emile durkheim, suicide

editor's introduction (13-)

(13): "a short appraisal is still possible because throughout Durkheim's work on each and all of these topics subsidiary to suicide, is the basic theme that suicide which appears to be a phenomenon relating to the individual is actually explicable aetiologically with reference to the social structure and its ramifying functions."

(14): "it is these social concomitants of suicide which for Durkheim will serve to place any individual suicide in its proper aetiological setting."

(14): egoistic suicide--"which results from lack of integration of the individual into society."

(15): altruistic suicide--which "results from the individual's taking his own life because of higher commandments."

(15): anomic suicide--"when this regulation of the individual is upset so that his horizon is broadened beyond what he can endure, or contrariwise contracted unduly..."

(16): the "collective inclination [to suicide] conforms, Durkheim believes, to his definition of a social fact... that is, this inclination is a reality in itself, exterior to the individual and exercising a coercive effect upon him."

(17): "for durkheim all ameliorative measures must go to the question of social structure. egoistic suicide can be reduced by reintegrating the individual into group-life, giving him strong allegiances through a strengthened collective conscience."

preface

(37-38): "sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual. there is no principle for which we have received more criticism; but none is more fundamental."

(38): "it is not realized that there can be no sociology unless societies exist, and that societies cannot exist if there are only individuals."

book two: social causes and social types

chapter one, how to determine social causes and social types (145-151)

(145): "the results of the preceding book are not wholly negative. we have in fact shown that for each social group there is a specific tendency to suicide explained neither by the organic-psyhcic constitution of individuals nor the nature of the physical environment. consequently, by elimination, it must necessarily depend upon social causes and be in itself a collective phenomenon; some of the facts examined, especially the geographic and seasonal variations of suicide, had definitely led us to this conclusion."

(146): doesn't make sense to proceed from the psychological-individual. so "let us reverse the order of study... consequently, we shall be able to determine the social types of suicide by classifying them not directly by their preliminarily described characteristics, but by the causes which produce them."

(147): "in a word, instead of being morphological, our classification will from the start be aetiological."

(148): more of the same--"if one wants to know the several tributaries of suicide as a collective phenomenon one must regard it in its collective form, that is, through statistical data, from the start."

(151): "the reasons ascribed for suicide, therefore, or those to which the suicide himself ascribes his act, are usually only apparent causes. not only are the reasons merely individual repercussions of a general state, but they express the general stats very unfaithfully, since they are identical while it is not..."

(151): his key methodological innovation--"we shall try to determine the productive causes of suicide directly, without concerning ourselves with the forms they can assume in particular individuals. disregarding the individual as such, his motives and his ideas, we shall seek directly the states of the various social environments (religious confessions, family..., etc.) in terms of which the variations of suicide occur. only then returning to the indivdiual, shall we study how these general causes become individualized..."

chapter two, egoistic suicide (152-)

(152-154): catholic vs. protestantism

(157): "the only essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the second permits free inquiry to a far greater degree than the first..."

(158): "we thus reach our first conclusion, that the proclivity of Protestantism for suicide must relate to the spirit of free inquiry that animates this religion... for the latter involves as much sorrow as happiness."

(159): catholicism, by comparison, "socializes men only by attaching them completely to an identical body of doctrine and socializes them in proportion as this body of doctrine is extensive and firm."

(160): the Jewish community, too, is "a small, compact, and coherent society with a strong feeling of self-consciousness and unity..."

(160-161): england vs. germany

(162): "... the progressive weakening of collective and customary prejudices produces a trend to suicide..."

(163-164): tied to individual learning, pursuit of knowledge? "does the craving for knowledge to the degree that it corresponds to a weakening of common faith really develop as does suicide?... the law can not only be verified by comparison of one faith with the other but also be observed within each religious confession..."

