Durkheim and suicide
Advocating for social science and methodological rigor
Emile Durkheim was one of the first proponents of a rigorous social science, of a theoretical orientation that looked for the explanation of human behavior in social phenomena. His major works were written in the last part of the 19th century (anthropologists were also actively studying societies and cultures, but primarily in places that had experienced little or no industrialization). At the time Durkheim (born and raised in France) lived and wrote, suicide was seen largely as an individual act reflecting mental illness. Durkheim believed that there was more to it than a person’s mental illness, that social forces external to the individual increased the likelihood that members of certain social groups or categories were more likely to take their own lives. In fact, different societies might exhibit different suicide rates, and these would be persistent over time, such that it would be clear there was something going on beyond the individual’s actions. This was provocative for the time–that humans weren’t in complete control of their actions, that there were ‘social’ influences as well, and that suicide rates could potentially be predicted, or at least explained, by looking at broader social factors that might be unique to a society. In addition, Durkheim set out to test his ideas using his own intuition, and hypotheses that could be tested and results borne out empirically. A quantitative method, if you will.
His research on suicide should be placed in an historical context. Vast changes were occurring across societies during industrialization. People were leaving the countryside, because of various ‘push’ (lack of opportunity on increasingly private farms) and ‘pull’ (factory jobs in cities) factors. They were leaving what was familiar and resettling in cities with other people, from other areas, with other cultures, dialects, even languages. Durkheim also observed the military, and the effect that the regimentation of military institutions could have on soldiers. He sought to discover whether suicide rates were increasing, and what kinds of factors–especially social–might help explain such an increase.
For starters, he needed to decide what constituted suicide. He was not naïve about the complex factors that might lead a person to take his/her life. Did a person do so knowingly, and with intent, or through some sort of delusion? Would the death of a parent or a soldier sacrificing his/her own life count? And speaking of ‘counting,’ how to handle those potential causes not easily attributable (how to measure ‘intent’ for instance)? Durkheim understood the imperfect nature of such a proposition, but also the need to have some definition, hence: … “the term 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” (p 44). What about someone going over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Is that sufficiently irrational to count? But you can understand Durkheim’s concern that he had to define as precisely as possible what he was attempting to measure.
Types of suicide identified by Durkheim:
- egoistic (lack of social integration, where ‘individualism’ prevails and familiar and familial bonds are weakened)
- altruistic (too much social integration—soldiers, grieving widows, when the individual relents in the face of strong social pressure)
- anomic (social regulation—institutional inability to provide what individuals need, often during periods of rapid social and/or economic change)
- fatalistic (hopeless situations)
But first, some context
Suicide as a phenomenon needs to be understood within the broader context of Durkheim’s work and thinking. The historical process that witnessed a transition from most people living in relatively undifferentiated societies–with respect to how households provided for their subsistence–characterized by ‘mechanical solidarity‘, to industrializing societies with complex economies, divisions of labor, and ‘organic solidarity.’ It represents a transition in which the individual may find less social mooring in tradition and traditional institutions–where everyone basically did similar things (growing or raising food, mostly), and in so doing shared a similar set of norms and values (what Durkheim referred to as ‘collective conscience‘). This was ‘collective’ in nature because no one person possessed all these, but they were all part of the repository contained within the collective, or society. They shared circumstances and understandings of the world. Religion was often the source of the values underlying this collective conscience. Self-expression, or ‘free spirits’ probably had little room to maneuver in such a setting, if the idea of a ‘free spirit’ even existed.
Loosen collective consciousness and you may get . . . anomie
Yet while traditional social institutions could be oppressive (think about the social control of a traditional society, the lack of emphasis on the individual and freedom of thought), the sense of liberation that could come with a lifting of the collective conscience must be tempered with the potential to be separated from the familiar, a feeling of ‘rootlessness’ referred to by Durkheim as anomie. If you’ve ever left your home to travel for an extended period in other, unfamiliar cultures, you may have a sense of ‘culture shock,’ that sensation that you no longer know what to expect, things just seem a little ‘off,’ people are speaking another language! If that were a more permanent feeling, you might gain a sense of anomie, but even then, you would adjust to a new culture. What if the ‘new culture’ was new as well to most of the people around you? And your reactions were rooted in the familiarities of your own upbringing and previous cultural moorings?
