'Durkheim and Social Fact Essay\r'

'Emile Durkheim’s â€Å"The Rules of sociological Method” posits the globe of various ‘ genial positions’ which, fit in to him, should be the stretch of all sociological get a line and discourse. Durkheim’s discourse jells well-disposed occurrences as, …a syndicate of particulars with very distinctive characteristics: it consists of expressive styles of acting, thinking and intent, outside to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by effort of which they control him. (Durkheim 3)\r\n therefrom the three main features of favor adequate to(p) details ar surfaced; as being external to the individual, emanating from a general and higher level than the individual and that these stuff or burden an individual to act in accordance to them for the purpose of control. These occurrences, according to Durkheim, must be considered things, which he defines as realities that may be find and assort. These things are posi ted to embody on the level of smart set, altogether outside the realm of the individual and are use to control a soul’s thoughts, actions and touch from being other(a)wise.\r\nShould a person refuse to withdraw to this coercion, he would find himself the object of negative reactions ranging from make fun, isolation or tied(p) concrete punishment or sanction. The implications of this definition initially cast sociology’s landing field of examine as all-encompassing, referring to all realities and influencees of human feel and behavior, thus Durkheim seeks to clarify and establish the meaning of the signifier ‘ cordial’ as opposed to other adjectives such as ‘biological’, psychological’ and ‘philosophical’.\r\n from each one individual drinks, sleeps, eats, reasons; and it is order’s interest that these functions be exercised in an orderly manner. If then, all these circumstances are counted as â€Å"s ociable” facts, sociology would fall in no subject occasion exclusively its own, and its domain would be confused with biota and psychology. (Durkheim 1) As mentioned above, Durkheim perceives the tender fact as the scope of sociological education, and uses other fields of study to stage what sociology should downstairsscore.\r\nBiological facts and study deal with characteristics of the physical proboscis of a person and are therefore non well-disposed, since the need to follow these facts (such as sleeping, eating and breathing) arise from the physiological needs of an organism to survive. Psychological study deals with thought processes and phenomena that glide by indoors an individual’s consciousness. Durkheim posits that ‘ fond’ facts emanate not from one person’s consciousness nor from a person’s physiological needs, solely from the level of conjunction itself, â€Å"…\r\nthis experimental condition [social] fits th em quite well, for it is clear that, since their reference book is not the individual, their substratum can be no other than corporation. ” (Durkheim 3) some other implication of his definition is that social facts exist all with the front man of social institutions which levy them and create them. For Durkheim, it is instant to clarify that in to the highest degree cases a social institution exists with the social fact, but it must not be thought that for a social fact to exist, a social institution must be perplex to have created it.\r\nRather, the reverse of the causation is in place. Social facts create social institutions which enforce and carry on them, but there are also other social facts which do not require the presence of an institution to sanction them. Durkheim defines such deinstitutionalized social facts as ‘social currents’, â€Å"They come to each one of us from without and carry us away in animosity of ourselves. ” (4) He uses t he example of crowd euphoria and feeling to adorn these. Social facts are further categorise into the ‘ habitual’ and the ‘ pathological’.\r\nDurkheim classifies social facts under these deuce categories in order to illust measure the coercive character of social facts and how society has been shaped to perpetuate and enforce them. Normal social facts refer to â€Å"those which align to given up standards” while pathological social facts refer to â€Å"those which ‘ought’ to be diverse” (Durkheim 47). Normal social facts are those most widely march onring in the society in psyche and function in such a way that their presence maintains social order and trus iirthy social life.\r\nDurkheim further posited that for a social fact to be considered traffic pattern, it would contribute to the health of a society, as mentioned earlier, it maintains accepted social processes, it promotes and is naturally coherent with accepted so cial norms. The vague constitution of this definition and its subjectivity was borne from Durkheim’s goal of trying to contextualize and take into consideration the novelty of social life crosswise unlike cultures and societies.\r\nThis implies the existence of facts that are produced to control people to act in accordance to accepted norms and values, and the existence of facts whose purpose is to illustrate what is a deviation from the previously-mentioned accepted norms and values. The characteristic of social facts that posits a force that coerces people to stick by to them is what involve Durkheim to make this categorization. He defined social facts as things, as realities, and thus he would seek to define the approach pattern and the ab common things and realities that are placed under the domain of what are considered ‘social’.\r\nIf social facts exist outside the individual and are imposed upon him, what of the phenomenon that occur which are deviati ons from the norm, how are these to be explained as sociological when they do not adhere to society? diseased social facts are therefore things or realities that occur in less cases than the prescript social facts to commemorate that these things are what are considered ‘ab linguistic rule’ or have some form of ‘morbidity’ that characterizes them as deviations.\r\nDurkheim compared this proportion with physiological studies, which first deal with a healthy, ‘normal’ human body and then would study the ‘abnormalities’ of the body, the viable symptoms and causes of sickness or ‘morbidity’. As the physiologist studies diseases in spite of appearance the human body, so does a sociologist study the pathological or ‘morbid’ phenomenon that occurs outside the individual’s consciousness. Another argument that Durkheim presents in defining the normal social fact is that ‘normal’ phenomena a re oft present not because of social norms and values but because of logical necessity.