David Émile Durkheim (French pronunciation: [emil dyʁkɛm]) (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.

Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or political philosophy.

Durkheim refined the sociological positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting epistemological realism and the hypothetico-deductive methodology in social research. For him, sociology was the science of "social facts":

"A social fact is every way of acting, 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."

Durkheim acknowledged in detail the limitations of sociology, emphasising the necessity in social science to form theoretical concepts in the abstract:

"Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description."

Also influential in anthropology, Durkheim was as a structural functionalist and an early proponent of solidarism. He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective conscience" have since entered the popular discourse.