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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 3

"An unslakable thirst is a perpetually renewed source of suffering.”

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 3

"One does not advance if one is not walking towards a goal or, which is the same thing, when the goal towards which one is proceeding is infinitely far away."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 3

"Since society to a large extent makes the individual, it makes him to the same degree in its own image. So the material that it needs will not fail it, because it has, so to speak, prepared it with its own hands."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"If the individual gives way to the slightest adversity, it is because the state of society has made him an easy prey for suicide."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"However individualized a person may be, there is always something collective that remains, which is the feeling of depression and melancholy that arises from this exaggerated individualism. When one has nothing else to share, one participates through sadness."

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"Individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs. Because it is the whole, the harm that it feels is communicated to the parts of which it is made."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness or merriment and makes them see things in cheerful or sombre colors."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"The more we feel detached from [society], the more we also detach ourselves from this life of which it is at once the source and the goal. Why these rules of morality, the precepts of law, .... the dogmas that impede us, if there is not outside us some being whom they serve and to whom we belong?"

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"Knowledge does not have the destructive power with which it is credited, but it is the only weapon that allows us to struggle against the dissolution from which it itself results. It is not by gagging science that one may restore authority to vanished traditions." (1/2)

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"So let those who look with anxiety and sadness on the collapse of old beliefs ... refrain from accusing knowledge and science of an evil which they have not caused, but which on the contrary they are seeking to cure! Beware of treating them as the enemy! (1/2)

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"Learning is not sought as a means to destroy accepted ideas,
but because they have already started to collapse. ... It is not dialectical proofs that uproot faith; faith must have been profoundly shaken by other causes for it not to withstand the shock of argument."

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"And the need itself can only have one cause, which is the collapse of traditional beliefs. If they still asserted themselves with the same force, one would not even think to criticize them."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"When mankind, after taking its [Catholic] faith ready-made from tradition, demands the right to make this faith for itself, it is not because of the intrinsic appeal of free inquiry — [in fact] this brings with it as many sorrows as it does joys — but because mankind now needs this freedom. (1/2)

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Sep 1

"Every kind of suicide is only the exaggerated or deviated form of a virtue."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"Now political freedom is a means, not an end... If it does not serve some end which goes beyond itself, it is not simply useless; it becomes dangerous. It is a battle weapon; if those who wield it do not know how to use it in fruitful struggles, they soon end by turning it against themselves."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"Today, the urgent task which must come before all others is to save our moral patrimony; once it is secure, we will see that it prospers. Let the common danger at least shake us from our torpor and give us back a taste for action!"

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"Men of my generation recall how great our enthusiasm was when, twenty years ago, we finally saw the fall of the last barriers which restrained our restlessness. But alas Disenchantment quickly followed. For we soon had to admit that
we did not know what to do with this hard-won freedom."

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"Today, a wave of sadness and discouragement has swept
over society; tomorrow, on the contrary, a breath of joyful confidence will raise our spirits. For a time, the whole group is pulled in the direction of individualism, then another period arrives and philanthropic social aspirations take over."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"Since each of us incarnates something of humanity, each individual consciousness contains something divine and thus finds itself marked with a character which renders it sacred and inviolable to others. Therein lies all individualism; and that is what makes it a necessary doctrine.”

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"Individualism ... is the glorification not of the self but of the individual in general. It springs not from egoism but from sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all sufferings, for all human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them and mitigate them, a greater thirst for justice."

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"In the same town ... occupations can coexist without being forced into a position where they harm one another, for they are pursuing different objectives. The soldier seeks military glory, the priest moral authority, the statesman power, the industrialist wealth, the scientist professional fame.”

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"We should not say that an act offends the common
consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends that consciousness. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it."

Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"We use the term 'crime' to designate any act which, regardless of degree, provokes against the perpetrator the characteristic reaction known as punishment."

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"The only power that can serve to moderate individual egoism is that of the group; the only one that can serve to moderate the egoism of groups is that of another group that embraces them all."

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Émile Durkheim @durkheimsays.bsky.social · Aug 27

"In any given society, every object of exchange has ... a fixed value that might be called its social value. It represents the amount of useful work intrinsic to it. By this must be understood not the total labor that it may have cost, but the part ... capable of producing socially useful effects."