Emile Durkheim

Durkheim married Louise Dreyfus in 1897 and they had two children, Marie and Andre. His wife followed the Jewish traditional of taking care of family affairs and helped him in proofreading and secretarial duties.

In 1915, his son Andre was killed while fighting on the Balkan front. The tragedy devastated the scholar. He suffered a stroke and died in Paris and was buried at the cemetery in Montparnasse.

David Emile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858, in Epinal, capital town of the department of Vosges, in Lorraine to Mélanie and Moïse, a rabbi of Epinal, and the Chief Rabbi of the Vosges and Haute-Marne.

Expected to become a devout rabbi, he began his education in a rabbinical school, but at an early age, he decided not to follow in his family's rabbinical path, and changed schools.

He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1879, at his third attempt and had as classmates brilliant people such as sociologist Jean Jaurès, philosopher Henri Bergson, historian Henri Berr and the psychologist Pierre Janet

At the Normale, he was guided by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu and read Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer.

In 1882, Durkheim passed his aggregation, the competitive examination required for admission to the teaching staff of state secondary schools, or lycées, and soon began to teach philosophy.

In 1885 he left for Germany, studied sociology in Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig and by the following year completed the draft of his ‘The Division of Labor in Society’, his doctoral dissertation.

His articles on German social science and philosophy, which were influenced by the work of Wilhelm Wundt, a German psychologist, philosopher, and a founding figure of modern psychology, made him famous in France.

He was appointed with the official title, Chargé d'un Cours de Science Sociale et de Pédagogie at University of Bordeaux in 1887 to teach the university's first social science course.

He reformed the French school system and introduced the study of social science in its curriculum. However, his belief that religion and morality could be explained by social causes earned him many critics.

In 1892, he published ‘The Division of Labour in Society’, his doctoral dissertation dealing with the nature of human society, its development and argued for moral and economic regulation to maintain peace and order

In 1895, in ‘the Rules of the Sociological Method’ he declared that social sciences should also be based on a scientific method and founded the first European department of sociology at Bordeaux