IntroductionEmile Durkheim was born in France in April 1858 and died in November 1917. He came from a close Jewish community to which he remained close even after breaking with the Jewish Church. Coming from a long family line of rabbis, he had planned to pursue this profession. Durkheim was known as the father of sociology. He was a liberal, a modernist and a nationalist. He was a very ambitious man; this ambition is illustrated by the achievements he accomplished during his life. During the conflict over the Dreyfus Affair, Durkheim used the new field of sociology to attempt to make sense of society and the world around it. The Dreyfus Affair was a government cover-up targeting a Jewish captain named Dreyfus. It turned into a political scandal that divided the French people. As Collins & Makowsky (2010) state, this allowed him to discover that “society is a ritual order, a collective consciousness based on the emotional rhythms of human interaction” (p. 92). Students at the University of Paris were not immune to conflict and professors gave lectures for the Dreyfus cause. At the time, he was one of the most renowned professors at the University of Paris. He went to Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory to study social sciences, although he preferred Comte's sociology to psychology. He wanted to study sociology and do what Wundt had done with psychology. Durkheim wanted sociology to be a research-friendly science rather than a philosophy. He became a professor at the Ecole Normale and then became the first chair of sociology in the early 1900s. Durkheim published several works on different sociology subjects, including suicide, religion and the ...... middle of article ......ut. Religion has been viewed from the perspective of its impact on society and life. It was broken down into sacred and profane beliefs and rites. He considers the division of labor by focusing on solidarity. He discusses two types of solidarity which are mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. Works CitedCollins, R., & Makowsky, M. (2010). The discovery of society (8th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Durkheim, E. (1951). Suicide: a study in sociology. (JA Spaulding and G. Simpson, Trans.)United States: The Free Press.Durkheim, E. (1984). The division of labor in society. (W. Halls, Trans.) New York, New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1965). The elementary forms of religious life. New York, NY: TheFree Press. Jones, R.A. (March 19, 2009). Durkheim homepage. From the Durkheim pages: durkheim.uchicago.edu/index.html