The Rules of Sociological Method

The Rules of Sociological Method is an uncompromising and compelling polemic against methodological individualism. It argues that explanations of human behavior are not invariably reducible to individual-level factors. Instead, social facts, real social phenomena which are more than just convenient short-hand terms for aggregated entities have an existence of their own, produce predictable social outcomes, and do not rest on the heads and hearts of individual human beings. By way of providing a speculative contemporary illustration, it has been reported that suicide rates among American soldiers in Iraq are higher than in previous conflicts. Could this be due to the the fact that the character of individual soldiers has changed such that the one's fighting in Iraq are less capable of withstanding the merciless stress of combat than soldiers in earlier wars? It's possible. But can we think of a plausible, in principle testable, alternative explanation that is social in character and does not rely on reference to individual traits? The war in Iraq is unique in that National Guard and Reserve units comprise 40 percent of the total fighting force. With the exception of the very beginning of the Korean War, the National Guard and Reserve have not played a combat role in past conflicts, being kept at home for domestic duties. When compared with the regular army, National Guard and Reserve units are poorly trained, lacking in discipline and conditioning, very short on experienced officers and non-commissioned officers, and commonly use obsolete, poorly maintained equipment. Because of these deficiencies, when National Guard and Reserve units are thrown into combat, they perform ineffectively, with high casualty rates and little success in attaining their assigned objectives, which may be ambiguous to begin with. As a result, instead of becoming a more unified and cohesive fighting force with close interpersonal ties and a shared culture of effective combat, the units tend to disintegrate. Their experience is characterized by cultural chaos and loss of social anchorages; a shared set of experientially determined norms of combat does not develop. In other words, to use concepts taken from Durkheim, the National Guard and Reserve units tend to be anomic (culturally deregulated) and egoistic (devoid of a sense of belonging). All this, including higher suicide rates, anomie, and egoism are the opposite of what one would expect of an effective fighting force. Instead, we would expect an experientially determined culture of effective combat to be shared by the members of such a unit, and strong interpersonal bonds of membership would be forged among them. Durkheim's own empirical research demonstrated that groups characterized by dysfunctional levels of anomie and egoism were also characterized by comparably high suicide rates. Varying levels of anomie and egoism were the social forces. Comparably varying suicide rates were the social facts.

Durkheim is probably one of the few people who should be allowed to call his book 'The Rules' for Sociology and get away with it. Durkheim's positivism, though I can't agree at every moment, does much to inform the aspiring social scientist about the objects of his/her pursuit. The translation from the French was effective and Luke's introduction is a good frame of reference for both the author as a whole and the specific piece. If you want to understand one of the driving forces behind sociology as it is done today, this is a good point of departure.