French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Photo by Getty Images. Deeply private and apolitical, Durkheim nevertheless strode into the political arena.

Emile Durkheim, professor and founder of French Sociology, at the Sorbonne, in the Guizot amphitheatre, in early 1900. Nubis Digital Library, CC BY. For this reason, he spent his entire career ...

Durkheim asserted that suicide is a social phenomenon and that an individual’s suicide is inextricably linked to their connection with society — views that are thought-provoking to this day. Suicide ...

Emile Durkheim. Source: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain. If I wanted to be controversial, as a sociologist, I might say that serial murder is “functional” for society.

Durkheim obviously never attended a Trump rally, but he might have recognized the dynamics at work. “This effervescence often reaches such a point that it causes unheard-of actions,” he wrote.

Almost precisely a century ago, Emile Durkheim pondered along similar lines. Durkheim, a pioneering sociologist, began digging through accounts of "primitive" cultures like the Arunta tribe of ...

In 1899, Émile Durkheim, one of the fathers of modern sociology, wrote a short essay called “Antisemitism and Social Crisis.” It was an attempt by Durkheim, a French Jew, ...