ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim held that the roles and norms that constitute social institutions are both inside the individuals who have internalized them and outside those individuals in that, once established, these norms exercise an independent influence on their creators. In Durkheim's imagination there is no philosophical mind-body problem. Minds and bodies, thoughts and thinkers, are always connected. Plain old Durkheim is used for the continuities that kept Young Emile and Master Durkheim interested in the relationship between knowledge and society. Durkheim vacillated between the everyday view of individualism as antisocial and his theories that told him that even individualism must be a social product. In The Elementary Forms Durkheim sets out to demonstrate how members of society exercise control over one another through religious beliefs and rituals. The subject of suicide, a seemingly "individual action affecting the individual only," provided Durkheim with a dramatic vehicle for demonstrating the social origins of individual action.
