David mile Durkheim (French: [emil dykm] or [dykajm];

[1]
April 15, 1858 November 15, 1917)
was a French sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher. He formally established the
academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal
architect of modern social science and father of sociology.
[2][3]

Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and
coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer
assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological
work was The Division of Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of
Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's
first professor of sociology.
[4]
In 1898, he established the journalL'Anne Sociologique.
Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and
Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social
science from psychology and political philosophy.The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life (1912) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and
modern societies.
Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science.
He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be
considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of thehypothetico-deductive
model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions, if this term is
understood in its broader meaning as "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the
collectivity"
[5]
and its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major
proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology
and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic;
[6]
that is, sociology should
study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of
individuals.