“This Is Not Normal”: Are Social Facts Finished?

The phrase “social facts” was coined by Emile Durkheim and first elaborated in the opening chapter of his The Rules of the Sociological Method, published in 1895. This forum, by happenstance, appears just after the centenary of Durkheim's death in 1917, but it is doubly timely in that so much recent political turbulence has turned on the possibility that “facts”—social or otherwise—are losing value as assets in the public interest. The aspect of “post‐truth” that concerns me in this essay is the connection between the cultivation of political division and the proliferation of competing fact claims. Does the idea of social facts—so important to our discipline—have anything to offer us in Trump's post‐truth world of “many many sides,” “alternative facts,” and “fake news”? A first step is to consider how facts and social facts might be mutually relevant in this context.