I. Durkheim on Suicide (1897)

          A. Non-psychological explanation (purely sociological) of what appears to be an intensely personal act

          B. Suicide rates vary by type of social structure (explaining social facts using social facts)

          C. Moral Regulation & Social Integration

                   1. A society must exert control over human nature

                   2. believed our desires/aspirations are limitless

II. Three types of social and moral organization (variations in moral regulation and social integration) & three corresponding forms of suicide

A. Egoistic Suicide (weak regulation and integration)

1. Protestantism fosters strong individualism, separates personal mortality from the "collective                                     conscience"

          a. people are responsible for their own actions

b. a stress upon the individual's direct relationship with God

c. emphasis upon individual reason as superior to and often pitted against the group

2. in bad times, the person has nowhere to turn for support

a. norms encouraging the individual's separation from           collective support and standards

b. increased the probability of suicide

B. Altruistic Suicide (opposite extreme: excessively strong societal control over the individual [maximum             regulation and integration])

1. societies in which there is virtually no room for individual identity

a. the self almost totally defined by and incorporated into the collectivity

2. the individual lives and dies for the group

C. Anomic Suicide  (zero regulation/integration)

1. the collective conscience no longer sets limits upon individual aspiration

          a. or, when social conditions change quickly and radically

2. people confused, miserable, set adrift

          a. economic crises, for example
                   D. Also Fatalistic Suicide – Durkheim didn't really develop this theme much

a. born of hopelessness of, e.g. , a slave existence
                   E. Durkheim feared that modernization had put many societies in a permanent state of anomie

1. industrial society and the power of economic forces  

a. the ever-increasing division of labor, and so on
                                      b. the separation of home and workplace

c. weakening ties of the family

d. the destruction of the guild system

e. weakened mediating institutions
                             2. left the individual with no set of social institutions capable of  clearly passing on normative and                             moral guidelines

 

         Or    

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