In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim ’ s first purpose was to identify the social origin and function of religion as he felt that religion was a source of camaraderie and solidarity.

The most devastating critique came from Durkheim ’ s contemporary, Arnold van Gennep, an expert on religion and ritual, and also on Australian belief systems.

Van Gennep plainly stated that Durkheim ’ s views of primitive peoples and simple societies were “ entirely erroneous ”.

At the conceptual level, van Gennep pointed out Durkheim ’ s tendency to press ethnography into a prefabricated theoretical scheme.

This period included a panoply of international ‘ great demographers ’ like Adolphe Quételet ( 1796 – 1874 ), William Farr ( 1807 – 1883 ), Louis-Adolphe Bertillon ( 1821 – 1883 ) and his son Jacques ( 1851 – 1922 ), Joseph Körösi ( 1844 – 1906 ), Anders Nicolas Kaier ( 1838 – 1919 ), Richard Böckh ( 1824 – 1907 ), Émile Durkheim ( 1858-1917 ), Wilhelm Lexis ( 1837 – 1914 ) and Luigi Bodio ( 1840 – 1920 ) contributed to the development of demography and to the toolkit of methods and techniques of demographic analysis.

Merton ’ s theory of deviance is derived from Durkheim ’ s idea of anomie.

However, Parsons drew directly on many of Durkheim ’ s concepts in creating his theory.

Among the concepts that Tarde initiated were the group mind ( taken up and developed by Gustave Le Bon, and sometimes advanced to explain so-called herd behaviour or crowd psychology ), and economic psychology, where he anticipated a number of modern developments. Tarde was very critical of Durkheim ’ s work at the level of both methodology and theory.

Acknowledging the decline of the Année following Durkheim ’ s death in 1917, several Durkheimians met in March 1923 in Paris to design a plan to resuscitate the journal.

However, after reading the work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research ( entitled simply The Andaman Islanders ) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths.

Durkheim's period in Germany resulted in the publication of numerous articles on German social science and philosophy ; Durkheim was particularly impressed by the work of Wilhelm Wundt.

By forced division of labor Durkheim means a situation where power holders, driven by their desire for profit ( greed ), results in people doing the work they are unsuited for.

In his work, Durkheim focused on totemism, the religion of the aboriginal Australians and Native Americans.

Referencing the work of sociologists and anthropologists such as Émile Durkheim and Margaret Mead, he also used the book as a vehicle to present his theory that illness was culturally relative.

Durkheim, whose work Gökalp himself translated into Turkish, perceived religion as a means of unifying a population socially, and even " religion as society's worship of itself ".

In fact, while Durkheim is widely considered the most important functionalist among positivist theorists, it is well known that much of his analysis was culled from reading Spencer's work, especially his Principles of Sociology ( 1874-96 ).

Talcott Parsons was heavily influenced by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, synthesizing much of their work into his action theory, which he based on the system-theoretical concept and the methodological principle of voluntary action.

In Capitalism and Modern Social Theory ( 1971 ), he examined the work of Weber, Durkheim and Marx, arguing that despite their different approaches each was concerned with the link between capitalism and social life.

Statistical sociological research, and indeed the formal academic discipline of sociology, began with the work of Émile Durkheim ( 1858 – 1917 ).

In the late 19th century, in the work of Émile Durkheim, the term was associated with society as a mass of undifferentiated, atomistic individuals.

His work in that field was distinguished by his acumen, his philosophical understanding, and extensive study of the major pioneering works of Durkheim, Toennies, Max and Alfred Weber, Simmel and others in the British Museum Library in London, while resident as a student in Oxford.

The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss ' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology.

While Mauss is known for several of his own works-most notably his masterpiece Essai sur le Don (' The Gift ')-much of his best work was done in collaboration with members of the Annee Sociologique, including Durkheim ( Primitive Classification ), Henri Hubert ( Outline of a General Theory of Magic and Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice ), Paul Fauconnet ( Sociology ) and others.

