Émile Durkheim, 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist whose contributions were decisive in the formation of sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first sociology journal (L'Année Sociologique) helped establish sociology within the academy as an accepted social science. During his lifetime, Durkheim lectured extensively and published numerous sociological studies on topics such as education, crime, religion, suicide, and many other aspects of society. He is considered one of the founding fathers of sociology. Durkheim was primarily concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era, when such things as religious and ethnic sharing could no longer be taken for granted. To study social life in modern societies, Durkheim sought to create one of the first scientific approaches to social phenomena. Together with Herbert Spencer, Durkheim was one of the first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to the function they played in keeping society healthy and balanced, and is therefore sometimes seen as a precursor of functionalism. Durkheim also insisted that society is more than the sum of its parts. Therefore, unlike his contemporaries Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, he focused not on what motivates the actions of individuals (methodological individualism), but rather on the study of social facts, a term he coined to describe phenomena that have a existence in and of themselves and are not bound to the actions of individuals. He argued that social facts had a greater and more objective independent existence than the actions of the individuals who made up society and could only be explained by other social facts rather than, for example, the adaptation of society to a particular climate or ecological niche . work The division of labor in society, Durkheim examined how social order was maintained in different types of society. He focused on the division of labor and examined its differences between traditional societies and modern societies[1]. Authors before him such as Herbert Spencer or Otto von Gierke had argued that societies evolved much like living organisms, moving from a simple state to a more complex one similar to the functioning of complex machines. Durkheim reversed this formula, adding his theory to the growing set of theories of social progress, social evolutionism, and social Darwinism. He argued that traditional societies were “mechanical” and held together by the fact that everyone was more or less the same, and therefore had things in common.