Mile Durkheim Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Mile Durkheim - Essay Example His family was a rather prominent one in the Jewish community with his male lineage being rabbis. He deviated from this path and became interested in the social sciences. Durkheim found a majority of the humanities in French academia to be uninteresting; therefore he focused on the areas of psychology, philosophy, ethics, and finally sociology. Durkheim’s biggest goal with sociology was that he wanted it to be a quantitatively and scientifically method heavy field. As a result, he wanted to take the scientific method that was used in the natural sciences and use it on society in an effort to describe and predict collective behavior. He believed that a collective consciousness was the glue, which bound everyone together in society. This consisted of beliefs, values, traditions, etc. which all served an important role in unifying society. With the rise of the industrial era and an increase in the segmentation of jobs, he worried that society was changing as the economy was destr oying the collective unconsciousness. Instead, it was being replaced upon the reliability and interconnectedness of economic principles. Being one of sociology’s principle founders, Durkheim played an important role in establishing sociology as a scientific field, rather than just as an abstract humanitarian course. This was achieved because of the emphasis he placed on taking the scientific method and applying it to society so that the research and discipline in the field would proliferate. He died on November 15, 1917.