(167-168): hmm -- "the jew... seeks to learn, not in order to replace his collective prejudices by reflective thought, but merely to be better armed for the struggle..." [i..e, this is why they do not commit suicide in high numbers, despite being well-educated--a little bit of twisting/contorting to make the argument fit, but okay]

(168): important, two important conclusions

1. "first, we see why as a rule suicide increases with knowledge... man seeks to learn and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. it is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized..."
   
2. "... if religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis; but because it is a society..."
   

(169): "far from knoweldge being the source of the evil, it is its remedy, the only remedy we have..." [an interesting paragraph, here, in general--"let those who view anxiously and sadly the ruins of ancient beliefs... not ascribe to science an evil it has not caused but rather which it tries to cure!"]

chapter three, egoistic suicide con't (171-

(171): "if religion preserves men from suicide only because and in so far as it is a societ, other societies probably have the same effect. from this point of view, let us consider the family and political society..."

(198): "from this table and the preceding remarks it appears that marriage has indeed a preservative effect of its own againt suicide. but it is very limited and also benefits onesex only... the fact remains that the family is the essential factor in the immunity of married persons... reserving the special effect of marriage for later study, we shall say that domestic society, like religious society, is a powerful counteragent against suicide."

(202): "our previous conclusion may thus be completed to read: just as the family is a powerful safeguard against suicide, so the more strongly it is constituted the greater its protection."

(203): "great political upheavals are sometimes said to increase the number of suicides. but morselli has conclusively shown that facts contradict this view."

(208): in sum, "we have thus successively set up three following propositions:

1. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of religious society.
   
2. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of domestic society.
   
3. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of political society.
   

(209): "the only quality satisfying this condition is that they ar all strongly integrated social groups."

(209): and thus--"the more weakened the groups to which he belongs, the less he depends on them.. if we agree to call this state egoism, in which the individual ego asserts itself to excess in the face of the social ego and at its expense, we may call egoistic the special type of suicide springing from excessive individualism."

(209): "when society is strongly integrated, it holds individuals under its control, considers them at its service, and thus forbids them to dispose wilfully of themselves. accordingly, it opposes their evading their duties to it through death. but how could society impose its supremacy upon them when they refuse to accept this subordination as legitimate?"

(210-211): "we may push back the frontier for some generations, force our name to endure for some years or centuries longer than our body; a moment too soon for most men, always comes when it will be nothing..."

(212): hmm -- the more one thinks, the less one believes. the less one believes, the more one asks "the exasperating and agonizing question: to what purpose?"

(214): even still, one's plight can never be exclusively individual -- "however individualized a man may be, there is always something collective remaining--the very depression and melancholy resulting from this same exaggerated individualism."

chapter four, altruistic suicide (217-)

(217-218): danish warriors considered it an ignominy to die in bed.

(219): though egoistic suicide was not known to ancient societies, altruistic suicide was--"when a person kills himself... not because he assumes the right to do so but, on the contrary, because it is his duty..."

(221): "we thus confront a type of suicide differing by incisive qualities from the preceding one. whereas the latter is due to excessive individuation, the former is caused by too rudimentary individuation...."

chapter five, anomic suicide (241-

(241-242): financial crisis suicides--but they don't have to do with increased hardship...


(246): an equilibrium theory of suicide--"if therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is not because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is disturbances of the collective order."

(250): equation of being docile to collective authority with "a wholesome moral constitution" -- this is, perhaps, somewhat lost in translation...

(250-251): with a different spin, what he is discussing here could quite easily be formulated as a theory of hegemony...

(251): natural ability objection to equality--borrrrrring.

(252): "man's greatest privilege is that the bond he acceptes is not physical but moral; that is, social. he is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels..."

(253): disequilibrium in event of crisis

(254): "poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraing in itself" [but this is emphatically false, insofar as poverty is the cause of many a suicide. what do we do with this?]

(254): "if anomy never appeared except, as in the above instances, in intermittent spurts and acute crisis, it might cause the social suicide rate to vary from time to time, but it would not be a regular, constant factor. in one sphere of social life, however--the sphere of trade and industry--it is actually in a chronic state."