After a brief period of study in England at the British Museum he returned to France, where he began doctoral work with Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.

By comparing statistics from different European countries he discovered the correlation between suicide rates and divorces, claiming that both phenomena was associated with social disequilibrium, ideas influencing Émile Durkheim in his work Suicide

Taking its lead from aspects of the work of Thomas S. Kuhn, but especially from established traditions in cultural anthropology ( Durkheim, Mauss ) as well as the later Wittgenstein.

The modern academic discipline of sociology began with the work of Émile Durkheim ( 1858 – 1917 ).

The tribes of Central Australia had already become the object of worldwide interest through the joint work of exploration and ethnographic enquiry undertaken by Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, whose researches exercised a notable impact on both sociological and anthropological theory, in the works of Émile Durkheim and James G. Frazer, and on psychoanalysis, in the thesis proposed by Sigmund Freud in his Totem and Taboo.

Functionalism grew from the work of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim.

Émile Durkheim, the sociologist and founder of the Année Sociologique in 1898, would greatly influence the life and work of Granet, and began teaching a course on pedagogy at the Sorbonne, which was compulsory for all students from 1904 until 1913.

Durkheim discusses the nature of tjurunga throughout his seminal work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

While Durkheim and others examined the state of modern societies, Mauss and his collaborators ( such as Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz ) drew on ethnography and philology to analyze societies that were not as ' differentiated ' as European nation states.

Compared to Durkheim and Marx, Weber was more focused on individuals and culture and this is clear in his methodology.

Whereas Durkheim focused on the society, Weber concentrated on the individuals and their actions ( see structure and action discussion ) and whereas Marx argued for the primacy of the material world over the world of ideas, Weber valued ideas as motivating actions of individuals, at least in the big picture.

Emile Durkheim expanded upon Tönnies ' recognition of alienation, and defined the differences between traditional and modern societies as being between societies based upon " mechanical solidarity " versus societies based on " organic solidarity ".

Durkheim identified organic solidarity-based societies as modern societies where there exists a division of labour based on social differentiation that causes alienation.

Durkheim claimed that modern society bases integration on the mutual benefits of the division of labour, but noted that the impersonal character of modern urban life caused alienation and feelings of anomie.

Classical, seminal sociological theorists of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Durkheim, Weber, and Marx were greatly interested in religion and its effects on society.

However, as the division of labor makes the individual seem more important ( a subject that Durkheim treats extensively in his famous Division of Labor in Society ), religious systems increasingly focus on individual salvation and conscience.

At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu.

Thus Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his career.

Finally, Durkheim's own son, André, died on the war front in December 1915 — a loss from which Durkheim never recovered.

Early on, during his university studies at the Ecole, Durkheim was influenced by two neo-Kantian scholars, Charles Bernard Renouvier and Émile Boutroux.

There were many points on which Durkheim agreed with the positivist thesis.

Durkheim authored some of the most programmatic statements on what sociology is and how it should be practiced.

The vast information Durkheim studied on the aboriginal tribes of Australia and New Guinea and on the Inuit was all collected by other anthropologists, travelers, or missionaries.

Sociology's task thus consists of discovering the qualities and characteristics of such social facts, which can be discovered through a quantitative or experimental approach ( Durkheim extensively relied on statistics ).

By anomie Durkheim means a state when too rapid population growth reduces the amount of interaction between various groups, which in turn leads a breakdown of understanding ( norms, values, and so on ).

Overall, Durkheim treated suicide as a social fact, explaining variations in its rate on a macro level, considering society-scale phenomena such as lack of connections between people ( group attachment ) and lack of regulations of behavior, rather than individual's feelings and motivations.

Out of those three concepts, Durkheim focused on the sacred, noting that it is at the very core of a religion.

Durkheim saw totemism as the most ancient religion, and focused on it as he believed its simplicity would ease the discussion of the essential elements of religion.