Social Fact Durkheim

Words: 200
Pages: 1

The tensions that surround social facts are rooted in their very nature, a nature that is fundamentally oppressive and exclusionary. Social facts instill a pressure to conform into categories in a world that is filled with individuals consistently blurring the lines that make up these categories, whether it be race or gender self-identification. In Emile Durkheim’s The Rules of the Sociological Method, he describes the constrictive power that a social fact can possess over an individual, “Not only are these types of behaviour and thinking external to the individual, but they are endued with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him” (Durkheim 2). Most social facts are met