Durkheim is interested in the unspoken social rules that we use to govern our collective life. There rules are often recognized in their breaches. These breaches point to logically possible, but socially implausible or unacceptable ways of behaving. We are constrained by these rules; they have a kind of objectivity to them, attested to by the fact that we follow the rules. These are Durkheims "social facts", which possess generality, externality, and exert constraint.
This view, then, is a kind of functionalism, in that Durkheim wants to account for human behaviour in terms of the function that institutions have toward supporting a stable society and social solidarity. This is also a kind of structuralism, in that the stability of society is possible due to the assumed structures that underlie it.
From Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method
| Collective beliefs, emotions and tendencies are not caused by certain states of consciousness of individuals but by the conditions in which the social group in its totality is placed. |
| Individual minds, forming groups by mingling and fusing, give birth to a being, psychological if you will, but constituting a psychic individuality of a new sort. It is this, then, in the nature of this collective individuality, not in that of the associated units, that we must seek the immediate and determining causes of the facts appearing therein. The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group...Consequently, every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false. |