Positivism in Sociology: Durkheim and the Scientific Study of Society

Last Updated on September 7, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Positivism in sociology is the view that society can and should be studied using the methods of the natural sciences. Positivists hold four things:

1. Society exists outside of individuals, as a structure of social facts which shape what people do
2. Those facts can be observed and measured from the outside, like any other natural phenomenon
3. Doing so will eventually reveal the general laws governing social life, as physics revealed the laws governing matter
4. Sociologists should therefore use quantitative methods and remain detached from the people they study

The approach was founded by Auguste Comte in the mid-nineteenth century and turned into working sociology by Emile Durkheim, whose study of suicide remains the standard example of positivist research. Positivism is examined on Paper 3 in theory and methods, and on Paper 1 wherever research methods are examined.

For how positivism compares with the opposing position, see my post on positivism vs interpretivism. This post is the positivist side in depth.

The origins of positivism

Positivism came out of two things happening at once: the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

The Enlightenment refers to a period of European history running roughly from 1650 to 1800, during which the authority of the church was challenged and people increasingly held that knowledge should come from science rather than from God. Three beliefs emerged from it that matter for sociology:

• That underlying laws explain how the universe and society work — that things are not simply God’s will
• That scientific study can reveal those laws, and that all people are capable of understanding them, unlike religious truth, which is revealed rather than discovered
• That once known, those laws can be applied to society in order to improve it. This is the belief in progress.

Industrialisation then supplied the problem those beliefs were applied to. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced a run of discoveries in physics, chemistry and biology, which led to new technologies, which led to factory production, railways and the mass movement of people into cities. Commentators writing from the early nineteenth century onwards were struck by a contradiction: enormous progress in science and industry alongside an apparent worsening in the lives of most people. Manchester and cities like it filled up with poverty, unemployment and unrest.

Sociology was founded in response to that contradiction. If scientific knowledge could be used to transform production, the reasoning went, it could be used to understand society and work out how to fix it. The fuller version of this story — the French Revolution, Saint-Simon, and what Comte was reacting against — is in my post on Auguste Comte.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and the founding of sociology

Auguste Comte gave the new discipline its name. He originally called the science he was proposing social physics, then coined the word sociology instead, introducing it in the fourth volume of his Course of Positive Philosophy in 1839. The word combines the Latin socius, meaning companion, with the Greek logos, meaning study — literally, the science of society.

His argument was that human understanding develops through three stages, ending in a positive stage in which we stop looking for ultimate causes and confine ourselves to the observable laws governing how things behave. The natural sciences had already made that transition. Sociology was the last field to make it, and Comte thought it was also the hardest, because society is the most complex thing there is to study.

One thing worth getting right, because textbooks usually miss it: Comte’s positivism was not primarily a philosophy of science. It was a political project. His earliest and, in his own view, most important work was a plan for the scientific work necessary to reorganise society. Science mattered to him because it was the means; social reconstruction was the end. That is why positivism and the belief in progress are so tightly bound together in nineteenth-century sociology.

Comte gets a post of his own. For the law of the three stages in full, the hierarchy of the sciences, his relationship with Saint-Simon and what happened to his reputation afterwards, see Auguste Comte: positivism and the scientific study of society. This post is about positivism as a research methodology; that one is about the man who invented it.

The general ideas of positivism

Six principles, which is the version to learn for the exam:

1. Sociology can and should use the same methods and approaches to study the social world that the natural sciences use to study the physical world.
2. By adopting scientific techniques, sociologists should eventually be able to uncover the laws governing societies and social behaviour, just as scientists have uncovered the laws governing matter.
3. Good scientific research reveals objective truths about the causes of social action. Science tells us that water boils at 100 degrees and this is true irrespective of what the researcher thinks; good social research should tell us similar things.
4. Because positivists want general laws, they are interested in society as a whole — in patterns and trends rather than in individual cases. They are after the bigger picture.
5. To get it they use quantitative methods: official statistics, structured questionnaires and social surveys. Numerical data is essential, because comparison is what reveals a trend and qualitative data is very difficult to compare.
6. These methods also keep the researcher detached from the research process, so that their values do not interfere with the results and the knowledge produced is objective.

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917): positivism in practice

The modern academic discipline of sociology begins with Durkheim. He rejected a good deal of Comte’s philosophy — in particular Comte’s later attempt to turn positivism into a religion — but he kept and sharpened the method, and he was the first to hold an academic post in the subject.

A common error, and one that was live on this post for years: Durkheim was not a student of Comte. Comte died in September 1857 and Durkheim was born in April 1858. Durkheim read Comte, was influenced by him and was sharply critical of him; they never met.

