The life and works of Emile Durkheim

Book Review

Tutor: Anne Beaumont

Zi-Han Su

This book is written by Dr Lukes, he in this book analyses Durkheim’s life, ideas and theories. Dr Steven Lukes is a fellow and tutor in Sociology and Politics at Balliol College, Oxford.

Dr Lukes in the introduction gives us an understanding of Durkheim’s ideas and to form critical judgements about their value. He evaluates how Durkheim saw the world, how his ideas relate to each other and how they developed in time. On the other hand the book seeks the knowledge on how valuable and valid these ideas are, what are the explanations behind his findings and how they stand up in modern day present value.

This essentially biographical book of Durkheim allows one to give full weight to the historical context of his ideas, the influences that helped to mould them and the criticisms to which they were subjected.

The introduction expands to the many faces (sides) of Durkheim. There is the sociologist Durkheim, the Durkheim of anomie theory and of suicide studies, the criminologists’ Durkheim and the social psychologists Durkheim. Lukes describes him in the introduction as a “materialist and a idealist, a positivist and a metaphysician, a rationalist and an irrationalist, a dogmatic atheist and a mystic… a conservative and a socialist” (cited in Lukes 1977)

The introduction of this book finishes with Durkheim’s key concepts (class consciousness, division of labour, conscious collective, representation collectives…)

Lukes then introduces us with Durkheim’s background, his childhood. David Emile Durkheim was born on 15 April 1858 at Epinal, the capital town of Vosges, in Lorraine. His father Moise Durkheim was a rabbi of Epinal since 1830. His mother, Melanie grew up in a close-knit orthodox Jewish family. Durkheim however like his father, grandfather, great grandfather… was destined for rabbinate. The family income was very modest. There were four children in the family: his brother Felix, 2 sisters Rosine and Celine, Durkheim was the youngest.

Durkheim went to the College d’Epinal where he was an outstanding pupil, skipping two classes and gaining baccalaureates with ease (1894). It was during this period where his father became ill. Durkheim hence had to take on the responsibility of acting in effect as the head of the family. Having little money, it was only after difficult financial negotiations that he was admitted to the institution of Jauffret. The following chapters guide us through Durkheims early years… The Ecole normale Superieure, The new science of Sociology… Durkheim at Bordeaux.

Lukes then discusses Durkheim’s major work on Suicide.Durkheim ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

Lukes then discusses Durkheim’s major work on Suicide.Durkheim first proposes us with the definition of suicide: "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 wil produce this result" (1982, p. 110 [excerpt from Suicide]). Durkheim used this definition to separate true suicides from accidental deaths. He then collected several European nations' suicide rate statistics, which proved to be relatively constant among those nations and among smaller demographics within those nations. Thus, a collective tendency towards suicide was discovered.

He gives us an insight on why Durkheim was so interested in the study of suicide. He

offers us with four reasons.

The first one possibly due to the suicide of his very close friend at the Ecole, Victor Hommay, which affected him quite deeply and may well have influenced his interest in this subject. Secondly, suicide having originally being treated largely as a moral problem in the 18th century came to be regarded as largely a social problem requiring explanation.

Thirdly, Durkheim claimed that suicide represents social realism, proving that existence of ‘realities external to the individual’. Fourthly Durkheim suggested that the study of suicide offered a means of approaching and evaluating the growing social problem of suicide in the 19th century.

Durkheim was able to demonstrate that social forces figure in the apparently isolated act of self-destruction. Statistics clearly showed that some categories of people were more likely than others to choose to take their own lives.

Men, Protestants, wealthy people, unmarried people have much higher suicidal rates than women, Roman Catholics, Jews, poor and married people.

Males are more autonomic, this means that they are more socially isolated and individualistic hence are more likely to commit suicide. The wealthy clearly also have much more freedom of action than the poor but also at the cost of a higher suicide rate. Single people are normally with weaker social ties than married people hence are also at a greater risk of suicide. Durkheim hence introduces us with four main categories of suicide.

Egoisitic suicide resulted from too little social integration. Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased basis. An example Durkheim discovered was that of unmarried people, particularly males, who, with less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals, committed suicide at higher rates than unmarried people.

The second type, Altruistic suicide, was a result of too much integration. It occurred at the opposite end of the integration scale as egoistic suicide. Self sacrifice was the defining trait, where individuals were so integrated into social groups that they lost sight of their individuality and became willing to sacrifice themselves to the group's interests, even if that sacrifice was their own life. The most common cases of altruistic suicide occurred among members of the military.

On the second scale, that of moral regulation, lies the other two forms of suicide, the first of which is Anomic suicide, located on the low end. Anomic suicide was of particular interest to Durkheim, for he divided it into four categories: acute and chronic economic anomie, and acute and chronic domestic anomie. Each involved an imbalance of means and needs, where means were unable to fulfill needs.

Each category of anomic suicide can be described briefly as follows:

Acute ecomomic anomie: sporadic decreases in the ability of traditional institutions (such as religion, guilds, pre-industrial social systems, etc.) to regulate and fulfill social needs.

Chronic economic anomie: long term dimunition of social regulation. Durkheim identified this type with the ongoing industrial revolution, which eroded traditional social regulators and often failed to replace them. Industrial goals of wealth and property were insufficient in providing happiness, as was demonstrated by higher suicide rates among the wealthy than among the poor.

Acute domestic anomie: sudden changes on the microsocial level resulted in an inability to adapt and therefore higher suicide rates. Widowhood is a prime example of this type of anomie.

Chronic domestic anomie: referred to the way marriage as an institution regulated the sexual and behavioral means-needs balance among men and women. Marriage provided different regulations for each, however. Bachelors tended to commit suicide at higher rates than married men because of a lack of regulation and established goals and expectations. On the other hand, marriage has traditionally served to overregulate the lives of women by further restricting their already limited opportunities and goals. Unmarried women, therefore, do not experience chronic domestic anomie nearly as often as do unmarried men.

The final type of suicide is Fatalistic suicide, "at the high extreme of the regulation continuum" (1982, p. 113). This type Durkheim only briefly describes, seeing it as a rare phenomena in the real world. Examples include those with overregulated, unrewarding lives such as slaves, childless married women, and young husbands. Durkheim never specifies why this type is generally unimportant in his study.

Durkheim recognised that society exists beyond us. Society is more than the individuals who compose it. Society has life of its own that stretches beyond our own personal experience, because society looms larger than individuals, it has the power to shape our thoughts and actions, it exists as a complex organism rooted in our collective life.

This book holds more than merely historical interest. This is a comprehensively detailed book of Durkheim’s life and work. Although this book is a bit too complexed for a beginner (1st year undergraduate) studying sociology, however for a sociologists or anyone who is more advanced than me will fully appreciate this piece of biographical book of the life and works of Emile Durkheim.