However, Durkheim saw this transition as functional for the emerging society. The glue or ‘solidarity’ was still work in a sense, but this time instead of something most people had in common, it was dissimilar work, or the division of labor, that held things together. Why? No longer at this point can everyone grow their own food. People migrate to the cities in search of employment, and we begin to see the transition to a cash economy, where people work and use their money to buy the food and other essentials they need (in principle, anyway). Neither is there enough land for everyone to grow their own food.
A division of labor allows for the production and consumption of a variety of goods and services, in an increasingly complex and differentiated economic system. Maybe it helps if you think of the difference between the human body, which is by definition ‘organic,’ but also incredibly complex. Yet in most cases it serves us humans pretty well, even if we don’t quite understand its complexity. The whole seems greater than the sum of its parts. Contrast that with a robot, with a few moving parts, but simpler at least when it comes to the narrow variation in how most people spend their working lives. It appears more ‘mechanical’ in that sense (or at least did to Durkheim). Now socially and culturally, there is a set of shared beliefs that is probably much more well-defined and bounded than in industrializing society. But to refer to mechanical solidarity as more simplistic would be to underestimate the sophistication of the non-material aspects of traditional culture, the often complex ways in which people view the world, their kin, outsiders, and how this knowledge and wisdom is transmitted from one generation to the next.
Hence Durkheim’s studies of suicide have much to do with his broader theories about social changes that were transforming the relationship of the individual to their society. The ‘solidarity’ or the glue holding things together was less the familiarity of culture, shared work and tradition, and more the impersonal forces of a diversifying industrial economy and work life that gave individuals more options perhaps than farming or husbandry, more freedom of choice about how to spend their productive lives, but was more of an individual, rather than a social or collective enterprise. You were on your own much more than in the past. And if you didn’t ‘succeed’, there was no well-developed social system, based on reciprocal relations, to take you in. And not everyone would experience this new ‘freedom’ as expanded choice. The poor were likely consigned to work in factories, their children as well, for meager wages, and no land or ability to grow their own food. That’s an aspect of these changes on which Karl Marx set his analytical sights. Weber would take on the organizational elements of the historical transformation (e.g., what would an universal social support system look like in a complex society?). Durkheim was more interested in the nature of the ‘glue’ that held together a different kind of society, in dynamic flux.
What causes differences in suicide rates?
Back to Durkheim’s focus on suicide, which he saw as on the rise, and as a by-product of this transition from one kind of society to another. He started with some simple hypotheses, based on his deeper theoretical claims that the historical transformation occurring was a transition from societies based on mechanical solidarity to one based on organic solidarity. Meaning the ‘glue’ holding together the society was different, in one case collective conscience (mechanical), and the other–where there was no real shared collective conscience–a division of labor (organic). Durkheim assumed that social groups that were more ‘individualistic’–where people had more freedom to act and think differently–were likely to be associated with higher suicide rates. He tested religion, in particular Protestant religions that he suspected were more individualistic than either Catholicism or Judaism and their members more prone to suicide. He tested marital status–single vs married-and guess what he hypothesized? He tested occupations, etc. So Durkheim would collect data and run tests. This was not as straightforward then as it might sound today. He relied on local certificates of death in many cases, and because some religions looked upon suicide as a source of family shame (or even a cause for damnation in the case of the Catholic Church), there was also the possibility that some other cause might have been officially listed. Durkheim would also conduct multiple tests, for instance to see if his findings in France on differences between Catholicism and Protestantism were similar in Germany.
We’ll discuss Durkheim’s method further in a separate page.
Durkheim’s story of change
If we think of theory in this case as a story, Durkheim’s story is compelling. We have sweeping historical change. People’s lived experiences, once (in France anyway) shared and familiar, according to Durkheim based on work and a shared way of life, begin to diverge as the basis of the economic system changes, and fewer people are left to grow the food for themselves and the others who no longer grow their own food, but make other contributions to the economy: commerce and trade, metallurgy, ceramics, textiles, construction, property, law, medicine, education, politics, transportation, millwork, lots of ‘dirty work’ like cleaning out open sewers, sweeping chimneys, and yes, there would still be a need for farming and animal husbandry. In other words, the ‘glue’ may still be work, but now the work varies, based on division of labor. And suddenly that shared experience begins to diminish, people interact more frequently with others they don’t know, and with whom they may have little in common.
