Émile Durkheim

Durkheim founded sociology as an academic discipline, establishing the first European university department in the field in 1895, and is credited alongside Karl Marx and Max Weber as one of modern social science's principal architects. His 1897 study Suicide used statistical analysis of Catholic and Protestant populations to show that even an act as personal as suicide follows social patterns, helping separate sociology from psychology and political philosophy as a method of inquiry. He went on to found the journal L'Année sociologique and, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), developed an influential theory of religion's social function.