ABSTRACT
A mystery story involves a cast of characters with a reconstruction of events to uncover what happened, how and why. In Louise Durkheim's case history, there is a long-standing enigma over why he suddenly took up the study of religion. After 1895, Durkheim begins to impute a religious character to all social phenomena and to become preoccupied with esoteric topics as hordes, exogamy, clans, taboos, and totems. While Durkheim's good fortune in marriage had monetary benefits, Durkheim also proved to be the ideal partner for an academic workaholic. Durkheim went on to credit economists as the first to recognize the spontaneous nature of collective life and the reality of economic laws. Durkheim also highlighted "social facts" as the unit of analysis and stressed using empirical observation and the comparative method for objective sociological research. Comte was to leave it to Herbert Spencer to integrate sociology into the natural sciences by adding sociology to his analysis of physics, biology, and psychology.
