Suicide and Durkheim
Suicide is perhaps the most personal action an individual can take upon oneself and yet it has a profound social impact. Perhaps this is because social relationships play such an important role in its causation. It is also, perhaps the least understood crime, or act, due to the fact that obviously, the dead can’t speak. Emile Durkheim was instrumental in bringing a new understanding of suicide, when in a sociological study he conceived his theory of suicide, and it’s relationship with society. Perhaps put more accurately, his theory was about society, and its relationship with suicide. For Durkheim, suicide was a symptom of a wider social disease (Stengel, 1964). To cure it, society had to be reformed. Emile Durkheim was first and foremost a sociologist, so his studies are sociological in nature. His main principle was that social facts such as suicide must be studied as realities external to the individual. Suicide, although apparently a highly personal act, was explicable only by the state of the society to which the individual belonged (Stengel, 1964:48). He argued that every society has a “public conscience” that constrains and impresses certain ideas that exist independent of the individual, but is “endowed with coercive
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Approximate Word count = 1947
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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