If, in certain cases, organic solidarity is not all that it should be, [...] it is because not all the conditions for its existence have been met.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim (15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline of sociology and—with Karl Marx and Max Weber—is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.
For organic solidarity to exist, it is not enough that there is a system of organs necessary to one another [...], but the way in which they must cooperate must also be predetermined.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The contract is only a truce, and a rather precarious one; it only suspends hostilities for a time.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The role of solidarity is not to suppress competition, but to moderate it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Habits, as they gain strength, are transformed into rules of conduct. The past predetermines the future.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The rule does not, therefore, create the state of mutual dependence in which solidary organs find themselves, but merely expresses it in a tangible and defined way.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If the division of labor does not produce solidarity, it is because the relations between the organs are not regulated; it is because they are in a state of anomie.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The state of anomie is impossible wherever solidary organs are in sufficient and sufficiently prolonged contact.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The producer can no longer survey the market at a glance, or even in thought; he can no longer picture its limits, since it is, so to speak, limitless.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The rules of method are to science what the rules of law and morals are to conduct; they direct the scholar's thought just as the latter govern men's actions.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It [the division of labor] has often been accused of diminishing the individual by reducing him to the role of a machine.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If the end of morality is society, it cannot let the very source of social life run dry.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Such a remedy [general education] would therefore only make specialization harmless by making it intolerable and, consequently, more or less impossible.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The division of labor does not produce these consequences [...] by virtue of a necessity of its nature, but only in exceptional and abnormal circumstances.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The division of labor presupposes that the worker, far from remaining bent over his task, does not lose sight of his immediate collaborators [...]. He feels that he is of some use.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is very true that contractual relations [...] multiply as the social division of labor increases. But [...] non-contractual relations develop at the same time.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
At the same time as domestic obligations become more numerous, they take on [...] a public character.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
For not everything in a contract is contractual.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Wherever a contract exists, it is subject to a regulation which is the work of society and not of individuals, and which becomes ever more voluminous and complicated.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Contracts [...] are binding not only for what is expressed in them, but also for all the consequences which equity, custom, or the law attribute to the obligation according to its nature.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If the division of labor makes interests interdependent, it does not merge them: it leaves them distinct and in opposition.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Each of the contracting parties, while needing the other, seeks to obtain what they need at the lowest cost, that is, to acquire as many rights as possible in exchange for the fewest possible obligations.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If we were bound only by the terms of our contracts, [...] only a precarious solidarity would result.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We cooperate because we have willed it, but our voluntary cooperation creates duties for us that we have not willed.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Contract law exercises [...] a regulatory action of the highest importance, since it predetermines what we must do and what we can demand.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
There are professional obligations that are purely moral and yet are very strict.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The contract is not self-sufficient; it is only possible thanks to a regulation of the contract that is of social origin.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The agreement of the parties cannot make a clause just which is not just in itself, and there are rules of justice whose violation social justice must prevent [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The role of society cannot, therefore, [...] be reduced to passively enforcing contracts; it is also to determine the conditions under which they are enforceable.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
There are two kinds of positive solidarity: the first connects the individual directly to society without any intermediary. In the second, he depends on society because he depends on the parts that compose it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Society can be an ensemble [...] of beliefs and sentiments common to all [...]: this is the collective type. Or, it can be a system of different and special functions united by defined relationships.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The first solidarity can only be strong to the extent that the ideas and tendencies common to all [...] surpass in number and intensity those which pertain personally to each one of them.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Solidarity [through likeness] can therefore only increase in inverse ratio to personality.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
There are in each of our minds two consciousnesses: one, [...] is society living and acting within us; the other, [...] represents only us in what is personal and distinct about us.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The solidarity which derives from similarities is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely covers our whole conscience [...]; but at that moment our individuality is nil.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If we have a strong inclination to think and act for ourselves, we cannot be strongly inclined to think and act like others.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
At the moment when solidarity through likeness exerts its action, our personality vanishes, [...] for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective being.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We propose to call this type of solidarity mechanical [...] by analogy with the cohesion which unites the elements of inorganic bodies.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In societies where this [mechanical] solidarity is highly developed, the individual does not belong to himself; he is literally a thing at the disposal of society.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The solidarity produced by the division of labor [...] supposes that individuals differ from one another.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Organic solidarity is only possible if each one has a sphere of action which is peculiar to him; a personality, consequently.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Each individual depends more closely on society as labor is more divided, and, on the other hand, the activity of each is more personal as it is more specialized.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The individuality of the whole grows at the same time as that of its parts; society becomes more capable of collective movement, at the same time that each of its elements has more individual movement.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Because of this analogy [with living bodies], we propose to call the solidarity that is due to the division of labor, organic.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
As society extends and concentrates, it envelops the individual less closely and [...] can less effectively contain the divergent tendencies that emerge.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In small towns, anyone who seeks to emancipate themselves from received customs meets with resistance that is sometimes very strong.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In large cities, the individual is much more freed from the collective yoke.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We depend all the more closely on common opinion the more closely it watches all our actions.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
One is nowhere as well hidden as in a crowd.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The more extended and dense a group is, the more the collective attention, spread over a large area, is unable to follow the movements of each individual.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Collective curiosity is all the more lively as personal relationships between individuals are more continuous and frequent.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
As mutual indifference has the effect of relaxing collective surveillance, the sphere of free action for each individual expands in fact, and little by little, the fact becomes a right.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
A rule no longer seems as respectable when it ceases to be respected with impunity.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Once we have used a liberty, we acquire the need for it; it becomes as necessary to us and seems as sacred as the others.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
As the moral density of society rises, it becomes itself like a great city that would contain the entire population within its walls.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
