Emile Durkheim

French sociologist who co-founded sociology as an academic discipline — writing Suicide (demonstrating that even the most individual act is shaped by social forces) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (arguing that religion is society worshipping itself) — and who established the concept of anomie.

Created sociology as a discipline with a distinctive method — social facts must be explained by social facts, not psychological facts — and established anomie as the concept for the social condition of normlessness created by rapid change, where the individual loses the social moorings that give life meaning.