Kata ini pertama kali diperkenalkan pada abad ke-19 oleh sosiolog Perancis [[Émile Durkheim]] dan banyak mempengaruhi analisa Durkheim (dan para pengikutnya) ketika meneliti masyarakat.
Where [[Auguste Comte]] dreamedmemimpikan untuk membuat ofilmu makingsosiologi sociologysebagai an all-encompassing discipline that contained all others—'the queen of sciences', in his terms— Durkheim was less ambitious. Durkheim aimed to set sociology on a firm, positivist footing, as a [[science]] among other sciences. He reasoned that any particular science must have unique subject matter which is not shared with any other science, but which must be susceptible to investigation by [[empirical]] means. Variations within the phenomena under investigation, according to Durkheim, must be explained by causes which also lie within the realm of that particular science. In consequence, Durkheim asserted that sociology must become the 'science of social facts'. "Sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual.... ...if no reality exists outside of the individual consciousness, it [sociology] wholly lacks any material of its own." (''Suicide'', p. 37-8, quoted in Hoult, p. 298)
In ''Rules of Sociological Method'', Durkheim wrote: "A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an influence, or an external constraint."
