Durkheim's Suicide

W.S.F. Pickering, Geoffrey Walford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134626113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Durkeim's book on suicide, first published in 1897, is widely regarded as a classic text, and is essential reading for any student of Durkheim's thought and sociological method. This book examines the continuing importance of Durkheim's methodology. The wide-ranging chapters cover such issues as the use of statistics, explanation of suicide, anomie and religion and the morality of suicide. It will be of vital interest to any serious scholar of Durkheim's thought and to the sociologist looking for a fresh methodological perspective.

1 INTRODUCTION

W.S.F.Pickering and Geoffrey Walford

Many undergraduate students in the past, certainly in Britain and the United States, have been introduced to Durkheim’s thought by reading his book on suicide (see chapter 12 here). Talk to them about Durkheim and immediately they refer to it. Of its kind, it is generally recognized as a classic, and if teachers want the students to encounter Durkheim’s sociology, probably no other book written by him will create such a spark of enthusiasm.

Of course it has its own intrinsic fascination. The subject of suicide— unlike, for example that of the division of labour—frequently arouses the emotions. The feelings of would-be readers may be stimulated by the fact that they have known friends who have committed suicide or tried to do so. The violence of self-destruction prompts the enquiring mind to search for a cause. Durkheim probably had a similar experience, based on evidence to be found in his long obituary of a close friend, Victor Hommay, who at an early age apparently committed suicide (Lukes 1973:49–51). The starkness of the English title, Suicide, tempts one to take the book down from the shelf and browse through it.

But another reason for focusing on the book is that it employs, at least at first sight, the validity of an empirical methodology, attractive at least to some minds which like to start with ‘facts’—if possible, statistical facts—from which a cause or causes for the ‘abnormal’ social phenomenon can be postulated. It has its appeal for those who are convinced that sociology should avoid grand theories or philosophical speculation. Whether Durkheim was successful in establishing causes by this method is something which remains open to debate, as will be shown here (see chapter 2).

In France, judged by the number of copies sold over the years, Le Suicide has not been the most popular of Durkheim’s books (see Besnard 1993 for details about the number of books sold). That honour goes to The Rules of Sociological Method. Le Suicide comes roughly an equal second with De la Division du travail social. Why Les Règies has turned out to be the most widely purchased of all Durkheim’s books is perhaps due to the alleged fact that the French academic mind prefers a more theoretical or philosophical book than Le Suicide. A more sceptical reason might be that it is a smaller and cheaper book than that on suicide!

The first edition of Le Suicide appeared in June 1897. According to the recently published Lettres à Mauss, Durkheim said he had finished the manuscript in February 1897, although he was still making finishing touches to it until the last moment (Durkheim 1998a:51). He appears to have handed it over to the Paris publishers, Alcan, who accepted all the books he wrote, early in March, perhaps 14 March. Remarkable is the fact that compared with our own age, with all its sophisticated electronic machinery, the book only took three months to produce. Durkheim was correcting the proofs on 4 April (1998a:63). In 1930 a new edition was brought out with a preface by Marcel Mauss. The page numbers of the two editions have remained the same.

The book was translated into English relatively late, in 1951, by the Americans J.A.Spaulding and G.Simpson, and turned out to be one of the most satisfactorily executed of all the early translations of Durkheim’s works, although some would question the translation of the psychiatric terms used at the time (Berrios and Mohanna 1990:1). It was the last of the four great books to be translated. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life was the first and appeared in 1915, only three years after the French publication. The Division of Labour came out in English in 1933 and The Rules in 1939. All the translations appeared first in America but were frequently published by an English press shortly afterwards. Thus Suicide officially appeared in England in 1952, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, via the American publishers, Free Press of Glencoe.

Students in their undergraduate days may associate Durkheim’s study of suicide with Max Weber’s classical text, The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism, which appeared shortly after Durkheim’s book, around 1904. Indeed, there are striking, but some would want to say superficial, parallels. Protestantism, be it in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, is according to Max Weber the key factor in the rise and development of bourgeois capitalism. For Durkheim, however, Protestantism in the nineteenth century was associated with a relatively high level of suicide in Europe.