For social control to be rigorous and for the common conscience to be maintained, society must be divided into compartments small enough to completely envelop the individual.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The acts that morals alone repress are not of a different nature from those punished by law; they are only less serious.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
When one is no longer sensitive to small faults, one is less so to large ones.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
When the weakest sentiments lose their energy, the stronger sentiments, which are of the same kind [...], cannot fully retain theirs.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Until now, sociologists have paid little attention to characterizing and defining the method they apply to the study of social facts.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
In all the work of [...] Spencer, the methodological problem has no place.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
The great sociologists [...] have hardly moved beyond generalities about the nature of societies, the relationship between the social and biological realms, and the general course of progress.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
To deal with these philosophical questions, special and complex procedures are not necessary.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
They were content [...] to weigh the comparative merits of deduction and induction and to conduct a summary inquiry into the most general resources available for sociological investigation.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
The precautions to be taken in observing facts, the way in which the main problems should be posed, the direction in which research should be guided [...] remained undetermined.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
One must move beyond these overly general questions and tackle a certain number of particular problems.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
We have been led, by the very force of things, to create for ourselves a more defined method, [...] more precisely adapted to the particular nature of social phenomena.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
It is these results of our practice that we would like to present here in their entirety and submit for discussion.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
It is [...] worthwhile to extract [the rules of the method], to formulate them separately, accompanying them with their proofs and illustrating them with examples.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
One will thus be better able to judge the direction that we would like to try to give to sociological studies.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
The general law of morality has scientific value only if it can account for the diversity of moral facts; we must begin by studying the latter in order to discover it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
How, when we are not certain about the nature of particular duties and rights, could we agree on the nature of their principle?
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Morality [...] is not made up of two or three very general rules [...], but of a very large number of special precepts. There is not one duty, but duties.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Here as elsewhere, what exists is the particular and the individual, and the general is only a schematic expression of it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is the particular rules, on the contrary, which, directly and without intermediary, bind the will at every moment.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
There are defined and special ways of acting that impose themselves upon us. [...] [These] are like so many molds into which we are obliged to cast our actions.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[Moral practices are] reflexes that are inscribed not within the organism, but in law and in customs: they are social phenomena.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Moralists [...] reason as if morality were something to be created entirely anew, as if they were faced with a blank slate on which they could build their system at will.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[Moralists] start from the concept of man, deduce an ideal from it [...], and then make the obligation to realize this ideal the supreme rule of conduct, the moral law.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Deduction, by itself, does not constitute a sufficient demonstration. Why should it be otherwise for the moralist?
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Who is to say that [morality] does not serve exclusively social ends to which the individual must be subordinated?
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
To be able to derive the general law of morality [...], one would have to know the function of morality, and for that, the only way is to observe moral facts.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
History has shown that what was moral for one people could be immoral for another, and not only in fact, but in right.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If the peoples who preceded us had held the respect for individual dignity that we profess today, they could not have survived.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Moral rules are moral only in relation to certain experimental conditions, and therefore, one can understand nothing of the nature of moral phenomena if these conditions are not determined.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The more defined beliefs and practices are, the less room they leave for individual differences.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[Beliefs] are uniform molds in which we all uniformly cast our ideas and actions; the consensus is therefore as perfect as possible.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The more general and indeterminate the rules of conduct and thought, the more individual reflection must intervene to apply them to particular cases.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Individual reflection cannot be awakened without dissent breaking out [...]. Centrifugal tendencies thus multiply at the expense of social cohesion.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The strong and defined states of the common conscience are the roots of penal law.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The number of [rules with repressive sanctions] is smaller today than in the past, and [...] progressively decreases as societies approach our current type.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If there are more things common to all, there are also many more that are personal to each.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The dissimilarities between people have become more pronounced as they have become more cultivated.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In each particular conscience, the personal sphere has grown much more than [the common sphere].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Because the individual personality has developed [...], there are more possible attacks against it; but the sentiment they offend is always the same.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The more numerous [the states of the common conscience], the more types of crime there must be, and [...] the variations of the one exactly reflect those of the other.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We must [...] not count the rules, but group them into classes [...], according to whether they relate to the same sentiment or to different sentiments.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[The collective conscience] has all the more action on the individual as it has more vitality. If [...] it is made only of weak impulses, it only draws the individual weakly in the collective direction.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[...] myths [...] aim to interpret existing rites rather than to commemorate past events; they are an explanation of the present much more than a history.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The number and importance of the prohibitions that isolate a sacred thing [...] correspond to the degree of sacredness with which it is invested.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
[...] the images of the totemic being are more sacred than the totemic being itself.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
In the [sacred] plant or animal is supposed to reside a formidable principle that cannot enter a profane organism without disorganizing or destroying it.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
[...] the prohibition [...] seems to have always been suspended in case of necessity, for example when the native is starving and has nothing else to eat.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The elderly, [...] having attained a high religious dignity, are freed from the prohibitions [...]: they can eat the holy thing because they are holy themselves.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
We are inclined [...] to conceive of the common man [...] as an essentially profane being. It may well be that this conception is not literally true of any religion.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
[...] there exists in man something that keeps the profane at a distance [...]; the human organism conceals a sacred principle in its depths.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
For the primitive mind, the name is not just a word [...]; it is a part of the being, and even something essential.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
One must [...] avoid seeing in totemism a kind of zoolatry. Man in no way has [...] the attitude of the faithful towards his god, since he himself belongs to the sacred world.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Each individual therefore has a double nature: within him coexist two beings, a man and an animal.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Myths aim to establish genealogical relationships between man and animal [...]. Through this community of origin, they are thought to account for their community of nature.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The bonds that exist between [man and his totem] are much more like those that unite members of the same family; animals and men are made of the same flesh [...].
