Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim was a sociologist in the 19th century who created the term social facts. His two main themes in his work are that sociology should be studied empirically and that society has power over the individual. This second theme is extremely important to keep in mind when studying the works of Durkheim because one of his biggest contributions to the field of sociology came from this. This contribution was the social fact. “A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations” (Durkheim 1895/2006, 73). Durkheim felt that these had a very strong power over the individual because they were the collective thoughts of the group and that adhered the group. Social facts can only be explained by other social facts and most important are to be empirically studied. There are different types of social facts; material and nonmaterial are two of the types. Nonmaterial social facts have to do with abstract constructs such as morality and social currents. Material social facts are more concrete, or based in reality, and can be things like laws or technology.

Another great contribution from Durkheim was the concept of the collective conscience. This has to do with the regulation of behavior by the implementation of social norms. A society will fare better if its members are mostly in agreeance with one another about the customs and there must be sanctions, which usually is some form of ostracism, for those who do not conform to these patterns.

Another notable figure in the history of sociology was Max Weber. He felt that humans should try to fully understand behavior by understanding the unspoken meanings that are attached to different behaviors. He used the German word for “understanding,” verstehen for this. To help in understanding behavior, Weber introduced the concept of ideal types. “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly