SOC 201 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1.8: Simple Machine
Document Summary
The origins of modern sociology in france: emile durkheim. Like many of his contemporaries, mile durkheim was alarmed by the chaos he saw in society. It was important, durkheim said, to study society and social dynamics to find out what was going on. Yet, whereas many of his contemporaries were repelled by the individualism that had emerged in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, durkheim wasn"t so sure individualism would be the undoing of society. In his first book, the division of labor in society, published in 1893, durkheim explored the sources of order and stability in the modern world. Based on his research, durkheim argued that even a society filled with selfish individuals would hold together, because even selfish people need one another to survive. Imagine, for example, a premodern society in which people"s livelihoods depended on their herds of sheep and their crops of vegetables.