But the analysis has further parallels in so far as both Durkheim’s and Weber’s contentions fail at the same point. Given the sociological correlation that Protestantism is related to both the rise of capitalism and high levels of suicide, the problem is to know precisely what in Protestantism brings about these consequences. One comes face to face with endless possibilities, none of which by itself seems satisfactory. For example, why is it that capitalists of a Protestant disposition were so successful? Was it on account of their disposition to hard work, to honesty, to dealing with persecution, for being open to change, and so on? All these can be said to be characteristics of various Protestant churches. Each characteristic rationally offers a possible answer. To posit multiple ‘causes’ in a random fashion is not convincing. And in the matter of suicide, what is the factor operating in Protestantism which could be said to give rise to a relatively high level of suicide? That Protestants were of an individualistic disposition? That the control of ministers over their flocks was not as authoritarian as that in Catholic parishes? That Protestant churches did not have that level of social cohesion or solidarity present in Catholic churches? And if one factor is singled out, should it not apply to other religious groups in accounting for varying levels of suicide?

But to return to the production of the book and Durkheim’s attitude towards it. He was certainly proud of what he had written. After he had delivered it to the publisher he wrote: ‘Pauvre bouquin, cela me fait de la peine de m’en séparer’ (Poor old book, it is painful to be separated from it) (Durkheim 1998a:65). Does this also imply that he was a long time writing it, as Gaston Richard, a former colleague of Durkheim, seemed to indicate? But he was also keen to know how it would be received by the academic world. An early reaction on his part was that it was all a wasted effort (un coup de l’épée dans l’eau) (Durkheim 1998a:78), for early reviews were far from encouraging (for a more detailed account of the reception of the book, see chapter 10 here). He became somewhat depressed at this time, not least because of the pressure of producing what he thought was a significant book but also of having to prepare the first volume of the journal, L’Année sociologique, which was intended to further the cause of sociology. Further, emotional tension was heightened over the possibility of his receiving a chair at the Collège de France, which in the end eluded his grasp (for Durkheim’s mental troubles see Mucchielli 1998).

Despite the final popularity of Le Suicide to which we have referred, it is remarkable that in later years Durkheim made little or no reference to it. Why was this so? Three answers are possible. First, he was completely satisfied with what he had written and there was no need for further statistical research which would modify his theories. Second, he lost all interest in the subject as other issues, such as religion and morality, became more important to him. And third, that he did not refer to suicide much in later years might have been due to what he saw as a theoretical or methodological flaw which he later realized but did not wish to speak about. He was sometimes sceptical about the use of statistics, and his next book—his magnum opus, The Elementary Forms (1912a)—used as its data, not statistics about contemporary religion, but ethnographic material from preliterate societies in central Australia. Did a sense of failure cause him to seek empirical data of a totally different kind? We can only speculate as to possible reasons. Of course, it could be argued that he always sought to work on primal or primitive forms of social institutions as a key to understanding later and more complex ones, and that statistics would be out of place.

With the expansion (in the western world) of universities after World War II and the accompanying rapid growth of social sciences in university curricula, Le Suicide tended to be portrayed as a worthwhile text for students (see chapter 12 here). Such approval gradually gave way to more serious criticisms as sociology became increasingly sophisticated and as methodology became more and more a subject of debate and even acrimony. With the advance of statistical analysis it was evident that Durkheim’s use of statistics was inadequate. Its naïveté gave rise to facile conclusions as was evident in both early and late criticisms of the book. The result in some circles was to degrade it so that in the hands of some teachers it became popular only on the grounds that it showed the way how not to do sociology!

Durkheim’s contribution to the study of suicide has often been said to be his theoretical approach. He made his nephew Marcel Mauss work extremely hard on the book in compiling statistical tables. Mauss said he classified 26,000 suicides, all arranged on cards (1979). But, of course, they were available from statistics from government and other sources throughout Europe, which had been collected by various bodies and commented on by scholars, not least Morselli. Durkheim’s specific contribution to the study of suicide was not so much in producing more statistics but in his carefully argued rejection of psychological, geographical, sexual and similar approaches to an understanding of suicide. Instead he placed an overriding emphasis on social characteristics, for suicide is seen as a social act, not an essentially individual one. Perhaps less convincing in some people’s eyes is the fact that he felt it necessary to subdivide the phenomenon of suicide into types or classes, in which each is related to corresponding social factors.

