The Rules of Sociological Method: And selected texts on sociology and its method

267 Pages·1982·25.534 MB·English

by  Emile Durkheim (auth.), Steven Lukes (eds.)

CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY
General Editor: ANTHONY GIDDENS
This series aims to create a forum for debate between different
theoretical and philosophical traditions in the social sciences. As
well as covering broad schools of thought, the series will also con
centrate upon the work of particular thinkers whose ideas have had
a major impact on social science (these books appear under the sub
series title of 'Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences'). The
series is not limited to abstract theoretical discussion - it will also
include more substantive works on contemporary capitalism, the
state, politics, and other subject areas.
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY
General Editor: ANTHONY GIDDENS
Published titles
Tony Bilton, Kevin Bonnett, Philip Jones, Ken Sheard, Michelle Stanworth and
Andrew Webster, Introductory Sociology
Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology
Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (ed. Steven Lukes, trans.
W. D. Halls)
Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism
Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory
Anthony Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory
Anthony Giddens and David Held (eds), Classes, Power and Conflict
Ali RaUansi, Marx and the Division of Labour
Gerry Rose, Deciphering Sociological Research
Steve Taylor, Durkheim and the Study of Suicide
John B. Thompson and David Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates
John Urry, The Anatomy of Capitalist Societies
Forthcoming titles
Martin Albrow, Weber and the Construction of Social Theory
Clive Ashworth, Chris Dandeker and Terry Johnson, Theoretical Sociology
David Brown and Michael Harrison, Industrial Sociology
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (trans. W. D. Halls)
Boris Frankel, Beyond the State
Anthony Giddens, Between Capitalism and Socialism
David Held, Bureaucracy, Democracy and Socialism
Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism Divided
Jorge Larrain, Marxism and Ideology
Claus Offe, Structural Problems of the Capitalist State
John Scott, The Upper Classes
Michelle Stanworth, Gender and Class
John B. Thompson, Language and Ideology
Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences
Published title
Barry Barnes, T. S. Kuhn and Social Science
Forthcoming titles
Ted Benton, Althusser and the Althusserians
David Bloor, Wittgenstein and Social Science
Chris Bryant, Positivism in Social Theory
John Forrester, Jacques Lacan
John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology
Athar Hussain, Foucault
Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas
Julian Roberts, Walter Benjamin
James Schmidt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Social Theory
Dennis Smith, Barrington Moore: Violence, Morality and Political Change
Robin Williams, Erving Goffman
The Rules of Sociological
Method
And selected texts on sociology and
its method
Emile Durkheim
Edited with an Introduction by Steven Lukes
Translated by W. D. Halls
M
Introduction and selection © Steven Lukes 1982
Translation © The Macmillan Press Ltd 1982
Softcover reprint of the hardcover Ist edition 1982
All rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, without permission.
First published 1982 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives throughout the world
ISBN 978-0-333-28072-0 ISBN 978-1-349-16939-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16939-9
Typeset in Great Britain by
ILLUSTRATED ARTS
The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by
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on the subsequent purchaser.
Contents
Introduction (by Steven Lukes) 1
THE RULES OF SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD
Preface 31
Preface to the Second Edition 34
Introduction 48
Chapter I: What is a Social Fact? 50
Chapter II: Rules for the Observation of Social Facts 60
Chapter III: Rules for the Distinction of the Normal
from the Pathological 85
Chapter IV: Rules for the Constitution of Social Types 108
Chapter V: Rules for the Explanation of Social Facts 119
Chapter VI: Rules for the Demonstration of Sociological
Proof 147
Conclusion 159
WRITINGS OF DURKHEIM BEARING ON ms VIEW OF
SOCIOLOGY AND ITS METHOD
Marxism and Sociology: The Materialist Conception of
History (1897) 167
Sociology and the Social Sciences (1903) 175
Debate on the Relationship between Ethnology and
Sociology (1907) 209
Debate on Explanation in History and Sociology (1908) 211
Debate on Political Economy and Sociology (1908) 229
The Contribution of Sociology to Psychology and
Philosophy (1909) 236
vi Contents
Notes on:
Social Morphology (1899) 241
Civilisation in General and Types of Civilisation (1902) 243
The Method of Sociology (1908) 245
Society (1917) 248
Letters about:
The Psychological Character of Social Facts and their
Reality (1895) 249
The Nature of Society and Causal Explanation (1898) 251
The Psychological Conception of Society (1901) 253
The Role of General Sociology (1905) 255
Influences upon Ourkheim's View of Sociology (1907) 257
Index 261
Translator's Note
References to works cited in the Notes have been checked in
editions available and in some cases additions and amendments
have been made.
W.O.H.
Introduction
This volume contains the first English translation of Emile Durk
heim's The Rules of Sociological Method that does justice in terms
of accuracy and elegance to the original text. It also brings
together his more interesting subsequent statements (most of them
hitherto untranslated) on the nature and scope of sociology and its
method.! They take various forms, including contributions to
debates and letters, and show him confronting critics and seeking
to clarify his positions. They cover the period between his first
major book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893) and his last,
