According to Durkheim, What Is Not a Social Fact?
According to Émile Durkheim, a social fact is a phenomenon that is external to the individual, coercive, and general over the whole society. On the flip side, to properly understand what qualifies as a social fact, one must also examine what Durkheim explicitly excludes. Durkheim’s work in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) draws clear boundaries between social facts and other types of phenomena, such as individual psychology, biology, and idiosyncratic actions. Understanding what is not a social fact is just as important as defining what is, because it protects the discipline of sociology from collapsing into psychology, biology, or other sciences That's the part that actually makes a difference..
Introduction to Durkheim's Concept of Social Facts
Émile Durkheim is widely regarded as the father of modern sociology. His central project was to establish sociology as an independent science, distinct from philosophy, psychology, and biology. To achieve this, he proposed the concept of social facts — a term he defined with precision Surprisingly effective..
No fluff here — just what actually works.
“A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.”
This definition has three key characteristics:
- Exteriority: Social facts exist outside the individual, in the collective.
- Coercion: They exert a pressure on individuals, often without their awareness.
- Generality: They are shared by most or all members of society.
With this framework in mind, Durkheim then systematically identifies what does not belong in this category. This distinction is crucial for the methodological rigor of sociology Easy to understand, harder to ignore..
The Criteria for a Social Fact
Before listing what is not a social fact, it is helpful to recall the positive criteria Durkheim sets:
- External: The fact is not reducible to individual consciousness.
- Coercive: It acts upon the individual with a force that is felt as obligation or constraint.
- General: It is not an isolated or rare phenomenon but is widespread.
Any phenomenon that fails one or more of these tests is excluded from the category of social facts Still holds up..
What Is Not a Social Fact According to Durkheim
Durkheim was meticulous in separating sociology from adjacent disciplines. Worth adding: he argued that confusion arises when sociologists mistake psychological, biological, or historical phenomena for social facts. Below are the main categories he excludes.
Individual Psychological Facts
One of the most frequent errors Durkheim warns against is confusing social facts with individual psychological facts. Because of that, if a phenomenon exists only in the mind of a single person — such as a personal belief, a fleeting emotion, or a private habit — it is not a social fact. Durkheim insists that sociologists must study collective phenomena, not individual states of consciousness.
Take this: if a person feels anxious before an exam, that anxiety is a psychological fact. But if anxiety is a widespread condition in a society, manifested in norms, rituals, or institutions, then it becomes a social fact. The distinction lies in the collective nature of the phenomenon.
In Durkheim’s own words:
“The determining cause of a social fact must be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of the individual consciousness.”
This principle excludes any analysis that starts from the individual psyche.
Biological Facts and Instincts
Durkheim explicitly rejects the reduction of social facts to biological facts. He argues that sociology is not a branch of biology, even though human beings are biological organisms. Instincts, physiological needs, and hereditary traits are not social facts because they are not produced by society.
Here's a good example: hunger is a biological fact. On top of that, it is universal, but it is not a social fact because it does not originate from social interaction. On the flip side, the way a society organizes its food distribution, taboos around eating, or rituals around meals are social facts. Durkheim warns that if sociologists treat social phenomena as mere extensions of biology, they will miss the truly social dimension.
In The Rules of Sociological Method, he writes:
“It is not for the sociologist to occupy himself with individual facts, nor with facts which are explicable by purely biological causes.”
Artistic and Literary Productions
This category is particularly interesting. Durkheim acknowledges that a work of art — a novel, a painting, a poem — is created by an individual. In its individual
