French sociologist, the third of the so-called founding trinity of the discipline alongside Marx and Weber, and the one who most self-consciously set out to establish sociology as an autonomous science with its own object and its own method. Born in Épinal to a rabbinic family, trained at the École Normale Supérieure alongside Bergson and Jaurès, Durkheim held the first French chair of social science at Bordeaux and then, from 1902, the chair of education and sociology at the Sorbonne. He founded L'Année sociologique in 1898, gathering a school — Marcel Mauss (his nephew), Maurice Halbwachs, Robert Hertz — that made French sociology a distinct and enduring tradition.
Four books define him. The Division of Labor in Society (1893) argued that modern industrial societies cohere not through the "mechanical solidarity" of shared belief characteristic of traditional societies but through an "organic solidarity" generated by functional interdependence — and that the pathologies of modernity (what he called anomie, normlessness) arise when the transition between these forms misfires. The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) is the methodological manifesto: social facts are sui generis, external to and constraining on the individual, and must be explained by other social facts rather than reduced to psychology or biology. Suicide (1897) applied the method to what looks like the most individual of acts, showing statistically that suicide rates track social integration and regulation — a classic early demonstration of the sociological imagination. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), his late masterpiece, took Australian totemism as a case and argued that what religion really worships, under the symbols of gods, is the society itself — a thesis that has shaped the sociology and anthropology of religion ever since.
Durkheim's influence is structural rather than schoolish. His insistence on the reality of the social, his concepts (anomie, collective effervescence, the sacred and the profane, mechanical/organic solidarity), and his methodological ambition run through Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu (his institutional heir in France), and much subsequent work on religion, ritual, education, and deviance. He died in 1917, broken by the death of his son André on the Eastern Front the year before.