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Because of this kinship, man sees in the animals of the totemic species benevolent associates on whose assistance he believes he can count.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Human blood [...] is so sacred a thing that [...] it is very often used to consecrate the most respected instruments of the cult.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
I consider [...] that education is an eminently social thing, in its origins as well as in its functions, and that [...] pedagogy depends more closely on sociology than on any other science.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Far from there being a universally valid education for all humankind, there is [...] no society where different pedagogical systems do not coexist and function in parallel.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Education varies with social classes or even with habitats. The education of the city is not that of the countryside; that of the bourgeois is not that of the worker.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Each profession [...] demands particular skills and special knowledge [...], and as the child must be prepared for the function they will be called upon to fulfill, education, from a certain age, can no longer remain the same for all.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
We cannot develop with the necessary intensity the faculties our function specifically implies without letting the others grow numb from inaction, thus abdicating [...] a whole part of our nature.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Each type of people has its own education, which can serve to define it in the same way as its moral, political, and religious organization.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
The human being that education must create in us is not the human being as nature made them, but as society wants them to be; and it wants them as its internal economy demands.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
In the present as in the past, our pedagogical ideal is [...] the work of society. It is society that draws for us the portrait of the person we ought to be [...].
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Far from education having the individual and their interests as its sole or main object, it is above all the means by which society perpetually renews the conditions of its own existence.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Society can only live if there is sufficient homogeneity among its members. Education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in advance in the child's soul the essential similarities that collective life requires.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
In each of us, there exist two beings [...]. One is the individual being [...]. The other is the social being. To constitute this latter being in each of us is the end of education.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Spontaneously, man was not inclined to submit to political authority, to respect moral discipline, to devote himself, or to sacrifice himself.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
[Education] creates a new human being within us [...], made of all that is best in us, of all that gives value and dignity to life.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
[The aptitudes that social life requires] cannot be transmitted from one generation to the next through heredity. It is through education that this transmission occurs.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
To limit ourselves to looking within would be to turn our gaze away from the very reality we must reach; it would make it impossible for us to understand anything of the movement that carries the world around us.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Although the division of labor is not new, it was only at the end of the last century that societies began to become aware of this law, which until then they had submitted to almost unknowingly.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Far from condemning or fighting it, economists [...] proclaim its necessity. They see [in the division of labor] the supreme law of human societies and the condition for progress.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The division of labor is not unique to the economic world; its growing influence can be observed in the most diverse areas of society.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Political, administrative, and judicial functions are becoming more and more specialized. The same is true of artistic and scientific functions.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We are far from the time when philosophy was the one and only science; it has fragmented into a multitude of special disciplines, each with its own object, its method, its spirit.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
From half-century to half-century, the men who have made their mark in the sciences have become more specialized.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Not only does the scientist no longer cultivate different sciences simultaneously, but he no longer even embraces an entire science as a whole. The circle of his research is restricted to a specific set of problems or even to a single problem.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The law of the division of labor applies to organisms as it does to societies; it has even been said that an organism occupies a higher place on the animal scale the more its functions are specialized.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[The division of labor] is no longer merely a social institution originating from human intelligence and will; but it is a phenomenon of general biology [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The social division of labor appears only as a particular form of this general process, and societies, by conforming to this law, seem to yield to a current that arose long before them [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Such a fact obviously cannot occur without profoundly affecting our moral constitution.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Is it our duty to seek to become a finished and complete being, a whole that is self-sufficient, or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, an organ of an organism?
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In short, the division of labor, while being a law of nature, is it also a moral rule for human conduct [...]?
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Everyone feels that it [the division of labor] is and is increasingly becoming one of the fundamental bases of the social order.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Science [...] may well enlighten the world, but it leaves darkness in the hearts; it is up to the heart itself to create its own light.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
What is the point of working to know reality, if the knowledge we acquire cannot serve us in life?
