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Émile Durkheim · 1897
Durkheim took the most private act imaginable and proved it was social — that suicide rates hold steady and vary by group in ways no individual psychology can explain, which means the cause must lie not in the despairing person but in the society around them.
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What this book knows
Suicide rates are social facts shaped by integration and regulation, not individual psychology — society itself kills.
belonging
Society is also a power controlling them. There is a relation between the way this regulative action is performed and the social suicide-rate.
VLA-F2C4804B-RC-205Men would never consent to restrict their desires if they felt justified in passing the assigned limit — they must receive it from an authority they respect.
VLA-F2C4804B-RC-212faith-and-doubt
The more the believer doubts, the less he feels himself a real participant in the religious faith — the more he becomes a mystery to himself.
VLA-F2C4804B-RC-173Everywhere without exception, Protestants show far more suicides than the followers of other confessions — the difference varies up to 300 per cent.
VLA-F2C4804B-RC-125Man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning.
VLA-F2C4804B-RC-137self-and-identity
Suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.
VLA-F2C4804B-RC-029Illuminates
Editor’s framing
Published in 1897, Suicide is one of the founding demonstrations of sociology as a discipline: the argument that there are social facts, real and measurable, that exist above the individuals who compose them. Durkheim's method was to compare rates across groups — Protestants against Catholics, the married against the single, soldiers against civilians — and to find patterns too stable to be accidents of individual temperament. Attend to the two forces he isolates: integration, how tightly a person is bound to others, and regulation, how firmly society orders their desires; suicide rises when either is too weak or too strong. His finding that the believer who doubts becomes a stranger to his own faith — and that loosened religious community, not doctrine, drives the Protestant rate — is why Vela holds this on the religion axis as much as the sociological one. The specific figures are nineteenth-century and have been revised; the structural insight, that belonging itself is protective, has not.
Featured passage
Wurttemberg(1873- 76) 19012060 Durkheim Wurttemberg(1881- 90) 170119142Id. Thus, everywhere without exception, Protestants show far more suicides than the followers of other confessions. The difference varies between a minimum of 20 to 30 per cent and a maximum of 300 per cent. It is useless to invoke with Mayr against such a unanimous agreement of facts, the isolated case of Norway and Sweden which, though Protestant, have only an average number of suicides. First, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, these international comparisons are not significant unless bearing on a considerable number of countries, and even in this case are not conclusive. There are sufficiently great differences between the peoples of the Scandinavian peninsula and those of Central Europe for it to be reasonable that Protestantism does not produce exactly the same effects on both. But furthermore, if the suicide-rate is not in itself very high in these two countries, it seems relatively so if one considers their modest rank among the civilized peoples of Europe. There is no reason to suppose that they have reached an intellectual level above Italy, to say the least, yet self-destruction occurs from twice to three times as often (90 to 100 suicides per million inhabitants as against 40). May Protestantism not be the cause of this relatively higher figure? Thus the fact not only does not tell against the law just established on the basis of so many observations, but rather tends to confirm it. The aptitude of Jews for suicide is always less than that of Protestants; in a very general way it is also, though to a lesser degree, lower than that of Catholics. Occasionally however, the latter relation is reversed; such cases occur especially in recent times. Up to the middle of the century, Jews killed themselves less frequently than Catholics in all countries but Bavaria; only towards 1870 do they begin to lose their ancient immunity. They still very rarely greatly exceed the rate for Catholics. Besides, it must be remembered that Jews live more exclusively than other confessional groups in cities and are in intellectual occupations. On this account they are more inclined to suicide than the members of other confessions, for reasons other than their religion. If therefore the rate for Judaism is so low, in spite of this aggravating circumstance, it may be assumed that other things being equal, their religion has the fewest suicides of all. These facts established, what is their explanation?
Wurttemberg(1873- 76) 19012060 Durkheim Wurttemberg(1881- 90) 170119142Id.
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