SOC-4040 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Sui Generis, Social Fact, Utopia
19 Oct 2017
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Marx and durkheim: dimensions of social structure; social space. Suicide is an empirical study (data-based) that shows the non-random, in fact, regular and predictable distribution of suicide rates both across societies and within societies. He uses the data of suicide rates to support the logic of sociology, and the logic (theory of social structure) of sociology to, in turn, help interpret the observed variations in suicide rates. These rates vary according to degree of social change, religion (protestant, catholic), occupation, age, marital status, and sex. In the book suicide durkheim attempts to do four things. First, he wants to show that quite apart from physical, biological and psychological influences, social facts have social force; they act as an independent, causal influence. Social facts are things sui generis social facts are objective aspects of existence, relative to but separate from the subject-fields of other sciences. He accomplished this first goal in an earlier work, the rules of sociological method (1895).