Durkheim’s central claim is that social trends are social facts: real phenomena which exist independently of the individuals who make them up, which constrain those individuals, and which can therefore be studied objectively. He argued that if sociology restricted itself to social facts it could achieve the objectivity of a natural science, and that these facts allow us to make predictions about how societies change. The suicide rate is not the sum of individual decisions; it is a property of a society.

His preferred technique was the comparative method, which means comparing groups and looking for relationships between two or more variables in order to establish cause and effect. Sociologists cannot run experiments on whole societies, so comparison across groups does the work an experiment would do in a laboratory.

I have a fuller post on what social facts are, which is worth reading alongside this one.

Durkheim’s study of Suicide (1897)

Durkheim chose suicide deliberately. It looks like the most personal act imaginable — if he could show that it was shaped by social factors, then nothing could be beyond sociological explanation.

He began with a close analysis of the available official statistics, which showed that suicide rates varied:

• Between countries — countries undergoing rapid social change had higher rates
• Between marital statuses — the divorced had higher rates than the married
• Between religious groups — Protestants had higher rates than Catholics

The crucial observation was not the variation but its stability. The rates for each group might rise or fall, but they stayed constant relative to each other over long periods. If suicide were an entirely individual matter, untouched by social factors, that consistency would be an astonishing coincidence. Individual decisions produce random patterns, not stable ones.

From this Durkheim derived his theory: suicide rates rise where there is too little or too much social integration, meaning the extent to which people feel they belong to society, or too little or too much social regulation, meaning the extent to which a society imposes clear norms on its members. This gave him four types — egoistic suicide from too little integration, altruistic from too much, anomic from too little regulation, and fatalistic from too much. Protestant suicide rates were higher than Catholic ones, on his account, because Protestantism placed more emphasis on individual conscience and so integrated its members less tightly.

What makes this the model positivist study is the sequence: a social fact, measured in official statistics, compared across groups, explained by other social facts, with the individual never entering the argument at any point.

Criticisms of the positivist approach

Positivism is one of two positions you are expected to be able to argue against as well as for.

It treats people as passive. Human beings think, reflect and change their behaviour, including in response to being studied. Positivism models them as objects reacting to external forces, and interpretivists argue that people’s subjective realities are far too complex for that — which is why they prefer in-depth qualitative methods.

The statistics may not measure what they claim to. This is the strongest criticism and it goes straight at Durkheim. Jack Douglas argued in The Social Meanings of Suicide (1967) that official suicide statistics record the decisions of coroners rather than acts of suicide, and that those decisions are influenced by the social characteristics of the deceased and by how hard relatives resist the verdict. J. Maxwell Atkinson developed the point in Discovering Suicide (1978), arguing that coroners work with a common-sense picture of what a typical suicide looks like and classify deaths against it. If either is right, Durkheim’s differences between Protestants and Catholics may record differences in how Protestant and Catholic communities respond to a death rather than differences in how often people kill themselves.

Detachment produces shallow understanding. Staying at a distance means never finding out what anything meant to the people involved. You get the pattern and lose the reason.

HOWEVER, none of this disposes of positivism. Durkheim’s basic finding has held up remarkably well for research that is now almost 130 years old: suicide rates still vary with levels of social integration and regulation. And the criticism that official statistics are socially constructed applies with much more force to some statistics than others. Recorded crime figures are a construction of police decisions in a way that death and birth registrations are not, and a good answer distinguishes between them rather than dismissing all quantitative data at once.

Where positivism sits in the specification

Functionalists are generally treated as positivists, Durkheim most obviously, and much of what is said about functionalism as a structural theory is really an argument about positivist method. Positivists generally hold that sociology is a science, and that it can be value free — which is why this topic is the foundation for both of those second-year debates.

In a methods question, positivism is the reason to favour a method rather than a feature of the method itself. “Positivists favour social surveys because the standardised questions produce reliable data which can be replicated” is a theoretical point and sits in a higher band than a practical one about cost.

Positivism in Sociology: Frequently Asked Questions

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Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written for students studying the second-year compulsory theory and methods module of the AQA’s A-level sociology course, specification 7192. It is examined mainly on Paper 3, and on Paper 1 in the methods sections.

Positivism is usually taught against its opposite. For the comparison — the differences in theory and method, the strengths and limitations of each side, and how to use the contrast in an answer — see Positivism vs Interpretivism.

The two debates this topic underpins are Is Sociology a Science? and Sociology and Value Freedom.

For the theory, see Functionalism and my post on social facts.

For the founder of the whole approach — his life, the law of the three stages and the hierarchy of the sciences — see Auguste Comte: Positivism and the Scientific Study of Society.

For the methods positivists prefer, see Official Statistics in Sociology, Social Surveys and Types of Research Methods in Sociology.

Links to all of my research methods posts can be found on my main research methods page.

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