Emile Durkheim's Suicide Theory - in Tamil | Let's Learn Sociology By Prof. S. Madhan Kumar

Hi I am Prof. S. Madhan Kumar. In this video, I will be explaining Emile Durkheim's Suicide Theory.

David Émile Durkheim (15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, alongside Max Weber and Karl Marx.

In the book Suicide (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. Overall, Durkheim treated suicide as a social fact, explaining variations in its rate on a macro level, considering society-scale phenomena such as lack of connections between people (group attachment) and lack of regulations of behavior, rather than individuals' feelings and motivations.

Durkheim believed there was more to suicide than extremely personal individual life circumstances: for example, a loss of a job, divorce, or bankruptcy. Instead, he took suicide and explained it as a social fact instead of a result of one's circumstances. Durkheim believed that suicide was an instance of social deviance. Social deviance is any transgression of socially established norms.

He created a normative theory of suicide focusing on the conditions of group life. Proposing four different types of suicide, which include egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic, Durkheim began his theory by plotting social regulation on the x-axis of his chart, and social integration on the y-axis:

Egoistic suicide corresponds to a low level of social integration. When one is not well integrated into a social group it can lead to a feeling that they have not made a difference in anyone's life.

Altruistic suicide corresponds to too much social integration. This occurs when a group dominates the life of an individual to a degree where they feel meaningless to society.

Anomic suicide occurs when one has an insufficient amount of social regulation. This stems from the sociological term anomie, meaning a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises from the inability to reasonably expect life to be predictable.

Fatalistic suicide results from too much social regulation. An example of this would be when one follows the same routine day after day. This leads to a belief that there is nothing good to look forward to. Durkheim suggested this was the most popular form of suicide for prisoners.

This study has been extensively discussed by later scholars and several major criticisms have emerged. First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli, who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers found that the Protestant-Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-speaking Europe and thus may have always been the spurious reflection of other factors. Durkheim's study of suicide has been criticized as an example of the logical error termed the ecological fallacy. However, diverging views have contested whether Durkheim's work really contained an ecological fallacy. More recent authors such as Berk (2006) have also questioned the micro-macro relations underlying Durkheim's work. Some, such as Inkeles (1959), Johnson (1965), and Gibbs (1968), have claimed that Durkheim's only intent was to explain suicide sociologically within a holistic perspective, emphasizing that "he intended his theory to explain variation among social environments in the incidence of suicide, not the suicides of particular individuals."

Despite its limitations, Durkheim's work on suicide has influenced proponents of control theory and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study. The book pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy.

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