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
For societies as for individuals, health is good and desirable; illness, on the contrary, is the bad thing that must be avoided.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
Between science and art there is no longer an abyss; but one passes from one to the other without a break in continuity. [...] Art is merely the extension of science.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
We must give up the habit [...] of judging an institution, a practice, a moral maxim, as if they were good or bad in and of themselves, for all social types indiscriminately.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
A social fact can only be called normal for a given social species, in relation to a given phase of its development.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
The greater frequency of [the most widespread forms of organization] is therefore proof of their superiority.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
To act with full knowledge of the facts, it is not enough to know what we should want, but why we should want it.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
If there is one fact whose pathological character seems indisputable, it is crime.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
To classify crime among the phenomena of normal sociology [...] is to affirm that it is a factor of public health, an integral part of all healthy societies.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
Imagine a society of saints, an exemplary and perfect cloister. Crimes properly so called will there be unknown; but faults which appear venial to the layman will create there the same scandal as the ordinary offense.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
Crime is therefore necessary; it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life, and by that very fact it is useful.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
For the originality of the idealist who dreams of surpassing his century to manifest itself, the originality of the criminal, who is below his time, must be possible. The one does not go without the other.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
Contrary to current ideas, the criminal no longer appears as a radically unsociable being, [...] he is a regular agent of social life.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
The statesman's duty is no longer to violently push societies towards an ideal [...], but his role is that of the physician: he prevents the outbreak of diseases with good hygiene and, when they are declared, he seeks to cure them.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
If labor is more divided as societies become more voluminous and denser, [...] it is because the struggle for existence is more acute.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Competition between two organisms is all the more keen the more alike they are. Having the same needs and pursuing the same objects, they find themselves everywhere in rivalry.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Men are subject to the same law. In the same city, different professions can coexist without being obliged to harm one another, for they pursue different objects.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The eye doctor does not compete with the one who treats mental illnesses, nor the shoemaker with the hatter [...]. As they render different services, they can render them in parallel.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The closer the functions are, the more points of contact there are between them, and consequently, the more they are exposed to conflict.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Any condensation of the social mass, especially if it is accompanied by an increase in population, necessarily determines the progress of the division of labor.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Does an increase in average happiness result from all these changes? It is not clear what cause it would be due to. [...] The greater intensity of the struggle implies new and painful efforts.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Everything happens mechanically. A rupture of equilibrium in the social mass gives rise to conflicts that can only be resolved by a more developed division of labor: such is the motor of progress.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The division of labor is, therefore, a result of the struggle for existence, but it is a mellowed denouement.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Thanks to [the division of labor], rivals are not obliged to eliminate one another, but can coexist side by side.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
A frail individual can find a place within the complex framework of our social organization where it is possible for them to render services.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The more the environment is subject to change, the greater the part of intelligence in life becomes; for it alone can find the new conditions of a constantly broken equilibrium.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is not without reason that mental illnesses go hand in hand with civilization, nor that they are more prevalent in cities than in the countryside.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
To say change is not necessarily to say progress. We see how the division of labor appears to us in a different light than it does to economists.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If we specialize, it is not to produce more, but to be able to live in the new conditions of existence that have been made for us.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[A] choice was not made without a more or less concerted agreement between the different groups.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
There is [...] the extreme contagiousness of religious forces.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
[Religious forces] invade every object within their reach, whatever it may be.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
A single religious force can animate the most different things, which, by that very fact, find themselves closely brought together and classified in the same category.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The contagiousness [of religious forces] [...] stems from the social origins of the notion of the sacred.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
When an act that [...] is bound to conform to a moral rule deviates from it, society [...] intervenes to obstruct this deviation. It reacts actively against its author.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
This predetermined reaction, exerted by society on the agent who has broken the rule, constitutes what is called a sanction. [...] We can say that every moral fact consists of a sanctioned rule of conduct.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
What distinguishes moral rules is that they are obligatory.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is impossible for the members of a society to recognize a rule of conduct as obligatory without reacting against any act that violates it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The reality of an obligation is certain only if it manifests itself through some sanction.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The moralist must proceed in such a way as to take as obligatory only what is obligatory and not what seems so to him; that he should take as the subject of his research realities and not subjective appearances.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We believe [...] that law and morality are domains too intimately united to be radically separated. There is a continual exchange between them.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If morality is allowed to penetrate law, it invades it, and if it does not penetrate it, it remains a dead letter, a pure abstraction, instead of being an effective discipline of wills.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The positive science of morality is a branch of sociology; for every sanction is a social matter above all else.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[Individual duties] are individual only in appearance and can also only depend on social conditions.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
There are acts that public opinion imposes, others that it leaves to private initiatives. The latter are therefore gratuitous and free.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The moral fact proper does not consist in the act conforming to the rule, but in the rule itself. Now, there is no rule where there is no obligation.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
What this contingency indicates [...] is that these acts [beyond duty] are not necessary, are not adjusted to any vital purpose, in a word are a luxury; which is to say that they belong to the domain of art.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Just as play is the aesthetics of physical life, and art the aesthetics of intellectual life, [performing acts beyond duty] is the aesthetics of moral life.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We believe, on the contrary, that anomie is the negation of all morality.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If it [the negative cult] prescribes that the faithful flee the profane world, it is to bring them closer to the sacred world.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
All forces, even the most spiritual, are worn out by the effect of time, if nothing comes to restore the energy they lose [...]: therein lies a primordial necessity which [...] is the profound reason for the positive cult.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
There is no positive rite which, deep down, does not constitute a true sacrilege; for man cannot commune with sacred beings without crossing the barrier which, normally, must keep him separate from them.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
