Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
Emile DurkheimRead
Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics... 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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Society is more than just a collection of individuals; it has its own dynamics and characteristics.
Durkheim emphasizes that understanding society requires recognizing that it operates as a collective entity, distinct from the individual behaviors of its members. The interactions and associations among individuals create a complex social reality, where the group's thoughts and actions cannot be solely understood by analyzing each person in isolation.
Themes
SocietyCollectiveIndividualsGroupSocial Dynamics
In practice
Example use cases
In a sociology class discussing group behavior, this quote can illustrate the complexities of social interactions.
More from Emile Durkheim
All quotes →Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
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If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
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A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.
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The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
Emile DurkheimRead
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.
Emile DurkheimRead
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