ABSTRACT
Durkheim’s central achievement was to spell out the elements of social explanation at a time when political and ethical philosophy, the ‘science’ of political economy, and the positive schools were united under the banners of individualism. Taking up the temporarily eclipsed work of the moral statisticians, Durkheim (1964a, pp. 144-5) urged a confrontation between sociologists, concerned with social facts, and those who would engage in individualistic reductionism:
If we consider social facts as things, we consider them as social things…It has often appeared that these phenomena, because of their extreme complexity, were either inhospitable to science or could be subject to it only when reduced to their elemental conditions, either psychic or organic, that is, only when stripped of their proper nature…. We have even refused to identify the immateriality which characterizes [social facts] with the complex immateriality of psychological phenomena; we have, furthermore, refused to absorb it, with the Italian school, into the general properties of matter.