It is he [man] who makes his gods [...] or, at least, it is he who makes them last; but, at the same time, it is through them that he lasts.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Sacred beings only are what they are because they are represented as such in the mind. Should we cease to believe in them, they would be as if they were not.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Common faith is rekindled quite naturally within the reconstituted collectivity; it is reborn because it finds itself in the very conditions in which it was originally born.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Without the gods, men could not live. But, on the other hand, the gods would die if worship were not rendered to them.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
What the faithful truly gives to his god is not the food he places on the altar, nor the blood he lets flow from his veins: it is his thought.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
If [...] the sacred principle is nothing other than society hypostasized and transfigured, ritual life must be interpretable in lay and social terms.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The individual holds from society the best of himself [...]. If we take away from man language, the sciences, the arts, the beliefs of morality, he falls to the rank of animality.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Society exists and lives only in and through individuals. Should the idea of society be extinguished in individual minds [...], society will die.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The rhythm which religious life obeys only expresses the rhythm of social life, and results from it.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The only way to rejuvenate collective representations [...] is to re-immerse them in the very source of religious life, that is to say, in assembled groups.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
What essentially constitutes the sacrifice was no longer [...] the act of renunciation that the word sacrifice ordinarily expresses; it was, above all, an act of alimentary communion.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The cult really has the effect of periodically recreating a moral being on which we depend as it depends on us. And this being exists: it is society.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Today, that general culture, once so vaunted, strikes us as nothing more than a soft and slack discipline.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We want activity, instead of spreading itself over a large surface, to be concentrated and to gain in intensity what it loses in breadth.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The gentleman of yesteryear is for us now nothing more than a dilettante, and we refuse to grant any moral value to dilettantism.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We see perfection rather in the competent man who seeks not to be complete, but to produce, who has a delimited task and devotes himself to it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The moral ideal, from being one, simple, and impersonal, is becoming more and more diversified.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We no longer think that the fundamental duty of man is to realize in himself the qualities of man in general; but we believe he is equally bound to have those of his occupation.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
From one of its aspects, the categorical imperative of the moral conscience is taking the following form: Put yourself in a position to usefully fulfill a specific function.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Never [...] has the division of labor been declared good absolutely and without reservation, but only within certain limits that must not be exceeded.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is with moral life as it is with the life of the body [...]; nothing in it is good indefinitely and without measure.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
A duty can be contained and moderated by another duty, but not by purely economic necessities.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Morality lives from the life of the world; it is therefore impossible that what is necessary for the world to live should be contrary to morality.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
While commanding men to specialize, [public opinion] always seems to fear that they might specialize too much.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
As the principle of the division of labor receives a more complete application... art progresses, the artisan regresses.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
To know what [a social fact] is objectively, it is not enough to develop the content of the idea we have of it, but we must treat it as an objective fact, observe, and compare.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
What distinguishes the restitutive sanction is that it is not expiatory, but amounts to a simple restoration of the state of affairs.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
A suffering proportionate to his misdeed is not inflicted on the one who has violated the law [...]; he is simply condemned to submit to it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The judge states the law, he does not pronounce penalties.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The idea that murder could be tolerated outrages us, but we accept very well that inheritance law might be modified [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Rules with restitutive sanctions are either not part of the collective conscience at all, or are only weak states of it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Repressive law corresponds to the heart, the center of the common conscience; [...] restitutive law originates in very eccentric regions.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
While repressive law tends to remain diffuse throughout society, restitutive law creates increasingly specialized organs.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
When society is brought to intervene, it is not to reconcile individual interests; [...] it applies the general and traditional rules of law to the specific case.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The law is a social thing above all, and its object is entirely different from the interest of the litigants.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If the contract has the power to bind, it is society that imparts this power to it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Every contract thus presupposes that, behind the parties who commit, there is society ready to intervene to enforce the commitments made.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Society only lends this binding force to contracts that have a social value in themselves, that is, which conform to the rules of law.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The relationships that [restitutive rules] determine [...] are established not between the individual and society, but between restricted and special parts of society, which they link together.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[The relationships of restitutive law] are very different from those regulated by repressive law, as the latter directly and without intermediary link the particular conscience to the collective conscience.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
All known religions have been [...] systems of ideas that tended to embrace the universality of things and to give us a total representation of the world.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
For the Australian, things themselves, all the things that populate the universe, are part of the tribe; they [...] therefore have, just like men, a determined place within the framework of society.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
It is because men were grouped that they were able to group things; for in order to classify the latter, they confined themselves to placing them in the groups they themselves formed.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The unity of these first logical systems merely reproduces the unity of society.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The fundamental notions of the mind, the essential categories of thought, can be the product of social factors.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The genus is the external framework [...]. The content cannot itself provide the framework in which it is arranged.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The animal is capable of forming generic images, whereas it is ignorant of the art of thinking by genera and species.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
We would [...] never have thought of bringing the beings of the universe together into homogeneous groups, called genera, if we had not had the example of human societies before our eyes.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Hierarchy is exclusively a social thing. It is only in society that there are superiors, inferiors, and equals.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
It is society that has provided the canvas on which logical thought has worked.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Man sees in the things of his clan relatives or associates; he calls them friends, he considers them to be made of the same flesh as himself.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
[...] there is nothing known that is not classified in a clan and under a totem, there is also nothing that does not receive, to varying degrees, some reflection of religiosity.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Just like the Greek religion, [the totemic religion] puts the divine everywhere; the famous formula πάντα πλήρη θεῶν can also serve as its motto.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
The different totemic cults [...] mutually imply one another; they are but parts of a single whole, elements of a single religion.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
To get an adequate idea of totemism, one must not confine oneself to the limits of the clan, but consider the tribe in its totality.
