Together with the other two musketeers of French sociology, Saint-Simon and Comte, Durkheim can be said to have essentially invented the new science at the beginning of the twentieth century. Before them, mathematicians had drawn "morality statistics" on the importance of crime in different regions, times, etc., but never had such a clear scientific agenda been laid down. However, the power and seductive simplicity of the newly invented statistics were offering more and more new "facts"-and new questions-about the state of nations and demanding new explanations for these facts. Sociology was then unequivocally separated from philosophy, the last empirical discipline to do so.

The key point to understanding the extent of the break Durkheim accomplished with what had been the traditional study of social groups is the idea that society is more than the sum of its parts. Together the parts form the "social world", an inevitable effect of the sheer existence of individuals -- as long as there are more than one -- in position to interact with one another in some way. From that alone comes social currents or forces that in turn produce culture, popular knowledge, social action, etc. According to Durkheim, we learn to perceive reality, to think about it and to communicate with others, through group interactions. Remember what Hobbes understood as the rational organization of society under the social contract: here, society appears to be rational only because it has shaped our rationality in its image.

For Durkheim the social world is essentially normative in its essence; it is a collection of instructions for individuals about how to live in the group. It is also dynamic: the set of instructions is never definitive, the model allows for evolution and revolution; but any change is always a feedback effect of the rules in the first place, never simply the result of individual decisions or initiative.

So there are two basic elements that form the social world, the group (again, a group of two is sufficient, and there is even a name for it, the dyad) and the possibility of interaction. Possibility, because interaction in itself is already a product of society: no one is born with language, for example. For language to develop, and then to be learned by children, interaction must be possible. With these two essential elements a social world emerges, in the form of rules-language rules for instance. The social is like the spark that two flints produce when they meet: it is not part of the flints, but it is invariably there when they make contact.

It follows then that all collective behaviour, and probably all individual behaviour (at least as far as we need to think about what we do with socially produced language) can be explained by the effect of those social rules, and that is basically the agenda that Durkheim set for the burgeoning social sciences: to explain the social by the social, social "facts" by social "rules." To Durkheim, reverting to psychological explanations was nothing but a dangerous reduction of society to psychology, which in turn could be reduced to biology, then to physics; in this he was obviously opposed to Descartes, and his contention that explanations of facts came from explaining the elements of those facts, rather like explaining the clock by its cogs and wheels. We have seen Hobbes, just a few years later (Descartes died in 1650, a year before the publication of the Leviathan), insisting that human behaviour could be explained by looking at the "particles" that form the human body.

Another way to look at it is to imagine that Durkheim simply does not see individuals as parts of the social. Does that sound strange? Think about it: the social world (remember that this very phrase is a creation of Durkheim in the first place) could be seen as having parts (rules, "sub-rules") that are merely reflected in individuals, but the leap to actual persons is a leap outside the social machine into something else (psychology). Your personality and your behaviour is merely a symptom of the social organization of your environment: there will be x many suicides if society has y and z characteristics-suicide is not a personal decision. So despite the rejection of reductionism, the break from the mechanistic explanation is less than complete. Further, Durkheim remained firmly attached to linear causal explanations and the deductive-nomological model of the natural sciences.

For Hobbes, social rules are known by all, created and maintained by reason, and followed because there is punishment attached to delinquency. For Durkheim it is rather the opposite: few of us really know the rules or recognize them as such: we think things are "natural" or inevitable, or we do not question the organization of our environment at all. For instance, the only time we really think in terms of language "rules" is in grammar school: after that, language use is just a given. Sometimes we are vaguely aware of certain of more concrete manifestations of the social world, like the criminal code -- or the rules of politeness. But why do we wear clothes? Just because we "want" to? What kind of clothes are proper? In which circumstances? Why? What did you have for breakfast today? Why? The "real" rules or social facts behind these everyday manifestations are in general hidden to ordinary perception, and become concrete only through reactions caused by their having been broken (these would later be called "societal reactions" and take on an entirely different meaning). But in the vast majority of cases, people do not conform because they are openly coerced but because they think it is the "right" thing to do; but they rarely understand why that is. Durkheim's sociological agenda was then for the sociologist to discover the "hidden" coercive causes of behaviour.

