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74 UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY sciences. Sociology concerned itself make up the collectivity; we cannot see exclusively with what he called the the collectivity itself. One of Durkheim’s ‘emergent’ level, that is, the level of most significant achievements is his complex collective life where social demonstration that sociology, a phenomena can emerge. These discipline that dealt with abstract phenomena — for example, social entities like social facts, could institutions like religion or the family,evertheless be a science founded on or social values like friendship or observable, empirically verifiable patriotism etc. — were only possible evidence. Although not directly in a complex whole that was larger observable, social facts were indirectly than (and different from) its observable through patterns of constituent parts. Although it is behaviour. The most famous example composed entirely of individuals, a of his use of a new kind of empirical dataisinhisstudyofSuicide. Although collective social entity like a footballeach individual case of suicide was or cricket team becomes something other than and much more than just specific to the individual and his/her a collection of eleven persons. Social circumstances, the average rate of entities like teams, political parties, suicide aggregated across hundreds of thousands of individuals in a street gangs, religious communities, community was a social fact. Thus, nations and so on belong to a different level of reality than the level of social facts could be observed via social individuals. It is this ‘emergent’ levelbehaviour, and specially aggregated patterns of social behaviour. that sociology studies. So what are ‘social facts’? Social The second defining feature of facts are like things. They are external Durkheim’svisionofsociologywasthat, like most of the natural sciences, it waso the individual but constrain their to be an empirical discipline. This was behaviour. Institutions like law, education and religion constitute actually a difficult claim to make social facts. Social facts are collective because social phenomena are by their representations which emerge from very nature abstract. We cannot ‘see’ a collective entity like the Jain the association of people. They are not community, or the Bengali (or particular to a person but of a general nature, independent of the individual. Malayalam or Marathi) speaking Attributes like beliefs, feelings or community,ortheNepaleseorEgyptian collective practices are examples. national communities. At least, we cannot see them in the same straightforward way that we can see a Division of Labour in Society tree or a boy or a cloud. Even when the In his first book, Division of Labour in social phenomenon is small — like a Society, Durkheim demonstrated his family or a theatre group — we can method of analysis to explain the directly see only the individuals who evolution of society from the primitive Reprint 2026-27