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 ".

The sociologist Durkheim, in his seminal book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, defined religion as a " unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things ".

Durkheim defined religion as

Moore, William James, Henri Bergson, and Émile Durkheim defined their ideas in relation to his.

* the collective conscience as defined by Durkheim is diminished ; and

The beliefs of a religion also reflecting the values are expressed in creeds, dogmas, and doctrines, and form what Durkheim calls a credo.

Durkheim noted long ago that religion as `` a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things unites into one single moral community all those who adhere to them ''.

The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system ; however, in the words of Émile Durkheim, religion differs from private belief in that it is " something eminently social ".

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.

Durkheim, Marx, and Weber had very complex and developed theories about the nature and effects of religion.

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.

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

Durkheim saw religion as the most fundamental social institution of humankind, and one that gave rise to other social forms.

Durkheim saw the religion as a force that emerged in the early hunter and gatherer societies, as the emotions collective effervescence run high in the growing groups, forcing them to act in a new ways, and giving them a sense of some hidden force driving them.

However, Durkheim also believed that religion was becoming less important, as it was being gradually superseded by science and the cult of an individual.

However, even if the religion was losing its importance for Durkheim, it still laid the foundation of modern society and the interactions that governed it.

And despite the advent of alternative forces, Durkheim argued that no replacement for the force of religion had yet been created ,.

Durkheim also argued that our primary categories for understanding the world have their origins in religion.

It is religion, Durkheim writes, that gave rise to most if not all other social constructs, including the larger society.

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

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.

Durkheim ’ s work on religion was heavily criticized on both empirical and theoretical grounds by specialists in the field.

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

Here, Durkheim outlines how totemism within an Australian aboriginal religion is an example of how collective representations are enacted through religion.

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

As Durkheim indicated in several essays, it was in Leipzig that he learned to appreciate the value of empiricism and its language of concrete, complex things, in sharp contrast to the more abstract, clear and simple ideas of the Cartesian method.

However Durkheim made a clear distinction between historical and functional analysis, saying, “ When … the explanation of a social phenomenon is undertaken, we must seek separately the efficient cause which produces it and the function it fulfills ” in Coser, 1977: 140.

If Durkheim made this distinction, then it is unlikely that Parsons did not.

" Central to the social reality of major western religion is the distinction made by Émile Durkheim between the sacred and the profane.

According to Durkheim, fashion serves to differentiate between lower classes and upper classes, but because lower classes want to look like the upper classes, they will eventually adapt the upper class fashion, depreciating it, and forcing the upper class to adopt a new fashion.

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.

In this way Durkheim attempted to bridge the divide between seeing categories as constructed out of human experience and as logically prior to that experience.

For Durkheim, anomie arises more generally from a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards, or from the lack of a social ethic, which produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations.

In it, Durkheim argues that religious beliefs require people to separate life into categories of the sacred and the profane, and that rites and rituals are necessary to mark the transition between these two spheres.

The term anomie, derived from Émile Durkheim, for Merton means a discontinuity between cultural goals and the legitimate means available for reaching them.

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.

More generally, the growth of anomie ( see Durkheim and, more recently, the Strain Theory proposed by Merton ), predicted a strong correlation between unemployment and property crime.

Émile Durkheim ( drawing on the analogies between biological and social systems popularized by Herbert Spencer and others ) introduced the idea that diverse social institutions and practices played a role in assuring the functional integration of society through assimilation of diverse parts into a unified and self-reproducing whole.

There are some sociologists such as Durkheim who suggest there is a link between population density and the number of rules that must be imposed.

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

The specific term " economic sociology " was first coined by William Stanley Jevons in 1879, later to be used in the works of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel between 1890 and 1920.

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