The various criticisms that have been levelled against the book are dealt with in the pages ahead. Nevertheless these criticisms only partially detract from the book’s continued popularity as a text with which sociology students have to grapple. It is highly fitting that a book should be devoted to the reassessment of Durkheim’s classic work over one hundred years after its publication.

Following this introduction, the chapter by Luigi Tomasi gives a broad overview of Durkheim’s contribution to the sociological explanation of suicide. He argues that the sociological explanation of suicide is both awkward and also slightly disturbing because, according to sociologists, people do not kill themselves. Instead, those who commit suicide are always, at least partly, killed by the social conditions in which they live. The suicide phenomenon is sociological in so far as it is considered from the point of view of a way of reasoning which is typical of sociology. This chapter highlights how the work of Emile Durkheim on suicide represents a significant stage in our knowledge of the phenomenon. Tomasi focuses on how Durkheim was able to present voluntary death—traditionally seen as an individual event or act—as a sociological fact, in order to demonstrate that an event as definite as suicide can be explained on the basis of variations in suicide rates. In making evaluations and judgements on suicide as a ‘social factor’, special attention is given to type, the result of a differentiated analysis, which is to be considered Durkheim’s most long-lasting contribution. Furthermore, the chapter tackles the problem of the recontextualization of suicide in today’s society and, at the same time, discusses the ‘rather inaccurate’ interpretations made by Durkheim himself. Finally, Tomasi argues that the strength of Suicide lies in its being a work produced in a precise social context, using pioneering methodology typical of earlier sociology and based on a theory whose validity is primarily provided by the discussion which arises from it one hundred years on.

The next three chapters focus on methodological and theoretical issues. The third chapter, by Mike Gane, considers the many critical issues that are raised by Durkheim’s statement that in Suicide he reversed the method advocated in The Rules of Sociological Method. This chapter outlines what this reversal meant in practice, and discusses whether the alteration was a minor adjustment once the epistemological space of sociology was established or, on the contrary, raises fundamental questions as to the relation between the theoretical framework, sociological analysis and methodological procedures. Gane argues that Durkheim improvises a quite different solution from the one expected of him, and that by so doing, initiated an autodeconstruction of key methodological propositions.

In the fourth chapter Christie Davies and Mark Neal discuss the neglect by subsequent sociologists of Durkheim’s concepts and discussion of altruistic and fatalistic suicide. This is contrary to the symmetrical quality of Durkheim’s work in which those forms of suicide are balanced by egoistic and anomic suicide. Durkheim’s critics have tended to argue that he did not give enough modern examples of altruistic and fatalistic suicide and that his only substantive example of altruistic suicide is that of the military. However, such suicide is in itself important enough to justify the use of the idea of altruistic suicide, and Durkheim in fact provides a complex and subtle set of comparisons between military rank and unity to support his thesis.

Durkheim’s critics are sadly Eurocentric. A study of Asian suicide rates and notably of the very high suicide rates among young (15- to 24-year-old) women in rural China indicates that altruistic and fatalistic suicide are major phenomena in those societies. Durkheim was right in seeing a curvilinear relationship between egoistic and anomic suicide on the one hand, and altruistic and fatalistic on the other, with a notional ‘low point’ somewhere in between.

However, there remains a serious problem: the fall in the suicide rate of the military (both army and navy) in wartime, which ought not to happen according to Durkheim as increased integration and regulation are being imposed on an already excessively integrated and regulated institution. What this phenomenon and a consideration of the unstable suicide rate of religious orders and sects reveal is that the suicide rate under conditions of extreme altruism and fatalism is indeterminate; it depends on the content of the rules and the nature of the ethos of the institution concerned in a way that is not true of egoistic or fatalistic suicide. The curvilinear Durkheimian model thus fails and in this chapter is replaced with a new and more sophisticated model which coincides with the Durkheimian model at high levels of egoism and anomie but is deliberately indeterminate at the altruistic and fatalistic end of the spectrum.

