Émile Durkheim was one of the founding figures of sociology. His work is important to students of communication because of the central, though often implicit, role of communication processes in his sociological analyses. In current Durkheimian theory, communication, broadly conceived, is the fundamental social process. As a result of communication, biological beings become civilized human beings, psychological dispositions take the shape of cultural forces, and material and economic life takes meaningful shape as community and society. Durkheim himself was never so explicit about such large claims, and he was writing before the development of the modern vocabulary of communication theory. Nevertheless, interested readers have no difficulty seeing that signs, symbols, representations, rituals, myths, symbolic interaction, and other modes and media of communication are the underlying processes of his theoretical explanations of social order and process.

Durkheim was born in Épinal in the...