Suicide, a Study in Sociology

Author

Émile Durkheim. Published in French as Le Suicide: étude de sociologie in 1897 by Félix Alcan. The standard English edition was translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, edited with an introduction by George Simpson, and published by the Free Press in 1951.

Description

Durkheim's subject is not why a particular person takes their own life. It is why the rate at which a population does so stays stable over years and differs consistently between one population and another. The rate, he argues, is a social fact: a thing external to any individual, exerting force on individuals, and explicable only by other social facts rather than by psychology, climate, race, or imitation, each of which he takes up and rejects in the opening section.

The evidence is official statistics from European states, compared across groups. Durkheim reports that Protestant regions showed higher rates than Catholic ones, unmarried people higher than married, the childless higher than parents, and that rates fell during wars and political crises and rose during both economic booms and economic collapses.

From these comparisons he derives a typology built on two variables, integration and regulation. Egoistic suicide follows from weak integration, where the individual is insufficiently bound into a group. Altruistic suicide follows from integration so complete that the individual has no separate existence to preserve, which he associates with military units and with certain religious duties. Anomic suicide follows from weak regulation, when the norms governing expectation break down, which is why he treats sudden prosperity and sudden ruin as producing the same effect. Fatalistic suicide, the inverse case of regulation so total that the future is blocked, appears only in a footnote and Durkheim treats it as of little contemporary relevance.

The book has lasting important. It was the demonstration that sociology possessed a subject matter of its own, and that a phenomenon assumed to be maximally private and individual could be shown to vary with social structure. It also established the comparative use of statistical tables to eliminate competing explanations one at a time, an approach that shaped quantitative social science well beyond the topic.

Criticism

Two lines of objection have persisted. The first is statistical. William S. Robinson's 1950 paper on ecological correlations named the fallacy of inferring individual-level relationships from group-level rates, and Durkheim's design is the standard illustration of it. Aggregate association between Protestantism and higher rates does not establish that the individuals in question were Protestant.

The second is interpretive. Jack Douglas, in The Social Meanings of Suicide (1967), argued that official statistics are themselves social products, assembled by coroners and officials whose classification decisions vary with religion, class, and local practice. If Catholic communities were more reluctant to record a death as suicide, the variation Durkheim measured may partly reflect the recording rather than the event. J. Maxwell Atkinson extended this argument in Discovering Suicide (1978).

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