Definition of Social Fact in Durkheim

The social fact is a fundamental concept within the field of sociology and of the anthropology Social. It was developed by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) throughout his work.

Characteristics of the social fact

The exteriority of the social fact refers to its objective dimension, by virtue of which it constitutes realities with an entity that is not derived from the biological or psychic conformation of the individuals who put it on going. The bases of the social fact exceed the individual —as a biological and psychological unit—, they do not depend on a awareness or of an individual will and, in this sense, they are “outside” of it. For the same reason, social facts are not the result of a particular action, but rather conform collective modes of action and behavior.

thought, which are inherited from generation to generation. To the extent that it is external to the individual, the social fact is pre-existing to the individual subjects and, then, operates as a conditioning factor of their conduct within the framework of society. Consequently, the social fact is not derived from individuals, but precedes them and is internalized by most of them.

What characterizes as Social the fact is not its regularity statistics, that is, the factual data by which there is a sum of individual wills that coincide in it, but rather that it is characterized by responding to collective patterns. The generality is given by the very definition of the social fact, insofar as it consists of a way of doing things independent of its particular manifestations, which —on the other hand— can vary among themselves, although they preserve a regularity between they.

Finally, social facts are characterized as coercive, since they consist of representations, ways of feeling and acting that are imposed on individuals and do not derive from their particular inclinations, but vice versa. In this sense, the social operates as a constriction of individual nature, insofar as it determines the practice of individuals within the group. Faced with such coercion, subjects may offer a greater or lesser degree of resistance.

Criticism of the Durkheimian perspective

The Durkheimian perspective of the social fact under the criteria of independence, externality and obligation —as it was presented in his work The rules of the sociological method (1895)—, has been criticized as it would imply a reduction of social actors in the face of a social reality that completely determines them. Against this, it is worth noting the methodological nature of the work, based on which the author presents the features that make it possible to identify the social fact within a process of research, rather than providing a complete definition of it, in an ontological sense —namely, what it essentially or existentially consists of, or what its deep causes are—.

In his work The elemental forms of the religious life (1912), Durkheim investigates the mechanisms that are at the base of the integration of modern societies, taking the question of what sacred not only as an essential element of the religious fact, but also as a expression paradigmatic that makes the institutionality of social life in general, through belief systems.

Thus, there is a relationship of mutual reciprocity between the realm of the sacred and the realm of the social. In this line, it is possible to interpret this relationship as the foundation of what Durkheim had pointed out under the category of the social fact —although there are distances between the approach of the author in each of these works— and, in this sense, it would be a link that prefigures the representations and actions of the members within the group Social.

Bibliography

Vazquez Gutierrez, J. P. (2012). The conception of social fact in Durkheim: From material reality to the world of collective representations. Politics and Society, Vol. 49, (2), p. 331-351.