French sociologist Durkheim (1858-1917) stressed that people are the product of their social environment and that behavior cannot be understood fully in terms of individual biological and psychological traits. He believed that the limits of human potential are socially based, not biologically based. In his work The Rules of Sociological Method (1964 1895), Durkheim set forth one of his most important co to sociology: the idea that societies are built on social facts.