Durkheim founded social science by positing society as an objective order independent of individuals

Evidence

In order to bring out the peculiar nature of the connections between the crowd, the school and the conception of an object called society, it may help to recall the writings of a major European social theorist from this period. The work of Emile Durkheim, who trained as a school teacher in Paris in the 1880s and later lectured there on education and social theory, laid the base on which was built much of the twentieth century’s scientific study of this new object, society. Durkheim’s importance to social science was that he established society as something with an ‘objective’ existence, as a mental order independent of the individual mentality, and showed how this imaginary object might be studied. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 388

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what Durkheim’s ‘society’ as an objective order means and how it became the object of scientific study.