Readings from Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim was born in Epinal, France on April 15, 1858. He received a baccalauréats in Letters in 1874 and Sciences in 1875 from the Collège d'Epinal. He became a professor of sociology at the Sorbonne, where he founded and edited the journal L'Annee Sociologique. He is renowned for the breadth of his scholarship; for his studies of primitive religion; for creating the concept of anomie (normlessness); for his study of the division of labor; and for his insistence that sociologists must use sociological (e.g., rates of behavior) rather than psychological data. He published several works including His Suicide in 1897. His notion of community, his view that religion forms the basis of all societies, had a profound impact on the course of community studies. He died on November 15, 1917 at the age of 59. Kenneth Thompson has been based at the Open University in the United Kingdom since 1970. He has held visiting professorships in recent years at Yale University and the University of California, Los Angeles.