Emil Durkheim. Suicide.  Study questions

1. Introduction:

1. Definition of suicide

2. What Durkheim means by the statement that “Suicide is <...> merely exaggerated form of common practice”? P. 45

3. Defining the object of sociological investigation: suicide rates and the behavior of individual

4. Can suicide rates be explained by behavior of individuals?

5. Statistical variation of suicide rates. What does Durkheim mean by the statement that “At each moment of its history, therefore, society has a definite aptitude for suicide” p. 48

2. Suicide and Insanity (organic - psychic predispositions)

1. Is suicide a disease, i.e. a form of mental insanity? 

2. Insanity, gender and suicide

3. Insanity, age and suicide

4. Insanity and suicide

5. Alcoholism and insanity

Chapter 4. Altruistic Suicide.  

1. Was there a phenomenon of suicide in the lower (traditional) societies? Define its character.

2. What were the causes of the suicide in the “lower” societies? How suicide in the “lower” societies is related to the societal integration? Why it is called an “altruistic” suicide?

3. What is the relationship between individualism and collectivism in the “lower” societies?

4. What is obligatory altruistic suicide, optional altruistic suicide and acute altruistic suicide? What factor explains variation in these subtypes of the altruistic suicide?

Altruistic suicide in contemporary societies: suicide in the army

1. How suicides in military compare with suicides among civilian population?

2. Are suicides in military accounted for by alcoholism?

3. Disgust for the service?

4. Strictness of discipline?

5. What does Durkheim mean by the statement that “Of all elements constituting our modern societies, the army, indeed, most recalls the structure of lower societies” p. 234

6. What does Durkheim mean by the statement “that the profession of a soldier develops a moral constitution powerfully predisposing man too make away with himself” p. 239

7. Summary: Altruistic suicide: is it determined by individual/psychological or social factors? What social factors explain it?

Chapter V. Anomic suicide.

1. How does suicide relates to increase or decease in economic prosperity of a society? Is the economic welfare or its change (increase or decease) that influences suicide rates?

2. Why does according to Durkheim conti nuous and ever growing prosperity does not produce happiness? Why, as he argues, that endless increase in material well-being on the contrary, causes misery and suicide?

3. How and when we reach conditions leading to happiness?

4. What is anomie and what are the conditions that produce it?

Summary: The Social Element of Suicide

1. Why the last part of the book is called "the social element of suicide"? What are individual explanations of suicide and why they are not sufficient to explain suicide rates?

2. Why suicide rates cannot be explained by describing an "average type" of an individual prevalent in a society (i.e., "French" or "American") ?

3. What is, according to Durkheim, the cause of suicide rates?

4. Explain why "although only a few years suffice to change completely the personnel of the army, the rate of suicides varies only very slowly in a given nation" (p.307)?

5. Why suicide rates are called by Durkheim "moral statistics" (p. 308)?

6. Why does Durkheim argue that "collective tendencies have an existence of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces" (p. 309)?