Durkheim One interesting way of looking at cultural, historical, and sociological trends is to extrapolate the individual into society and vice versa. Trends that occur within the individual -- birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, illness, old age, dementia, and death -- also occur within society, albeit at a different pace and severity. The pathology of an empire, for example, the Roman Empire, can be compared to more modern interpretations of the stages

His underlying interest was to understand the basic forms of religious life for all societies. In Elementary Forms, Durkheim argues that the totems the aborigines venerate are actually expressions of their own conceptions of society itself. This is true not only for the aborigines, he argues, but for all societies (ibid). Religion, for Durkheim, is not "imaginary," although he does deprive it of what many believers find essential. Religion is

Marx and Durkheim on Religion Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, two of the most important social critics of the modern world, agree on very little about the functions and goals of religion and its place in modern societies. The one clear overlap in their assessments of religion is that it is immensely important and that no important critique of society can be complete without an examination of religion. This paper explores

662). In other words, individuals coalesce around environments repetitively to form the collective. The collective structure stays even when the individual is alone. This is close to the collective representations of Durkheim, but it is based on innate or genetic structures that connect during the repetition of social encounters (which in Allport are not religious). The social bonding function is similar: "The collective-structure event-format (so called 'reality of the

Many different views abound on the origins of modern capitalism, causalities that range from economic to political, from religious to cultural, or for some, an amalgamation of societies need to expand and the resources necessary to fuel that expansion. Max Weber's the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a study of the relationship between the ethics of ascetic Protestantism and the emergence of the spirit of modern capitalism.

It cannot apply exactly to any individual."(Durkheim 1982, pg. 82) This is illustrating how social science is a way of objectively analyzing society. It is different from other disciplines by showing how it is seeking to look at different collective facts. This is in order to understand why everyone will behave and react in a particular fashion. (Gane 2010) (Applerouth 2008) Furthermore, it must respect all scientific principles and be