Durkheim: The Theory of Suicide

In one line

Durkheim showed that the suicide rate, which looks like the sum of the most private decisions imaginable, varies with the degree to which people are integrated into groups and regulated by them.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: in Suicide: A Study in Sociology, 1897, Durkheim argued that the suicide rate is a social fact which must be explained by social causes and not by individual psychology, since it remains stable in a society over long periods although the individuals composing it change entirely. He identified two social currents whose deficiency or excess produce four types: egoistic suicide, from insufficient integration; altruistic suicide, from excessive integration; anomic suicide, from insufficient regulation; and fatalistic suicide, from excessive regulation.

What the study was for

Durkheim chose the subject deliberately, and understanding why is half the answer.

It is the hardest possible case for sociology. If any act is individual, private and psychological, this is it. Demonstrating that its rate is socially determined therefore proves the discipline's central claim, that there are social facts which cannot be reduced to facts about individuals.

It is the method that carries the argument. He used official statistics, which existed for many European countries; he compared rates across countries, religions, marital statuses, occupations, ages and periods; and he eliminated the non-social explanations one by one before advancing his own. That procedure, elimination followed by covariation, is the comparative method described in [Types of Methodology] as sociology's substitute for the experiment.

The explanations he eliminated

He tested and rejected, in turn: mental illness, on the ground that the distributions did not match, since the rates by sex and by religion ran opposite to the distributions of the conditions then recognised; race and heredity, since rates varied within the same populations and changed over time; climate and cosmic factors, which do not vary as the rates do; and imitation, which might explain a local cluster and cannot explain a stable national rate.

The nineteenth century categories he used for these explanations are dated, and the argument's form is what survives: a proposed cause must vary as the effect varies, and each of these did not.

The individual and the rate

The distinction that makes the whole study intelligible and which students most often miss.

Durkheim is not explaining why a particular person takes their life. That is a question for psychology and for the person's own history. He is explaining why the rate differs between groups and stays stable within them, which no fact about any individual can do.

The illustration he gives is that a society's rate remains nearly constant from year to year although the individuals are different people with different circumstances. Something is producing that regularity, and it is not in any of them.