Emile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist who rose to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Along with Karl Marx and Max Weber, he is credited as being one of the principal founders of modern sociology. When Durkheim began writing, sociology was not recognized as an independent field of study. As part of the campaign to change this he went to great lengths to separate sociology from all other disciplines, especially philosophy.
Durkheim is often considered a conservative within the field of sociology, being concerned primarily with order, consensus, solidarity, social morality, and systems of religion. His theoretical analysis helped provide a basis for relatively conservative structural functional models of society.Key Ideas: Combined empirical research with sociological theory, Social Integration, Functionalism and Structure