1912
Source: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Social life derives from a double source: the similarity of consciences and the division of social labor.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The individual is socialized [...] either because, having no individuality of his own, he merges with his fellows, or because he depends on them to the very extent that he is distinguished from them.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The similarity of consciences gives rise to legal rules which [...] impose uniform beliefs and practices on everyone.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The division of labor gives rise to legal rules that determine the nature and relationships of the divided functions.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Where restitutive law is highly developed, there is a professional morality for each profession.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The rules of professional morality and law [...] oblige the individual to act for ends that are not his own, to make concessions, to take into account interests superior to his own.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Even where society rests most completely on the division of labor, it does not dissolve into a dust of juxtaposed atoms [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The members [of society] are united by bonds that extend far beyond the brief moments when exchange takes place.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Because we fulfill a certain function, [...] we are caught in a network of obligations from which we do not have the right to free ourselves.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Altruism is not destined to become [...] a sort of pleasant ornament of our social life; but it will always be its fundamental basis.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Men cannot live together without agreeing and [...] without making mutual sacrifices, without binding themselves to one another in a strong and lasting way.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Every society is a moral society.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Because the individual is not self-sufficient, it is from society that he receives everything he needs, just as it is for society that he works.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[The individual] gets used to seeing himself at his true value, that is, to seeing himself only as part of a whole, the organ of an organism.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Society learns to regard its members [...] no longer as things over which it has rights, but as cooperators it cannot do without and towards whom it has duties.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
School cannot be the property of a party, and the teacher fails in their duties when they use the authority at their disposal to draw their students into the rut of their personal biases.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
There are [...], at the base of our civilization, a certain number of principles that [...] are common to all [...]: respect for reason, for science, for the ideas and feelings that are the basis of democratic morality.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Education does not create man from scratch [...]; it is applied to dispositions it finds already made.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
One of the characteristics of man is that his innate predispositions are very general and very vague.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Whatever may have been said, one is not born a criminal; still less is one destined from birth for this or that type of crime.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Between the undecided virtualities that constitute man at the moment of birth and the defined character he must become [...], the distance is considerable. It is this distance that education must have the child travel.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Far from being discouraged by our powerlessness, we should rather be frightened by the extent of our power.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Education must be essentially a matter of authority. [...] Nothing is as false and deceptive as the conception [...] according to which man can be formed through play and with no other stimulus than the attraction of pleasure.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
The sense of duty is, in fact, for the child and even for the adult, the stimulus par excellence for effort.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Freedom and authority have sometimes been opposed [...]. But this opposition is artificial. [...] Freedom is the daughter of well-understood authority.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
To be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be master of oneself, to know how to act by reason and do one's duty.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Education is the action exerted on children by parents and teachers. [...] Pedagogy [...] consists not of actions, but of theories.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
It is futile to believe that we raise our children as we wish. We are forced to follow the rules that prevail in the social environment in which we live.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
[Education] creates a new being in man, and this being is made of all that is best in us, of all that gives value and dignity to life.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Education is an eminently social thing, in its origins as in its functions, and [...] pedagogy depends more closely on sociology than on any other science.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
From the moment men form a society, however rudimentary it may be, there are necessarily rules that govern their relations and, consequently, a morality [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Theft can only exist to the extent that property exists.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Just because a society does not find pillaging neighboring nations revolting, one cannot conclude that it tolerates the same practices in its internal relations [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The fact that a rule is deviated from under special conditions does not prove that it does not exist.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Individuals can admire a person's courage without the act itself being tolerated in principle.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If there is one rule common to all moralities, it is certainly that which prohibits attacks against the person [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If all individuals [...] are equally protected today, this softening of morals is due not to the appearance of a new penal rule, but to the extension of an old one.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is not [the collective sentiments] that have multiplied, but the object to which they relate.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
On the whole, the common conscience includes fewer and fewer strong and determined sentiments [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The only collective sentiments that have become more intense are those whose object is not social things, but the individual.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The individual personality must have become a much more important element in the life of society [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[The personal conscience] must have emancipated itself from the yoke of [the common conscience] and, consequently, the latter must have lost the dominion it exercised in the beginning.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
People who resemble one another cannot live together without each feeling a sympathy for their fellows that opposes any act likely to cause them suffering.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Does the general who sends a regiment to certain death [...] act any differently than the priest who sacrifices a victim to appease the national god?
