Émile Durkheim
No one can be happy without limits: only society can set the measure of our desires.
Life
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), born in Épinal, was a French sociologist, professor at Bordeaux and then at the Sorbonne. He made sociology a science in its own right, studying social facts as things. In Suicide (1897) he showed that suicide rates vary with the integration and regulation of society. He matters for the big questions because he explains happiness, morality and religion through life in society.
Main works
Studies what holds societies together: the solidarity born from likeness, then from the difference of tasks.
Holds that social facts must be treated as things, that is, observed from the outside.
Explains variations in suicide rates by social integration and regulation, including anomie.
Treats religion as the way a society represents and strengthens itself.
In his own words
« No living being can be happy, or even live, unless its needs are sufficiently in proportion to its means. »
« By itself, apart from any outside power that regulates it, our sensibility is a bottomless pit that nothing can fill. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceA rabbi's son who left the faith, he explains religion as a social fact: the sacred is the way a society represents itself to its members, with no need for a god.
Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912)
Left to themselves, human desires have no limit and bring suffering; they need a moral power outside the individual to regulate them.
Durkheim, Le Suicide (1897), livre II, ch. V
Individual freedom depends on the solidarity and the rules that a society gives its members; he values the group over the isolated individual, while defending a moral individualism (the "cult of the individual") that society itself produces.
Durkheim, De la division du travail social (1893)