Social fact in the context of "Suicide (Durkheim book)"

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⭐ Core Definition: Social fact

In sociology, social facts are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim 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."

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👉 Social fact in the context of Suicide (Durkheim book)

Suicide: A Study in Sociology (French: Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie) is an 1897 book written by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. It was the second methodological study of a social fact in the context of society (it was preceded by a sociological study by a Czech author, later the president of Czechoslovakia: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Der Selbstmord als soziale Massenerscheinung der Gegenwart, 1881, Czech 1904). It is ostensibly a case study of suicide, a publication unique for its time that provided an example of what the sociological monograph should look like.

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Social fact in the context of Methodological individualism

In the social sciences, methodological individualism is a method for explaining social phenomena strictly in terms of the decisions of individuals, each being moved by their own personal motivations. In contrast, explanations of social phenomena which assume that cause and effect acts upon whole classes or groups are deemed illusory, and thus rejected according to this approach. Or to put it another way, only group dynamics which can be explained in terms of individual subjective motivations are considered valid. With its bottom-up micro-level approach, methodological individualism is often contrasted with methodological holism, a top-down macro-level approach, and methodological pluralism.

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← Methodological individualism ← Suicide (Durkheim book)
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Sociology → Social control → Émile Durkheim →