Durkheim realized these sweeping historical changes were not all positive and functional for all in society, and his theory of suicide is one effort to try to explain, methodically, a ‘side effect’ of, or response to, this historical transition–anomie. If I gave you an assignment–let’s say to consider ‘organic solidarity’ as a new pharmaceutical drug, and your job was to market it, you would talk about the merits of moving from the oppression of traditional society to shiny, new city life! And at the end of the commercial, you would insert the disclaimer about side effects, which would include that feeling of disorientation, anomie. Again, we’re talking about probability here, so not everyone would experience anomie. But if you have other risk factors (in Durkheim’s day)–participation in a Protestant faith, no spouse, no children, a professional occupation–you might want to consider whether to step back and re-think this thing.
Ask your doctor if Division of Labor might be right for you.
But of course that’s not how social change happens. It is not by design. There may be people with some influence over it, who see opportunities, but no one was thinking of orchestrating a wholesale change in how society organized itself. More generally, those ‘variables’ attempting to explain suicide–and they’re variables because they vary (Protestantism vs Catholicism vs Judaism, for instance, or higher versus lower rates of suicide)? Underlying them is this transition from a more collectively-lived to a more individualistic, mass society, one that ‘works’ because different people fulfill different economic functions, all contributing to the whole in some way. And in an increasingly complex world, only the most naïve observer would think human behavior, even something more narrowly focused like suicide, explainable with one variable (mental illness, according to psychologists of the day). Durkheim knew better, and he was determined to create a discipline that sought explanations in the social milieu.
Structure and agency. And that’s the major historical trend underlying much of Durkheim’s theorizing, and his efforts to show the relationship between structure and agency, between individuals and the so-called ‘social facts’ that shape their work, their behaviors, their beliefs, their life chances.
Is social change driven by functional adaptation, or conflict?
Durkheim believes this historical change occurring during the age of industrialization is more a functional transition. In other words, organic solidarity is the glue holding together a new kind of society, and that’s a good thing, because without it, the side effects might be more than just side effects. Organic solidarity functions to serve a changing society’s needs.
As we’ll read, Karl Marx had a different view of the historical changes afoot in the 19th Century. He contended that though historical change was necessary to transition from a capitalist system of production and governance to communism, the changes for the most part were highly exploitative and indicative of a conflict between the class that owned the wealth, and the much larger class that worked for the owners. Such conflict tended to benefit the minority, capitalist (and ruling) class. Those who performed most of the labor–growing food, producing goods, cleaning out open sewers or chimneys–were being taken advantage of but so removed from their shared interests in better, more equitable lives that they rarely thought about organizing to change things.
Max Weber was more agnostic. While Durkheim was promoting the discipline of Sociology as a way to understand human behavior and institutions and change, and Marx was suggesting that class conflict and exploitation would ultimately end with workers governing themselves and sharing in a more just ownership of a society’s wealth, Weber thought that rationalization emerged as a fundamental process and principle of organization in European societies. Societies changed, he thought, because they were confronted with problems, like increasing size and complexity, that were ill-suited to traditional forms of social organization (hence Weber identified the emergence of ‘bureaucratic’ organization). But he was not naïve. He understood that power vested in some organizational type–where decisions were made from the top and filtered down–was not likely to benefit all who fell under its sphere of influence equally. In other words, it was functional, but not for everyone, equally.
Three grand theories of sweeping changes occurring in 19th Century Europe, but like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each was drawing conclusions based on different sets of observations, and different lenses to observe them. They missed much, but their theorizing also yielded brilliant insights. As early social observers, we might have expected them to notice that the burgeoning field seemed populated with mostly white, educated men. The fact that perspective did not inform their work may speak to the power of being in the dominant majority group, and the sense that reality experienced by this group is universal.
Or it’s simply a serious blind spot. In any case, the story continues . . .
