upheld by the entire society. He further implied that when individual act as part of the society, they do so under the influence of certain coercive norms and bounds imposed on them by the larger society. This is one of the differences that emerge between psychology and sociology, given that the former tends to narrow in on the individuals while...