Critically assess the concepts used by Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858 in Epinal, capital town of the department of Vosages in Lorraine. Born the son of a rabbi in a Jewish family, he too was intended to follow his father and attended a rabbinical school. While still a school boy Durkheim dismissed this idea and soon, Judaism altogether after his arrival to Paris. After two failing attempts, Durkheim got admission to the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure where he eventually became a professor simultaneously gaining great influence in the French academic world. Emile Durkheim is considered by many to be the father of sociology. He is credited with making sociology a science and having made it part if the French curriculum as "science social". Having lived in a France that underwent, at the time, tremendous change due to industrialisation, modernisation and a world war, Durkheim developed many influential theories and concepts on these matters. Durkheim's functionalist perspective was prevalent for a substantially long time and although many of his concepts, under the light of new scientific research, are greatly imperfect their importance and influential nature cannot be disregarded.At the beginning of the nineteenth century certain profound changes occ
The increase in the number of jobs, the separation that occurred unavoidably as a result of the division of labour in industry and the promotion of self-interest, resulting from the capitalist ideology that had become prevalent, changed the behaviour and the conscience of all society's members. The result would be great gain to society in terms of morality integration and in effect greater solidarity. In the new society, people were independent and individual. Amongst other effect anomie had a direct effect on the suicide rates; they increased. The division of labour meant that the work for people became increasingly simplistic; the worker was no longer connected to the produce since he completed only a tiny part of a procedure to make it and could therefore not feel the satisfaction of having created something. According to Durkheim there is an apparent correlation between the functional specialisation of the parts society and the extent of that society's evolutionary development in the same way that Charles Darwin perceived evolution in biological organisms. He argued that where social life exists it tends to assume a definite organised form; law was the most precise expression of this organisation. Work was reduced to a meaningless activity and social relationships became economic relationships. Each specialized group worked as an organ and together they formed an organism that would not function with any of its parts missing, thus Durkheim called it organic solidarity. Max Weber argues that action and thought are individual and infinitely complex. Close relations between people disintegrated along with the norms, the morals and the common conscience that were previously predominant. Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, for instance has provided sufficient evidence of the existence of significantly complex relations of exchange by the Trobriand islanders. This is the development of modern forms of industry, factories, machines and large-scale production processes in pursuit of profit. Durkheim was a functionalist; in fact many consider him the father of functionalism.
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