Introduction – Why this is important and what to look for

When reading an important but difficult work like Suicide, it is often useful to spend the most time reading the introduction. Here, Durkheim, always very organized, sets forth the problem and the methods he will use to address the problem. As always with Durkheim, he first sets out a definition of any key concepts – here, “suicide.”  Before reading the Introduction passage, you may want to contemplate for yourself what a useful definition of this term would be.  After the introduction, we move to some key passages in Book 2, where Durkheim sets forth both the method and results of his study of suicide.  This book is crucial for understanding Durkheim’s overall theory on society and its collective problems.  

Introduction

One hears the word suicide used many times in the course of conversation, so one could believe that everyone knows what it means and that defining it would be unnecessary.  But in reality, the usual words used, like the concepts they express, are always ambiguous and the researcher who uses the everyday language without further elaboration exposes herself to grave confusion.   Not only is the understanding of the term so vaguely defined that it changes from one circumstance to another, but it also results in categories of very different things being called the same thing or else things that are quite the same being called by different names.  One can only explain what can be compared.  A scientific investigation can only be successful if it deals with comparable facts.  The more comparable facts, the likelier the success of analysis. The scientist cannot use the groups of facts as categorized in everyday speech, however. She must construct the groups that she wishes to study, in order to ensure the homogeneity and specificity of what she is comparing.

Our first task then is to determine the order of things we propose to study under the name of ‘Suicide.” …

We arrive at our first formula: “Suicide is any death which results directly or indirectly from an act (negative or positive) of the victim himself.”

But this definition is incomplete. [What about the confused man who jumps out of a window, thinking it is level with the ground?]  Should we say that suicide is only an act resulting in death when the victim has that result in mind? [But how can we ever get into another’s mind this way and know if he or she intended to die?]  Intention is a thing too intimate to be grasped by an outsider…how many times have we ourselves mistaken the motives of our own acts!  For example, when we explain what we do in terms of generous intentions or elevated considerations when we are really inspirited by petty jealousies or blind habit.

[After much more back and forth, we are led to the following:]

Suicide is any death which results directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act by the victim and which the victim should know will produce such a result.

But is the thing we have so defined of interest to the sociologist?  Because suicide is an act of the individual that affects the individual as such, it appears to depend exclusively on individual factors and to be more psychological than sociological.

We can, in fact, look at this from a different perspective.  Instead of seeing particular events, isolated from one another, each suicide the result of its own individual factors, we can consider all the suicides committed in a given society over a given period of time.  By doing so, we actually arrive at something that constitutes a new fact – not simply a sum of many parts, but a wholly new social fact to be observed and analyzed.

Each society, at each moment of its history, has a particular aptitude towards suicide.  We can measure the relative intensity of this aptitude by figuring the total number of voluntary deaths in the population of every age and sex.  We call the resulting figure the rate of mortality-suicide for that particular society.

Our intention is not to provide a complete inventory of all the possible conditions that can give rise to particular suicides, but to investigate what lies behind the social rate of suicide.  There are surely many individual conditions that are not general enough to affect the social rate.  These individual conditions may lead this or that isolated individual to commit suicide regardless of whether the society has a strong or weak tendency towards suicide.  Those conditions concern the psychologist, not the sociologist.   What the sociologist investigates are those causes which work not on isolated individuals, but on the group.  Of all possible causes of suicide, only those which have an effect on the whole of society are of interest to us.  The suicide rate is the product of these factors, which is why we must consider them.

That is the aim of the present work, which consists of three parts.

FIRST, the phenomenon we are trying to explain must result from extra-social causes, generally speaking, or specifically social ones.  In the first section we ask what is the influence of the former, and see that it is almost nothing, or very little.

SECOND, we determine the nature of the social causes, the way they produce their effects, and the relationship with the individual states that accompany the different kinds of suicide.

THIRD, we will be able to state with more clarity of what consists the social element of suicide, that is to say, the collective tendency of which we have spoken, how it is connected to other social facts and the means by which it is possible to act upon it.