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Reading

From Durkheim’s Suicide: A Study in Sociology, read Book Three: General Nature of Suicide as a Social Phenomenon. Then answer the questions that follow.

In addition to the preceding lecture, I’ve added two appendices that follow the questions. The first is a mini-lecture on Community and Personality in Historical Perspective that provides a broader framework for the nineteenth-century discussion on community in which Durkheim participated and, arguably, transcended. The second is a brief synopsis of the way that Durkheim applied his analysis of suicide to the smallest community — the family. I deliberately separated Durkheim’s analysis of the family apart from his other sociological writings lest his obvious chauvinism towards women distracted you from the profundity of his general argument. These appendices are optional reading; you will not be tested on any of the information therein. The piece on Durkheim and the family is meant to be humorous but, as far as I know, contains accurate and useful information. However, in the interest of his personal safety, the author disavows any responsibility for the analysis provided in an optional appendix. Caveat Emptor.

Questions to Consider

1. Why does Durkheim dismiss premeditative explanations of suicide?

2. How does Durkheim criticize psychological accounts of suicide?

3. How can the analyst gain real insights into the causes of suicide?

4. How does Durkheim describe the sociological analysis of suicide?

5. What determines individual actions, even at their most egoistic?

6. What is the best guide to understanding behaviour if not to focus on the individual or national types?

7. What makes the suicide rate such a good index to the collective consciousness?

8. Why can’t we blame suicide on individual or social unrest or unhappiness?

9. How does Durkheim deal with individualistic interpretations of phenomena or, to put it differently, how does Durkheim deal with those who suggest that social norms are merely the sum of individual consciences?

10. Why is sociology or the discovery of social facts a true science?

11. Where does the individual psyche or psychology fit into Durkheim’s sociological framework?

12. Why is individualistic philosophy misleading?

13. What makes it so difficult to discover social facts?

14. Why does Durkheim regard morality as a social rather than an individual construction of reality?

15. How does Durkheim’s analysis of suicide reflect his understanding of the social organism?

16. Once Durkheim has completed the argument that suicide is pre-eminently a social fact, what place does he give to individual factors?

17. Why is clinical psychology so limited?

18. How have social attitudes towards suicide changed with the development of the division of labour and the creation of a more organic society?

19. What is the historical evidence that societies of the past were more mechanical in nature and far less indulgent towards suicide?

20. What evidence is there to suggest that the suicides of the past were an affront to the community rather than simply a sin or weakness of the individual?

21. What other striking revelations can the history of suicide reveal?

22. What can all of this tell us about the nature of society?

23. What is the sociological problem with using criminal and juridical statistics as a primary or exclusive index of social values?

24. What conclusions did Durkheim draw from his critique of the French scholars who analyzed suicide?

25. What did Durkheim conclude about the relationship between homicide and suicide?

26. Why is it wrong headed for moderns to regard suicide as morbid or abhorrent behaviour?

27. How does Durkheim explain the inherent sadness of the suicidal individual?

28. Does Durkheim believe that sadness and suicide are too commonplace in our modern society?

29. Why does Durkheim believe that those who espouse greater power to the state to regulate social life and communication are wrong headed?

30. What communal bodies do have the ability to reconstruct the values of community in modern life?

31. Durkheim usually disapproves of those who take rigid and traditional attitudes towards social institutions. However, he makes one exception. What traditional social unit does he want to conserve at all costs?

Possible Answers

1. Durkheim suggests that that these personal deliberations are extremely varied and cannot explain the different rates of suicide in society. The real causes of suicide, therefore, must be “reasons unknown to consciousness.”

2. The relationship between factors like neurasthenia and social suicide rates is not merely inconclusive but cannot establish a “regular causal relationship.”

3. The analyst needs to forget the individual’s biological, physical or psychological character and to look at sociological causes. This kind of analysis involves developing a methodological classification of different types of suicide.

4. He suggests that the “moral constitution of society establishes the contingent of voluntary deaths.” In other words, social values are the hidden cause that impels men and women to acts of self-destruction.

5. Social values determine individual action, even individualism itself.

6. The key to understanding is to look at statistical averages. These averages are the true reflection of the social environment and are much more revealing than race.

7. It is one of the most stable and regular of all statistics because most individuals do not kill themselves. It is more accurate than mortality rates, which can reflect things like economic growth, changes in diet, or the presence/absence of disease. Dramatic changes in suicide, therefore, reflect significant changes in social values. The statistical regularity of suicides also demonstrates that the real cause of suicide cannot be those individual wills that are ignorant of one another’s existence. Suicide must reflect “some force in their common environment inclining them all in the same direction.”

8. Durkheim tells us that unhappiness lacks the statistical regularity to be a cause of suicide. He suggests that “no unhappiness in life necessarily causes a man to kill himself unless he is otherwise so inclined.”

9. For Durkheim, it is nonsense to say that social values are transmitted from individual to individual. Social values are transmitted as a whole package without significant “personal filiation” and collective tendencies have an existence and force all their own. They are a totality of external forces acting on the individual and creating individual values.

10. It has to be a science with a method because social facts are not intuitive. If the laws of the social world were obvious, sociology would be useless or simplistic. Academic rigor is necessary to discover the laws of society.

11. Durkheim has no problem with psychology as long as its practitioners understand the importance of social psychology, which has its own laws. Religion, science and values must be regarded as part of the collective consciousness and foundational. If society existed primarily of individuals and their unique consciousness, there could be no external forces shaping them.

