Durkheim’s positivism studied codified norms rather than individual intentions.

Evidence

What is usually left out of this account is that those famous “facts” which Durkheim wanted to treat as “things” were social actions informed by ideas —or to put it in more positivist language, action governed by rules and norms: rule-governed behavior. It was the constraining effects of the “rules of social life” upon individual actions which made “society” possible for Durkheim—and, at the same time, by making behavior systematic, constituted it as the possible object of a positive science. Hence Durkheim’s concern with method: with things arranged as classifications, with the discovery of “the rule,” with the “type” and “rate” of social phenomena. It was because he despaired of the capacity of hermeneutics to give us an adequate knowledge of these things that he turned to the positive method. He was certainly not uninterested in how ideas informed actions. His question was: how do you discover what norms are operating? how weak or strong the norms are (and therefore what the degree of social solidarity is)? how unified or plural, obligatory or optional they are? Rather than ask what was the “intention” concealed in the mind of the individual actor, Durkheim began at the other end: from the codified legal or moral system of ideas. For these were the “collective representations” of social relations, and in them at least, one could find, in a studiable form, those “rules” which men had thought it worthwhile to embody in the formal system of the law. In this sense, Durkheimean positivism self-consciously closed itself off from that whole Subject-Object dialectic which Hegel had inaugurated. Positivism chose to start with already objectivated social reality : with the facticity which the “rules” of social life had achieved, and their constraining force over action. It treated the “knowable” world as, already, a reification. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 353

Categorization

• XREF: Clarifies Durkheim as a neo-Kantian studying ‘phenomenal’ forms — resonates with the reader’s deep interest in how social rules constrain action, echoing themes from The Bias of Communication and Communication as Culture on rule-governed social life.
• DEFINE: Clarifies what Durkheim’s ‘social facts as things’ actually meant — rule-governed behavior, not brute objects.
• ADDENDUM: Shows social rules as constraints enabling systematic society — a structural parallel to the grafted-tree system view of organic connection and constraint in essay 1.