In the fifth chapter John Varty assesses Douglas’ analysis of Durkheim’s use of statistics in Suicide. Some time ago Jack Douglas raised the most comprehensive critique of the reliability of the official suicide statistics that Durkheim used. Douglas’ analysis broadens out to a wider questioning of how one should study suicide sociologically. Should the focus be upon suicide rates or individual acts of suicide? Should it be upon the external, social causes of suicide rates or the shared and personal meanings that cause individual acts of suicide?

In order to provide a critical account of the Durkheim-Douglas debate Varty focuses on Durkheim’s use of suicide statistics and his discussion of their accuracy and meaning; he discusses the problems arising out of Durkheim’s definition of suicide, and outlines and assesses Douglas’ critique of Durkheim.

Producing a verdict of suicide is a complex process involving a coroner’s investigation into possible motivations that lie behind someone’s death. Durkheim was aware of this problem and the difficulties it raised for his study. He observed that the official statistics of motives ‘are in fact the statistics of the opinions about motives held by officials’. Durkheim doubted the reliability of the statistics on suicide motives yet he did not extend this uncertainty towards statistics of the number of suicides. Douglas argues that Durkheim should have taken a further step in questioning not just the validity of the official judgements of motives but also of the suicide statistics themselves.

The following pair of chapters focus on the moral aspect of Suicide. In chapter 6 W.S.F.Pickering asks readers to give more attention than they have before to the conclusion of Suicide, and to understand Durkheim’s view of morality and religion presented there. Suicide is concerned with social phenomena other than suicide. As Durkheim admitted, his book raises questions which are associated with serious practical problems of the day. It is in the last chapters in the conclusion that several such issues are raised. Particularly important are those which relate to aspects of morality and religion, some of which are not considered elsewhere in the book and in his other writings. Durkheim presented a brief history of the moral attitudes of rulers, philosophers and theologians towards suicide. In some instances he misunderstood the writings of Christian theologians. The criticisms of Bayet, who was inspired to write his long book on morality and suicide as a result of reading Durkheim on the subject, are briefly stated, as are the problems of humanists with regard to the morality of suicide. What is not often stressed is that Durkheim committed himself to a strong position in considering suicide as absolutely immoral. In Suicide religion is portrayed very much in terms of its function of social control and the influence it can have on those given to suicide. Finally, secularization and the origin of religion, mentioned in these final chapters, are critically analysed.

This is followed by William Ramp’s chapter which explores the moral discourse of Durkheim’s Suicide. The status of Suicide as a methodological classic is reinforced by Durkheim’s own description of it as a ‘concrete and specific’ example of sociological method. But his characterization begs a question about the topic: why suicide? The chapter seeks answers both in the context in which the work was written and in Durkheim’s own justification of his topical choice, suggesting that suicide was more than a convenient occasion to demonstrate a sociological perspective and method. Durkheim attempted an ambitious moral theory of society organized around one of the most symbolically troubling features of modern life.

Suicide was part of, and addressed, a prolific nineteenth-century literature on ‘problems of modern life’ (excessive individualism, isolation, neurasthenia, a decline in traditional moral regulation): even its method was anticipated by moral statisticians. It exemplified the growth of professions, disciplines and policies concerned with the productivity, health and order of national populations as objects of study and intervention (Foucault’s ‘governmentality’). In this context, suicide was a resonant issue: an ultimate act of self-sovereignty in a culture of individualism, it was also a symbolic challenge to the moral integrity, productivity and welfare of national societies.

Durkheim himself claimed to have chosen the topic because few subject...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Emile Durkheim’s Contribution to the Sociological Explanation of Suicide
• 3 The Deconstruction of Social Action
• 4 Durkheim’s Altruistic and Fatalistic Suicide
• 5 Suicide, Statistics and Sociology
• 6 Reading the Conclusion
• 7 The Moral Discourse of Durkheim’s Suicide
• 8 The Fortunes of Durkheim’s Suicide
• 9 The Reception of Suicide in Russia
• 10 Marriage and Suicide
• 11 Social Integration and Marital Status
• 12 Teaching Durkheim’s Suicide