12. It fails to take into account that society is much more than simply individuals. It also includes material things and social phenomena that exist outside of the individual and that have power over him/her. Language, symbols and “avenues of communication” precede the individual; children need to learn these material and social facts to develop as individuals.

13. Many social facts or aspects of social consciousness have not been crystallized in an objective form (like laws or religious dogma). In fact, social trends and attitudes like cosmopolitanism or patriotism are hard to pin down, but may have an enormous effect on life as it is lived at any particular time. There is no single “centre or focus of consciousness” that defines the collective. Collective values and sentiments often do not visibly appear unless they are threatened.

14. This is because social morality is a whole, which individuals only ever have a partial understanding of. The part can never be equal or superior to the whole. Therefore, social facts like morality are external objective forces that confront each member of society.

15. As a social fact, suicide rates have the distinctive trait of a collective personality or organism. Durkheim views suicide, like society, as having “its own unity and its own individuality.” The only case, and not a very enlightening one, in which the individual has any significant determination in suicide is when that person is insane — a totally inadequate and uninformative causal relationship.

16. He suggests that that it is possible that an individual’s mental state may leave them too weak to offer “resistance to the suicidogenetic current.” But this “neuropathic condition” only causes suicides to more readily go along with the prevailing current.

17. The clinician can only deal with individual cases and the motives of individuals. But the most informative information about suicide is found “enmeshed in the collective life.”

18. The penalties and harsh attitudes towards suicide have been softening ever since the French Revolution. While suicide is still considered a “moral flaw” it is regarded with greater “indulgence”.

19. Up to 1823, it was still a custom in Catholic France to pierce a suicide’s body with a stick; drag it through the streets; and bury it on a highway without any religious ceremony. In Switzerland, the authorities drove a dagger through the suicide’s body near the head. In Russia, the penalties were extensive. A suicide’s will was annulled. A failed suicide was tried like a premeditated homicide. In Rome, suicides had their inert bodies tortured and crucified. Etc.

20. Durkheim cites the “striking conclusion” that whereas suicide was strictly forbidden to an individual acting on his/her own authority, the State or society could permit the individual to commit suicide. “The act is immoral only when it is wholly private and without collaboration through the organs of collective life. Under specific circumstances (i.e. Socrates), society yields slightly and absolves what it condemns on principle.”

21. The collective took responsibility for punishing suicide in earlier times, while religious authorities played a passive role. In our modern age, the state and the collective have removed themselves successively from interference in the affairs of the individual. Religious sanctions, relating to the immortality of the soul, have now become the primary sanctions against suicide.

22. Society has a symbolic and a real authority — a moral supremacy in Durkheim’s words — over us. Only when society decides to “exalt the human personality” will it allow us to do what we want with our bodies.

23. The recording of crimes can change significantly depending upon juridical procedures or bookkeeping. Thus, it is very difficult to assess whether particular crimes are increasing or decreasing. Many writers have erroneously discovered connections, parallels or inversions between homicide and suicide because they have used faulty statistics. Durkheim’s discussion of the appropriate and inappropriate use of statistical information was an important contribution to the discipline of sociology.

24. Durkheim discovered the following: 1) statistics on homicides and suicides move in different directions; 2) high homicide rates generally act as an inoculation against suicide; 3) wars usually restrain suicide; 4) suicide is pre-eminently an urban, rather than a rural, phenomenon; 5) the spread of Protestantism increases the incidence of suicide; 6) family life increases homicide while decreasing suicide.

25. He says that “suicide sometimes coexists with homicide; sometimes they are mutually exclusive; sometimes they react under the same conditions in the same way, sometimes in opposite ways, and the antagonistic cases are the most numerous.” All of these contradictory facts could be explained once one realized that suicide and murder were not monolithic entities but complex social phenomena. Just as there were different kinds of suicides (anomic/altruistic/egoistic) so too there were different kinds of murder. Social investigators need to understand the complex and subtle differences between superficially similar social phenomena because developing causal relationships. Sociologists were not to jump to conclusions before carefully examining the evidence in a scientific manner.

26. Scientifically and sociologically speaking, crime and suicide are normal facts of modern life. Excessive or extreme forms of behaviour have their uses. Egoistic suicide, for example, is indispensable in a society characterized by a high degree of individualism. It affirms the supremacy, freedom and value that society has transferred to the individual.

27. Durkheim argues that sorrow, especially of the melancholy kind, is a necessary and realistic antidote to an idealistic optimism. Ironically, sadness has its own special pleasures that are attached to it and only becomes morbid when it totally dominates human life. A tendency towards melancholy sadness is indicative of the “most civilized societies”. Intellectuals are particularly prone to this kind of sadness and are consequently at a higher risk of committing suicide. But they play an essential role in the development of culture and a collective mood of civility and humanity. Durkheim argues that “the collective penchant for sadness is wholesome” as long as it does not predominate. Sadness is the price paid or “ransom money” for civilization.

28. Yes he does. But he says that we cannot solve this problem by reestablishing the sanctions and penalties of the past. The real need is to halt the dissolving of society in the current age by encouraging the proliferation of professional and other forms of cohesion that suit our modern society. Occupational groups or corporations should perform the role played by the state, the religious community, and the extended family in the past.

29. To Durkheim’s way of thinking, the nation state is far too crude an instrument to deal with the complexities of modern life. Moreover, governments continually try to establish rules and regulations that “prove inapplicable to experience because they lack pliability.”

30. The corporations and professions are the only modern group that can achieve this goal.

31. Marriage. As long as it is too easy to dissolve marriages, there will always be an unhealthy abundance of male suicides. See Appendix 2 to appreciate why Durkheim believed this to be true.