I studied how societies are able to maintain stability and continue to exist even though each individual has his or her own thoughts and ways of doing things. I came to understand that society serves as a bond that allows people to continue working together. Who am I?
A. Herbert Spencer
B. C. Wright Mills
C. Émile Durkheim
D. George Herbert Mead

Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist and philosopher. He formally established sociology as an academic discipline and, together with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is considered one of the founding fathers of that science.

Durkheim perfected the positivism that Auguste Comte had first devised, promoting epistemological realism and the hypothetico-deductive method. For him, sociology was the science of institutions, and his goal was to discover structural "social facts". Durkheim was a major exponent of structuralist functionalism, a foundational perspective for both sociology and anthropology. According to his vision, the social sciences had to be purely holistic; that is, sociology had to study the phenomena attributed to society as a whole, instead of focusing on the specific actions of individuals.