Émile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist whose contributions were instrumental in the formation of sociology and anthropology. His work and editorial leadership of the first sociology journal (L'Année Sociologique) helped establish sociology within the academy as an accepted social science. During his life, 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 common religious and ethnic origin could no longer be assumed. In order to study social life in modern societies, Durkheim sought to create one of the first scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, Durkheim was one of the first to explain the existence and quality of the various parts of a society by reference to the function they performed in keeping society healthy and balanced, and is therefore sometimes considered to be a precursor of functionalism. Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts. Thus, unlike his contemporaries Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, he did not focus on what motivates the actions of individuals (methodological individualism), but rather on the study of social facts, a term he invented to describe phenomena that exist in and from themselves and are not related 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 composed society and could only be explained by other social facts rather than, for example, by society's adaptation to a particular climate or ecological niche. In his 1893 work The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim examined how social order was maintained in different types of societies. He focused on the division of labor and examined its differences between traditional and modern societies.[1] Authors before him, such as Herbert Spencer and Otto von Gierke, had argued that societies evolved much like living organisms, moving from a simple state to a more complex state resembling the operation of complex machines. Durkheim reversed this formula, adding his theory to the growing pool of theories of social progress, social evolutionism, and social Darwinism. He argued that traditional societies were "mechanical" and were united by the fact that everyone was more or less the same and therefore had things in common..