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If in lower societies so little space is given to individual personality, it is not that it has been artificially compressed or repressed, it is quite simply that at that moment in history it did not exist.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Individuals can only be subject to a collective despotism; for the members of a society can only be dominated by a force superior to them, and there is only one that has this quality: that of the group.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Any personality, however powerful it may be, could do nothing on its own against an entire society.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Far from being able to date the effacement of the individual from the institution of a despotic power, we must on the contrary see in it the first step that was taken on the path of individualism.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Leaders are in fact the first individual personalities to have emerged from the social mass.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
A source of initiative is thus opened, which did not exist until then. There is now someone who can produce something new and even [...] depart from collective customs. The balance is broken.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Whenever we are faced with a governmental apparatus endowed with great authority, we must seek the reason for it [...] in the nature of the societies they govern.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Despotism, at least when it is not a pathological and decadent phenomenon, is nothing other than a transformed communism.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We see [...] how false the theory is that posits egoism as the starting point of humanity, and altruism, on the contrary, as a recent conquest.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Wherever there are societies, there is altruism because there is solidarity.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We find [altruism] from the very beginning of humanity and even in a truly intemperate form.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Scientifically, a conduct is egoistic to the extent that it is determined by feelings and representations that are exclusively personal to us.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We must not say, therefore, that altruism was born of egoism; such a derivation would only be possible through a creation ex nihilo.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
These two drivers of conduct [egoism and altruism] have been present from the beginning in all human consciousnesses.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In civilized man, egoism enters into the very heart of higher representations: each of us has our own opinions, our beliefs, our own aspirations, and holds to them.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own; it can be called the collective or common conscience.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
An act is criminal when it offends the strong and definite states of the collective conscience.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We should not say that an act offends the common conscience because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends the common conscience. [...] It is a crime because we condemn it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[The collective conscience] is something other than particular consciences, although it is only realized in individuals. It is the psychic type of society [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
There are a multitude of acts that have been or still are regarded as criminal, without being in themselves harmful to society.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Even when a criminal act is certainly harmful to society, the degree of harmfulness [...] is not regularly proportional to the intensity of the punishment it receives.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If the [collective] sentiments are abolished, the most disastrous act for society could not only be tolerated, but honored and held up as an example.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The only common characteristic of all crimes is that they consist [...] of acts universally condemned by the members of each society.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Crime offends sentiments which, for a given social type, are found in all healthy consciences.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
This stability of penal law testifies to the strength of resistance of the collective sentiments to which it corresponds.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Things are good because we love them, rather than us loving them because they are good. [...] The same is true in social life. An act is socially bad because it is rejected by society.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Penal law [...] does not command one to respect the life of another, but to sentence the murderer to death. It does not first say, as civil law does, 'here is the duty,' but right away, 'here is the punishment.'
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is [...] to the collective conscience that we must always return; from it [...] all criminality derives. Crime is not simply the violation of interests [...], it is an offense against a [...] transcendent authority.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
However different the acts so qualified may seem at first glance, it is impossible that they do not have some common ground. For they affect the moral conscience of nations everywhere in the same way.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The bond of social solidarity [...] is that which, when broken, constitutes a crime; we call by this name any act which [...] provokes against its author that characteristic reaction known as punishment.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is enough for each individual to devote himself to a special function to find himself, by the force of things, in solidarity with others.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The hypothesis of a social contract is [...] irreconcilable with the principle of the division of labor.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Social life, like all life in general, can only be organized naturally through an unconscious and spontaneous adaptation, [...] and not according to a meditated plan of reflective intelligence.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The concept of the social contract is [...] very difficult to defend, for it has no relation to the facts. The observer, so to speak, does not encounter it on his path.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Social life, wherever it is normal, is spontaneous: and if it is abnormal, it cannot last.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If interest brings men together, it is never but for a few moments; it can only create an external bond between them.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In the act of exchange, the various agents remain outside of one another and, when the operation is over, each one finds himself and takes himself back entirely.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Consciences are only superficially in contact; they neither penetrate nor adhere strongly to one another.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Every harmony of interests conceals a latent or simply postponed conflict.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Where interest alone reigns, [...] each self finds itself vis-à-vis the other on a war footing, and any truce in this eternal antagonism cannot be of long duration.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Interest is indeed the least constant thing in the world. Today, it is useful for me to unite with you; tomorrow, the same reason will make me your enemy.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[The apparatus of law], far from diminishing, is growing and becoming more and more complicated.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If repressive law loses ground, restitutive law, which did not exist at all at the origin, is only growing.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If society intervenes more, one does not have the right to say that individual spontaneity is increasingly sufficient for everything.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Education is an eminently social thing.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Education is the action exercised by the adult generations on those that are not yet ripe for social life.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Each society forms a certain ideal of man. It is this ideal that is the pole of education.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Education is the means by which [each society] prepares in the hearts of children the essential conditions of its own existence.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Society finds itself [...], with each new generation, in the presence of an almost blank slate on which it must build anew.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
To the selfish and asocial being that has just been born, [society] adds another, capable of leading a moral and social life. This is the work of education.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
In each of us [...] there exist two beings [...]. One is the individual being. The other is [...] the social being. To constitute this being in each of us, such is the end of education.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
We are so accustomed to opposing society and the individual that any doctrine which makes frequent use of the word 'society' seems to sacrifice the individual.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
If making a person is currently the goal of education, and if to educate is to socialize, let us then conclude that it is possible to individualize by socializing.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
To say that education is a social matter is not to formulate an educational program; it is to state a fact.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
To consider social facts as things, that is the first rule of [the] method.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Institutions are neither absolutely plastic, nor absolutely resistant to any deliberate modification.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
The better one knows the nature of things, the better one's chance of using it effectively.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
Ideals are realities.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
The most elementary teaching must be the most philosophical.
