Social Facts
Durkheim believed that the subject matter for sociologists of the phenomena they study are ‘Social Facts’ which are different from any other facts. They are the very fabric of society and arise out of human relationships and human associations. According to Durkheim social facts are “collective way’s of acting, thinking and feeling that present the property of existing outside the individual consciousness.”
The methodology of Durkheim can be explained with reference to his concept of social facts. According to him, there are some facts in social life that cannot be explained in terms of physical or psychological analysis. These social facts have distinctive social characteristics and determinants. The social facts constitute the subject matter of sociology. According to Durkheim, there are two important features of social facts.
Exteriority:
Social facts are external to any particular individual considered as a biological entity. They continue to persist over a period of time while particular individuals die and are replaced by others. There are certain ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that are external to the individual, for example, the principles of public morality, family, religious observances, etc.
Coercion:
The social facts have coercive power, that is, they impose themselves upon the individual, independent of his own will. Durkheim gives a number of examples that show the element of coercion in social phenomena; for example, in a gathering or a crowd, a feeling imposes itself on everyone or there is a collective reaction.
The coercive power of social facts comes into force whenever social demands are violated; for example, the means of social control like law or custom immediately come into operation in case of such violation. However, in his later writings, Durkheim changed his views regarding external constraints. He admitted that some social facts, particularly the moral rules, become internalized in the consciousness of individuals, and then act as effective guides and controls of conduct.
Durkheim defined social fact as ‘every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint’. According to him, social facts should be regarded as things. We do not know in scientific sense, the social phenomena that surrounds us; for example, as a layman, we do not have scientific knowledge about the terms like state, sovereignty, democracy, socialism, or communism.
We generally have a vague and confused idea regarding them. When we learn to regard social facts as things we can avoid the preconceptions and prejudices that hinder the scientific knowledge about these facts. Moreover, we must observe social facts from outside, that is, we should gain knowledge about them through objective and scientific research. We can discover them as we discover physical facts. The social facts are general in character because they are collective. According to Durkheim, social fact is any way of behaving which is universal throughout a given society and has an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations.
Society is a sui-generis
According to Emile Durkheim, society existed before any individual was born and would continue to exist even after the individual is gone. This meant that, although society is composed of a number of parts with people representing one of the parts, it cannot be defined by reducing it to the sum of parts that interact to create its unique nature.
He explained social facts as “sui generis” meaning social facts are unique to the society that establishes those facts. This asserts that social facts are pre-existing and not a product of the current population. Thus, social facts shape the way the present generation behaves or interacts with their society, making their interaction and behavior predictable. Further, social facts cannot be changed by individual alterations, in their belief system or actions. Society is a sui generis that identifies the irreducibility of the social to other fields of study
Imprecision:
The Rules of Sociological Method begins with a traditional Enlightenment concern: unrecognised opinions, or ‘notiones vulgares.’ In sociology, it frequently defers to morality, law, family, and so on, and assumptions are both effective and pernicious. According to Durkheim, sociology has only ever expounded beliefs and has never examined phenomena. We can say that sociology has been characterised by a shift away from facts and toward opinion, resulting in imprecision and generality: “The great sociologists of the past rarely went beyond generalities concerning the nature of societies, the relationships between the social and biological realms, and the general march of progress.”
Theoretical and practical import:
In the discussion of the normal and the pathological, Durkheim proposes an immanent criterion of evaluation for social phenomena: something is good for society if it contributes to its health and bad if it leads to sickness. This method of evaluation, which insists that the index of a society’s well-being is ‘inherent in the facts themselves,’ demands to the specificity of each form of society in order to discover the particular conditions of its health. The danger of sociology’s imprecision and its substitution of opinion for analysis is that it loses the basis to make practical judgments. Imprecision, therefore, is not merely theoretically defective but moralistic and potentially fanatical; by turning from the specific social phenomena it addresses, opinion forfeits the condition to criticize and improve it.
Purity:
The overriding goal of Rules is to establish that ‘sociology is not the appendage of any other science; it is itself a distinct and autonomous science’. Science is independent if it has a unique subject matter all its own. Now, if sociology’s subject matter is the ‘social,’ Durkheim complains that this term has been uncritically extended to anything that exists within society (thereby embracing every human activity which may or may not be social). The cost is to render sociology without a ‘subject matter peculiarly its own’ and to confuse its domain with ‘that of biology and psychology’. This is precisely the problem with previous ‘sociological’ accounts (for example, Comte, Spencer, and Mill). To the extent that they reduce social phenomena to biology and psychology, they cannot be by definition sociological.
Society is sui generis, according to Durkheim, because it exists as an external force or pressure that affects on individuals.
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