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). During this
period, he not only published and lectured on suicide, the family,
crime and punishment, legal and political sociology, the history of
socialism, the history of education in France since earliest times,
the sociology of morality, primitive classification and the sociology
of religion, but he also established the remarkable journal, the
Annee sociologique (of which twelve fat volumes appeared be
tween 1898 and 1913) and, through it, the Durkheimian school of
French sociology. This flourished briefly, until the carnage of the
First World War, barely surviving its founder in an increasingly
alien intellectual climate between the wars; yet it has had a
profound impact on the history of the human sciences in France
and outside, from the French Annales school through British social
anthropology to American sociology.
Behind all the detailed work of Durkheim and his collaborators,
surveying and analysing world literature in the social sciences for
the Annee, writing specialised monographs and inculcating the
new science of sociology in a wide variety of students through
lectures, there lay a general organising conception of sociology - a
1
2 Introduction
vision of the map of social scientific knowledge, a programme for
its acquisition and systematisation, and a methodological canon
for establishing its claims. Durkheim never ceased to expound and
defend this conception, against critics friendly and hostile. It was a
cause to which he 'devoted [his] life'2 and one that, as I shall
suggest, went far beyond questions of scientific method and
academic boundaries.
His successive expositions and defences are instructive, in
various ways. In particular they throw light on Durkheim's and the
Durkheimians' project; they make clear where the limits of such a
conception of sociology and social science lie; and they suggest
what part extra-scientific interests and objectives may have played
in its very constitution. There are, in short, at least three ways of
reading The Rules and these accompanying texts: as an expression
of Durkheim's avowed intentions; as exemplifying the limits of his
view of sociology; and as a study in the politics of theorising.
I Durkheim's project
Durkheim intended The Rules as a manifesto on behalf of 'the
cause of a sociology that is objective, specific and methodical'. 3 By
1901, in his preface to the second edition, he could report that the
cause 'has continually gained ground. The founding of the Annee
sociologique has certainly contributed much to this result. Since it
embraces at one and the same time the whole field of the science,
the Annee, better than any more specialised publication, has been
able to impart a feeling of what sociology must and can become. ,4
His aim, he wrote in i907, had been to imbue with the sociological
'idea those disciplines from which it was absent and thereby to
make them branches of sociology'. 5 His explicit methodological
intentions for sociology, then, concerned its objectivity, its speci
ficity, its methods of explanation and its transformative relation to
other disciplines.
Sociology's objectivity was, in Durkheim's famous phrase, a
matter of treating 'social facts as things'. This elliptical formula
really meant that 'social facts' should be regarded by the sociolog
ist as realities; that is, as having characteristics independent of his
conceptual apparatus, which can only be ascertained through
empirical investigation (as opposed to a priori reasoning or
Introduction 3
intuition) and, in particular, through 'external' observation by
means of indicators (such as legal codes, statistics, etc.), and as
existing independently of individuals' wills, and indeed of their
individual manifestations, 'in definite forms such as legal or moral
rules, popular sayings, in facts of social structure', in forms which
'exist permanently ... and constitute a fixed object, a constant
standard which is always at hand for the observer, and which
leaves no room for subjective impressions or personal
observations,.6
Durkheim embraced the label 'rationalist'. Like Descartes he
adhered to an 'absolute conception of knowledge'7 as pertaining to
a reality that exists independently of that knowledge, and to the
goal of 'clear, distinct notions or explanatory concepts'. 8 Con
cerning science, he was a realist. The initial definitions by which
phenomena are classified 'must express the phenomena as a
function, not of an idea of the mind, but of their inherent
properties', according to 'some integrating element in their
nature', in terms of observable 'external' characteristics, with the
eventual aim of attaining those which, though 'less apparent are
doubtless more essential,.9 The sociologist must adopt what Durk
heim thought was 'the state of mind of physicists, chemists and
physiologists when they venture into an as yet unexplored area of
their scientific field' . 10 This involved making the move that had led
from alchemy to chemistry and astrology to astronomy, abandon
ing our everyday 'prenotions'. These, because they were 'de
veloped unmethodically in order to satisfy needs that are of an
exclusively practical nature, are devoid of any scientific value.
They no more exactly express social things than the ideas the
ordinary person has of substances and their properties (light, heat,
sound, etc.) exactly represent the nature of these substances,
which science alone reveals to us'. 11 Only through following
scientific method could the social scientist achieve a parallel
success.
The nature his science is to reveal is distinctively social, and
herein lies the specificity of sociology. 'For sociology to be
possible', wrote Durkheim, 'it must above all have an object all of
its own' - a 'reality which is not in the domain of the other
sciences'.12 In The Rules he offered a 'preliminary definition' of
social facts, singling out as their distinguishing criteria externality,
constraint and generality plus independence.13 As I have argued
in detail elsewhere,14 this was a crucially ambiguous definition.