1922
Source: Education and Sociology
To prove a hypothesis is not to show that it accounts fairly well for a few facts [...], it is to set up methodical experiments.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
There is no contradiction in the sphere of individual action growing at the same time as that of the State.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Nothing is less complex than the despotic government of a barbarian chief; the functions it fulfills are rudimentary and few in number.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The directing organ of social life can have absorbed all of the latter [...] without being very developed for that reason, if social life itself is not very developed.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
History shows [...] that, as a rule, administrative law is more developed the more societies belong to a higher type.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
A multitude of functions that were diffuse become concentrated. The care of education [...], of protecting public health, of presiding over public assistance [...] gradually enters the sphere of action of the central organ.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is [...] contrary to all method to regard the current dimensions of the governmental organ as a morbid fact, due to a combination of accidental circumstances.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[The growth of the State is] a normal phenomenon, which is linked to the very structure of higher societies, since it progresses continuously as societies approach this type.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
This phenomenon [centralization] occurs with mechanical necessity, and moreover it is useful, for it corresponds to the new state of affairs.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In a colony of polyps, one individual can be sick without the others feeling it. The same is not true when society is formed by a system of organs.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
As a result of their mutual dependence, what affects one affects others, and thus any somewhat serious change takes on a general interest.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The closure of a small workshop causes only very limited disturbances [...]; the bankruptcy of a large industrial company is, on the contrary, a public disruption.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
It is not true that the [social brain] only presides over external relations. [...] its true role is to preside over the entirety of life.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
What makes the governmental organ more or less considerable is not that peoples are more or less peaceful; but it grows as [...] societies include more different, more intimately interconnected organs.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We do not wish to derive morality from science, but to create a science of morality, which is a very different thing.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Moral facts are phenomena like any other; it must therefore be possible to observe them, describe them, classify them, and seek the laws that explain them.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If morality is one way or another at a given moment, it is because the conditions in which people then live do not allow it to be otherwise.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Morality is formed, transformed, and maintained for reasons of an experimental order; these are the only reasons that the science of morality undertakes to determine.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We would consider our research not worth an hour of our time if it were to have only speculative interest.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If we carefully separate theoretical problems from practical ones, it is not to neglect the latter; on the contrary, it is to put ourselves in a better position to solve them.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Science can help us find the direction in which we should orient our conduct, to determine the ideal towards which we are vaguely striving.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The ideal rests on nothing if its roots are not grounded in reality.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
A fact cannot be changed in the blink of an eye, even when it is desirable.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Any fact of a vital order [...] generally cannot last if it does not serve some purpose, if it does not meet some need; as long as the contrary is not proven, it is entitled to our respect.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
What reconciles science and morality is the science of morality; for at the same time as it teaches us to respect moral reality, it provides us with the means to improve it.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Science, here as elsewhere, presupposes complete freedom of mind. We must rid ourselves of those ways of seeing and judging that long habit has fixed in us.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Indeed, there is only one way to create a science: to dare to do so, but with method.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
How is it that, while becoming more autonomous, the individual depends more closely on society? How can they be at once more individual and more solidary?
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Since [...] social phenomena escape the experimenter's control, the comparative method is the only one suitable for sociology.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
This so-called axiom of the plurality of causes is a negation of the principle of causality.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
For the scientist, the causal relationship is not in question; it is presupposed by the very method of science.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
The same effect always corresponds to the same cause.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
If suicide depends on more than one cause, it is because, in reality, there are several kinds of suicides.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
Constant concomitance is therefore, in itself, a law, regardless of the state of the phenomena left out of the comparison.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
The way in which a phenomenon develops expresses its nature; for two developments to correspond, there must also be a correspondence in the natures they manifest.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
When two phenomena vary regularly with each other, this relationship must be maintained even if, in certain cases, one of them appears without the other.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
One proves nothing when [...] one is content to show by examples [...] that the facts have varied as the hypothesis requires.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
To illustrate an idea is not to prove it.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
A society does not create its organization from scratch; it receives it, in part, ready-made from those that preceded it.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
To explain a social fact of some complexity, one must follow its entire development through all social species.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
Comparative sociology is not a particular branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, insofar as it aspires to account for facts.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
What is necessary is to compare not isolated variations, but regularly constituted series of variations.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
The child receives from its parents faculties and predispositions that only come into play late in its life.
1895
Source: The Rules of Sociological Method
At the same time as societies, individuals are transformed as a result of the changes that occur in the number of social units and their relationships.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Man [...] depends on social causes.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The more associates there are and the more they react to one another, the more the product of these reactions extends beyond the organism.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
In humanity [...], it is social causes that replace organic causes. The organism becomes spiritualized.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The progress of consciousness is in inverse proportion to that of instinct.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Consciousness [...] only fills the space that instinct leaves free.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
The great difference that separates man from animal [...] comes down to his greater sociability.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
If [...] man is a rational animal, it is because he is a social animal [...].
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
As societies become larger and [...] more condensed, individual diversities [...] emerge, stand out, and multiply.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Each of them becomes a source of spontaneous activity. Individual personalities are formed, becoming conscious of themselves.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Only society has changed enough to be able to explain the parallel changes in individual nature.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
We must not [...] present social life as a simple resultant of individual natures, since, on the contrary, it is rather the latter that result from the former.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Almost everything found in individual consciousnesses comes from society.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
[In social facts], it is rather the form of the whole that determines the form of the parts.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society
Although society is nothing without individuals, each of them is much more a product of society than its author.
1893
Source: The Division of Labor in Society