Durkheim essays

Durkheim essays The famous Emile Durkheim was one of the most significant functionalists during the nineteenth century. Most of his scholarly work centered on one basic concept which dealt with what held society together. As a functionalist, Durkheim tried to argue that society is a social system consisting of various integrated parts, he called this Functional Interdependence or Organic Solidarity. This meant that our society is like a living organism with separate parts, each of these parts fulfills a specific role that contributes to the overall functioning of society. For Durkheim elements such as cohesion, laws, and order were vital for groups and individuals to maintain a balanced society. When he talked about law, he specifically divided them into 2 parts; Repressive law, which was basically punishment that was publicly viewed, it is to show what the individuals should not be doing, and it had strong moral ground. The other was Restitutive law, which was characterized by modern societ ies and their bureaucratic legal system in which punishments would be paying fines and imprisonment. He thought deviance was a natural part of society and that it was a guideline, it lets society know what they should avoid taking part in. A concept which strongly defined moral consensus was called the Collective Conscious. It consisted of 4 elements. The first is volume, it dealt with the amount of people that believe in a certain set of morals. The second intensity, which, referred to how much faith people had in those morals. The third rigidity, and that was how clearly defined and solid the beliefs are and the finally the fourth was content. Content is what words make up the collective conscious. Durkheim said that the growth of individualism and division of labor lower all four contents of the collective conscious. In addition to all of the topics discussed, Durkheim was one of the first sociologists to link suicide to the soci ...