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In
sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...
, social facts are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control. The French sociologist
Émile Durkheim David Émile Durkheim ( or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, al ...
defined the term, and argued that the discipline of sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. For Durkheim, social facts "consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him."


Durkheim's social fact

In ''
The Rules of Sociological Method ''The Rules of Sociological Method'' (french: Les Règles de la méthode sociologique) is a book by Émile Durkheim, first published in 1895. It is recognized as being the direct result of Durkheim's own project of establishing sociology as a p ...
'' Durkheim laid out a theory of sociology as "the science of social facts". He considered social facts to "consist of representations and actions" which meant that "they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, nor with physical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness." Durkheim says that a social fact is a thing that many
people A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
do very similarly because the socialized community that they belong to has influenced them to do these things. Durkheim defined the social fact this way: :"A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint; ::or: :which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations". He viewed it as a concrete idea that affected a person's everyday life. Durkheim's examples of social facts included social institutions such as kinship and marriage, currency, language, religion, political organization, and all societal institutions we must account for in everyday interactions with other members of our societies. Deviating from the norms of such institutions makes the individual unacceptable or misfit in the group. Among the most noted of Durkheim's work was his discovery of the "social fact" of suicide rates. By carefully examining
police The police are a constituted body of persons empowered by a state, with the aim to enforce the law, to ensure the safety, health and possessions of citizens, and to prevent crime and civil disorder. Their lawful powers include arrest and th ...
suicide statistics in different districts, Durkheim demonstrated that the suicide rate of
Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
communities is lower than that of
Protestant Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...
communities. He ascribed this to a ''social'' (as opposed to individual) cause. This was considered groundbreaking and remains influential. Durkheim's discovery of social facts was significant because it promised to make it possible to study the behaviour of entire societies, rather than just of particular individuals. Durkheim points to individual actions as instances or representations of different types of actions in society. Some contemporary, interpretivist, sociologists like Max Atkinson and Jack Douglas refer to Durkheim's studies for two quite different purposes, however: * Durkheim's studies are graphic demonstrations of how careful the social researcher must be to ensure that data gathered for analysis are accurate. Durkheim's reported suicide rates were, it is now clear, largely an artifact of the way particular deaths were classified as "suicide" or "non-suicide" by different communities. What he actually discovered was not different ''suicide rates'' at all—but different ways of ''thinking about suicide''. * His studies are also an entry point into the study of social meaning—and the way that apparently identical individual acts often cannot be classified empirically. Social ''acts'' (even such an apparently private and individual act as suicide), in this modern view, are always seen (and classified) by social ''actors''. Discovering the social facts about such acts, it follows, is generally neither possible nor desirable—but discovering the way individuals perceive and classify particular acts is what offers insight. A further complication is introduced by asking about the status of our "discovery" of these perceptions and classifications. After all, don't such "discoveries" ''also'' reflect socially embedded practices of classification? But if the alleged discoveries of perceptions of social facts aren't therefore dubious, it is hard to see why the original claims about the social facts are.


Mauss's total social fact

For
Marcel Mauss Marcel Mauss (; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and ...
(Durkheim's nephew and sometime collaborator) a ''total social fact'' (French ''fait social total'') is "an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres". Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he came to call ''total social facts''. A total social fact informs and organizes seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions.Edgar (2002), 157
Marcel Mauss Marcel Mauss (; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and ...
popularized the term in his book, '' The Gift'':


See also

*
Dominant ideology In Marxist philosophy, the term dominant ideology denotes the attitudes, beliefs, values, and morals shared by the majority of the people in a given society. As a mechanism of social control, the dominant ideology frames how the majority of the ...
*
Sociological positivism Positivism is an empiricist philosophical theory that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning ''a posteriori'' facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.John J. Macionis, Linda M. G ...


References


Sources

* Edgar, Andrew. (1999). "Cultural Anthropology". in Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter R. (eds.)
''Key Concepts in Cultural Theory''
New York: Routledge. * Edgar, Andrew. (2002). "Mauss, Marcel (1872–1950)". in Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter R. (eds.)
''Cultural Theory: the Key Thinkers''
New York: Routledge. * Mauss, Marcel. (1966). ''The gift; forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies''. London: Cohen & West.


Further reading

* Shaffer, L. S. (2006). "Durkheim's aphorism, the Justification Hypothesis, and the nature of social facts". ''Sociological Viewpoints'', fall issue'','' 57–70
Full text


External links

* From Émile Durkheim, ''The Rules of the Sociological Method'', (Edited by
Steven Lukes Steven Michael Lukes (born 1941) is a British political and social theorist. Currently he is a professor of politics and sociology at New York University. He was formerly a professor at the University of Siena, the European University Institute ...
; translated by W. D. Halls). New York: Free Press, 1982, pp. 50–59. {{Use British English Oxford spelling, date=November 2018 Émile Durkheim Social concepts Sociological terminology Structural functionalism