His reaction to economics is a good example of how Durkheim sees the problem: he says that they are "merely maxims of practical wisdom." The difficulty here for Durkheim is that economics is largely based on the rational choice of persons in a market society. Now, if there were such a thing as free rational choice, society would be the product of human minds, which it cannot be simply because of the empirical fact that most people follow rules, whether knowingly or unknowingly (and that is why they are predictable, and why statistics work at all). There is no rational incentive to follow tradition, for example, and yet it is followed; it is followed because an external rule says it is supposed to be. Most follow it because they want to, they have internalized objective rules, while the remaining few are forced to by the threat of exclusion or other forms of unofficial punishment: they are the only ones to actually bump into the rules, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. So in order to become a true social science, economics would have to explain the law of demand, for instance, in social terms, and not by assuming that people choose to buy this or that item: just because you do not actually feel the rules and you think you are freely choosing doesn't mean the rules don't exist. In a Durkheimian world there must exist a social reason why you make that "choice" in the first place.

If we go a little further in this concept of social rules it becomes evident that the best rules (those most closely followed) are the least visible ones. Those that are followed not because of fear of negative consequences, or even because they are deemed to be right, but because they are so perfectly integrated to individual intellects that they have lost the status of rule and seem to be biological or instinctual or part of unquestionable "human nature." Then not only is it impossible to conceive of an alternative action, it is impossible to recognize that this is action at all: it becomes akin to the path of the moon around the earth, it is unquestionable. To keep the same example, that something appears as a rational choice is simply that you no longer see the social rules that led to it. And yet there are rules there, since everyone makes the same rational choice of buying an SUV, wearing Gap clothing and watching ER on television. The fact of the matter is that people clearly hate choice-but love the concept of it, and that is a typical Durkheimian social fact: people adhere closely to all the social values, including the value of free choice and rebellion.

Another illustration of Durkheim's view is his remarks about crime, particularly interesting in this context. Now it must be underlined that Durkheim did not claim to explain crime; he was content at the time to dispel some common misconceptions about criminality and criminals, namely that they denote a "pathological" state of society (Durkheim still thinks of society as a living organism, like Hobbes did). In Les règles de la méthode sociologique (1895), after some rather outdated conclusions on the normative power of science, he defines "normality" as conformity in the right situational time frame. In other words, a widespread practice can still be "abnormal" if the historical conditions that made it useful and relevant have disappeared. It then follows that since crime is always present, and linked to social conditions, it is therefore "normal" and not pathological. It is simply a cultural category that includes the worst kinds of deviance according to the current general sentiment (les états forts de la conscience collective). For Durkheim, it then follows that eradicating crime would mean making all lesser forms of deviance progressively less acceptable, leading to social sclerosis and the total immobilisation of cultural progress: crime is in many ways a simple epiphenomenon of a healthy progression of ideas.

Again, this is not an explanation of how crime occurs; Durkheim did not study crime. But some interesting conclusions can be drawn: (1) even though Durkheim sees society as basically consensual, an organism that works when each of its parts performs the function it is designed for, he seems to leave room for development of a conflict theory -- even though he would most certainly disagree with it. In his view, conflict is something to be kept under control by other organs of the social world: the organism only "works" if its parts are compatible.

(2) What Durkheim calls conscience collective is not a collection of common judgments held by a majority of individuals; it is a real, objective "thing" simply reflected in everyone. This does not mean, obviously, that it is in some way an entity, that it has a life of its own, or an actual independent reality in the form of Plato's world of ideas; it is independent of the individual, but it remains a creation of the group. Therefore, the general dislike for crime is simply a cultural stress or label put on certain courses of action.

(3) For Hobbes, the civil society only held people more responsible for their actions, but they were basically the same people as before. In fact, the parties to the social contract knew in advance what civil society should look like. Durkheim sees humans in a very different way. Leave a baby on a desert island, would he say, with some mean to keep it alive, and come back 20 years later: he will in fact not be human; one will not recognize any human qualities in that adult. Durkheim, contrary to Hobbes, would not extrapolate on exactly what qualities you would find. Only one thing is certain: this person could not function in any human society. On the other hand, if that person on the island is a shipwreck survivor, the social world will have followed him to the extent that it has been internalized, i.e. it has transformed him (or in fact created him, since there is no way to know what he was before). For Hobbes, this survivor would probably revert to his passionate nature, since no one else on the Island can punish him for his delinquency.

In conclusion, humans act according to rules, and if they attempt to evaluate or modify these rules it is only in with the tools of collective conscience, i.e. the individual is a body only. This goes way beyond the familiar nature-vs-culture debate; it is saying that not only is it strictly culture (which I would tend to agree with) but that this culture cannot be "personalized", or analysed on an individual basis. In fact, the very idea of thought changes meaning.