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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.
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