Bloch was highly interdisciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache ( 1845 – 1918 ) and the sociology of Émile Durkheim ( 1858 – 1917 ).

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

But whereas Durkheim, following Comte, worked in the positivist tradition, Weber was instrumental in developing an antipositivist, hermeneutic, tradition in the social sciences.

Bloch was highly interdisciplinary, influenced by the geography of Paul Vidal de la Blache ( 1845 – 1918 ) and the sociology of Émile Durkheim ( 1858 – 1917 ).

Bloch was trying to reinvent history as a social science, but he departed significantly from Durkheim in his refusal to exclude psychology from history ; Bloch maintained that the individual actor should be considered along with social forces.

Durkheim identified mechanical solidarity as involving custom, habit, and repression that was necessary to maintain shared views.

The Cartesian Other was also used by Sigmund Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract regulatory force, and Émile Durkheim who viewed this as a psychologically manifested entity which represented God in society at large.

Another route undertaken was initiated by Émile Durkheim, studying " social facts ", and Vilfredo Pareto, opening metatheoretical ideas and individual theories.

David Émile Durkheim ( ) ( April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917 ) was a French sociologist.

Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science.

Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology.

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.

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.

Durkheim, a Jew and a staunch supporter of the Third Republic with a sympathy towards socialism, was thus in the political minority, a situation which galvanized him politically.

Durkheim was familiar with several foreign languages and reviewed academic papers in German, English, and Italian for the journal.

Durkheim was one of the pioneers of using quantitative methods in criminology during his suicide case study.

Throughout his career, Durkheim was concerned primarily with three goals.

Lastly, Durkheim was concerned with the practical implications of scientific knowledge.

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

At the same time, Durkheim believed that Comte was still too philosophical in his outlook.

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.

Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts.

Even more than " what society is ", Durkheim was interested in answering " how is a society created " and " what holds a society together ".

Durkheim was interested in cultural diversity, and how the existence of diversity nonetheless fails to destroy a society.

Mauss was born in Épinal, Vosges to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time, and passed the agrégation in 1893.

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 ".

After the death of Reclus as well as the main proponents of Le Play's ideas, and with Émile Durkheim turning away from his early concept of social morphology, Paul Vidal de la Blache, who noted that geography " is a science of places and not a science of men ", remained the most influential figure of French geography.

" It is in this way that systems theorists attempted to provide alternatives and an evolved ideation from orthodox theories with individuals such as Max Weber, Émile Durkheim in sociology and Frederick Winslow Taylor in scientific management, which were grounded in classical assumptions.

Other taxonomies, such as those analyzed by Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, are sometimes called folk taxonomies to distinguish them from scientific taxonomies.

Durkheim found humanistic studies uninteresting, turning his attention from psychology and philosophy to ethics and eventually, sociology.

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

The principles Durkheim absorbed from them included rationalism, scientific study of morality, anti-utilitarianism and secular education.

In a socioevolutionary approach, Durkheim described the evolution of societies from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity ( one rising from mutual need ).

First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli, who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data.

Durkheim argued that the concept of supernatural is relatively new, tied to the development of science and separation of supernatural — that which cannot be rationally explained — from natural, that which can.

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 further argued that Durkheim demonstrated a lack of critical stance towards his sources, collected by traders and priests, naively accepting their veracity, and that Durkheim interpreted freely from dubious data.

Durkheim borrowed the word from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau.

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.

But, as used by Émile Durkheim and later theorists, anomie is a reaction against or a retreat from the regulatory social controls of society, and is a completely separate concept from anarchy, which is an absence of effective rulers or leaders.

The nineteenth century French pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim borrowed the word from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau and used it in his influential book Suicide ( 1897 ), outlining the social ( and not individual ) causes of suicide, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values ( referred to as normlessness ), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness.

In Primitive Classification Durkheim and Mauss take a study of “ primitive ” group mythology to argue that systems of classification are collectively based and that the divisions with these systems are derived from social categories.