\r\nHe argues that normal facts differ crosswise species, but these facts are present mostly because the species has to align to its environment and are necessary (Durkheim 60) Rejecting other definitions of normal facts, Durkheim posited that normal facts are relative to the specific species in question during a specific time in its evolutional phase. Normal facts are therefore not ineradicable nor are they universal. He emphasizes this because of his previous statements that because of the normalcy and frequency of these facts they are attributed to be superior in nature.\r\nDurkheim decides what constitutes ‘normal’ social facts by evaluating the causal conditions that govern a certain fact. If, at a certain charge in the society’s development, the social fact is acceptable, then the fact is normal. An example would be the lend oneself of a girl asking a boy to engage in a social, romantic descent with her. In these modern times, this is considered a normal fact because of the rise of female empowerment and liberalism.\r\nHowever, if this social fact was to be classified during the Renaissance period, it would have been classified as abnormal, because women did not enjoy empowerment or the same power they enjoy today. A social fact’s nature is intrinsic to society’s norms and causal functions that create it at a certain point in time, and not with the richness of occurrence or moral acceptability. Durkheim takes into account how social facts may change their nature as normal and pathological over time, especially done the process of evolution,\r\nâ€Å"After having established by observation that a particular fact is general, he will go back to the conditions which determined this generality in the preceding(a) and will then investigate whether these conditions are shut up given in the present or if, on contrary they have chan ged. ” (Durkheim 61) Contention between the two types of social fact and the rough definition that Durkheim posited may be seen in the presence of villainy within a society. shame, at first glance would be characterized as a pathological social fact, as it would feature morbidity and abnormality. This is a common lore that all criminologists would adhere to.\r\nHowever, disgust is posited by Durkheim as a normal social fact. Durkheim showed that crime is present in all societies but in different forms, as normal and pathological facts differ across societies and evolutionary phases (65). He further stated that even in societies where crime rate is high and incidences rampant, a change may occur depending on the upcoming state of the society which will lessen the rate of normalcy of crime (66). Crime for Durkheim is separate and different from immoral behavior and iniquitous acts, since these are able to be explained on levels other than on the societal.\r\nThus Durkheim posited that the act of doing a execrable deed is not what is normal, but the presence of crime within society which is normal (67). The presence of deviations from the norm may be seen in all societies, but since the act in itself is brought about by psychological reasons and other factors that may be apparent on the individual level, criminal behavior may be part sociological and part psychological. Crime is posited to be variant and internal across cultures and societies, and is always present no proposition how severe the norms in a society are.\r\nCrime is defined in a society establish on the norms and values it holds in importance. Durkheim’s ‘ corporal conscience’ that governs society is what is held responsible for defining the criminal act. Again, in an effort to take into account the variation of societies, Durkheim posits crime as subjective and dependent on social norms, with the level of tolerance of the society in question dictating what is c onsidered crime and what is considered aberrant or shady behavior worthy or mere ridicule and oddity.\r\nCrime is always present in every society no matter how ordered and rigid it is, but with the higher control present in a society, the level of the sophistication of crime and the enfolding and effort used in committing a criminal act increases as well, in relation to the hassle in crime commission. Statistics may then be inferred by the student to be one concrete manifestation of a social fact because of its nature of describing trends and social phenomenon, but Durkheim posited otherwise.\r\nHe posited that statistics is used to compensate the ‘ incorporated mind’ which is the sum of the individual cases that adhere to social facts, whether normal or pathological. Statistics is used to set apart these specific trends. Though individual cases no motion have other mitigating biological and psychological factors for occurring, statistics provides a way to neutrali ze or eliminate the laissez-faire(a) factors that may constitute the cases as not within the realm of sociology. Durkheim justifies the normalcy of crime in a given society by citing that there is not society where crime is not present.\r\nCriminal acts are always regarded with negative sentiments in any society (Durkheim 66). However, Durkheim showed that the presence of crime affirms the normal social facts, that it enforces the normal by existing as a source of punishment for its own commission. In a society that has the strictest and most rigid structure of rules and normal fact that must be adhered to at all times, crime is not entirely eliminated but actually more apparent, more frowned-upon and more heavily sanctioned.\r\nThus, the presence of crime is considered normal and the commission of criminal acts is pathological. With all this say about the social fact, the idea of a ‘social system of rules’ would create some contentions. Social facts are thought to emanate from the societal level through a collective consciousness, where the individual is forced to conform and adhere to. A social system would signify that the relationship between individuals and society would not be so linear and one-sided. A social system would imply that as society exerts a force on the individual, so does an individual upon society.\r\nDurkheim’s ‘collective consciousness’ would then be debunked as an head game which is perpetuated in society. A systems framework for sociological study would then take into consideration the effect of individuals in society as social institutions and structures that are constitute of individuals. Durkheim’s theory on social fact would then be debunked as emanating from an illusion and would set down its objectivity and its characteristic of being grounded on reality. whole shebang Cited Durkheim, Emile. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press, 1938.\r\n'