of society to the individual are also essentially found in French culture. Durkheim postulated that the great contributions of society to the individual are order and control. This idea was fostered by the French attitude which is based on reasonableness and guarantees to the individual a sense of bonheur or society.
In the English translation of Durkheim's book, The Rules of Sociological Method, editor George E.G. Catlin writes in his introduction that Durkheim's influences were the following:
"Schaeffle . . . Wundt . . . [and] also Espinas, who, in his studies on animal society, had called attention to precisely those phases of hive life which, by displaying the power of instinct upon a co-operating mass of insects, presents the greatest difficulties to an individualist, and still more, to an intellectualist explanation" (1966, p. xxvii).
The authors of the scholarly treatise, Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, also agree that Durkheim was influenced by the works of Schaeffle but add then that Durkheim was also "explicitly interested in Saint-Simon, Comte, [and] Rousseau" (Parsons, 1961, p. 15). According to that treatise, Durkheim was also influenced by writer Henry Sumner Maine (Parsons, 1961, p. 91). Maine had extensive knowledge about India, which he used to write his book, Ancient Law. Ancient Law discussed how Western legal history affected a non-European society. Specifically, Maine's book developed a formula which documented how people shift from an (ascribed) status to "contract" (where rights and obligations could be voluntarily assumed). Ancient Law was a landmark work in the area of social structure analysis. Durkheim studied Maine's work and admitted that Maine's ideas about ascribed status and contract influenced his own thinking and led him to conduct further research into and analysis of social structures (Parsons, 1961, p. 91).
Moreover, when sociolo...