Emile Durkheim Research Paper

For this essay I chose to write about Emile Durkheim. He was born in Epinal, France on April 15, 1858. His family was long line of French Jews. Even though he did not believe in God. He started going to rabbinical school at a young age, but later he switched schools, and realized that he wanted to study religion from an agnostic point of view. In 1879 he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He had a job in Boreaux and was married with two children. Before he reached forty years old, he was appointed to a powerful position as a professor at the Sorbonne. However, he died of a stroke at the age of fifty-nine.
He contributed to sociology in many important ways. He wanted to prove why people who have more money but why they were more …show more content…
He accomplished this when the University of Bordeaux gave him the first academic appointed in sociology. The second major contribution in sociology was he wanted to show how social forces affect people. He also accomplished this when he started a research on suicide rates. His research showed him that the suicide rate is different in every country and that each different groups also have different suicide rates. He believed that the economic system was driving people to suicide and the numbers were increasing. His third book on suicide was what he mostly focused on. The book proved that suicide rates increase when nation becomes industrialized. He tried to explain why people become unhappy and he came up with reasons why people commit suicide. The first reason was individualism was that during normal societies people are normally close to groups or class. “Their beliefs and attitudes, their work and status follow automatically from the facts of their birth.” (The Philosopher’s Mail, 2015) When people’s life has already been decided for them life is easier but during capitalism when the person has to be chosen by that person makes things hard such as failing in life then the person becomes miserable. The second …show more content…
He focused on his view on the structure of societies. He mostly focused on how traditional and modern societies evolved and functioned. He believe that society should be analyzed and described in terms of functions. He was one of the first people to come with the idea of functionalism. He believed that social facts have their own existence and are not bound to the action of