It is therefore necessary to differentiate 'function' from 'intention'. Giddens gives the example of individuals going to church with the intention of worshipping God. The function of this action however, is to enhance social unity. The function of a social fact refers to its relationship to 'the general needs of the social organism', and Durkheim states in his first major work The Division of Labour in Society (1893), the function of repressive sanctions is to protect and preserve the values of the 'conscience collective'. This form of social life generates a property, a form of social consciousness that is totally different from individual consciousness. This common consciousness was thought by Durkheim to be the primary object of Sociological investigation.
The causal explanation of social fact s implies the identification of the laws explaining the evolution of social phenomena. Causes of the development of social form are therefore differentiated from the function that form fulfils, the explanatory account of which must eventually combine the two.
Durkheim believed in the need for empirical research and analysis in the new sociological method of which statistical correlation plays a large role in Suicide. It is important to note that Suicide was not a pioneer of sociological statistical correlation, it was the late eighteenth century moral statisticians, notably the Belgian demographer Quetelet, who inspired Durkheim. The innovation was in Durkheim's application of his conception of sociological method to the statistics in order to explain suicide.
Suicide had therefore been identified as a social fact in need of explanation in terms of other social facts. In his holistic approach, Durkheim sought to explain suicide as a social fact in terms of its social distribution, avoiding the individual explanations that might be afforded by psychologists. Suicide was to be regarded as a separate patterned phenomenon as opposed to an aggregate of individual facts.
The official statistics upon which Durkheim based his application showed that the suicide rate remained constant in any given society from year to year. This was naturally subject to short term fluctuations and an evaluation of long term trends. Durkheim saw this stability as indicative of the presence of a social fact as the individuals comprising the statistics in one year could not possibly be contributing to the statistics of the next. Marked and stable differences in suicide rates were noted between countries across Europe. For example Denmark had a suicide rate four times as high as that of England, which in turn had a suicide rate twice as high as that of Italy.
Early attempts at explaining Suicide had concentrated upon motive as a means of explanation, yet these arguments could not be applied to such a stable scenario. A clue to the answer lay in the fact that variations in the rate of suicide are found among different groups and localities in the same society. Durkheim argued that this variation was as a result of each society's 'collective disposition' to suicide:
"It is the moral constitution of society which fixes at any given time the quota of voluntary deaths. Thus, for every people there exists a collective force of specific power which drives men to kill themselves. The victim's actions which at first sight appear to express nothing but his own disposition are, in fact, the manifestation or external expression of a social condition."
(Le Suicide pp336)
It is not possible to predict who the individuals will be who will commit suicide, yet that is not the point. The point is to reveal the nature of the collective forces at work which render some people more vulnerable. Durkheim identifies this phenomenon as the 'suicidogenetic current'. Explanations according to motive could not cope with such data and the emphasis switches from 'why do people commit suicide?', to 'who are those most resistant to it?'.
The most famous example of differentiated suicide rates is that of the difference in rate between (French) Catholics and Protestants. Durkheim, although not the first, noted that Protestant communities exhibited higher levels of suicide that Catholic communities, and combined communities of both Catholics and Protestants showed intermediate rates. These differences could not be explained in terms of the character of their belief as both beliefs condemn suicide with equal severity. The most important difference between the Catholic and Protestant faiths is in the difference of structure. The Protestant Faith allows a greater degree of free enquiry, being alone before God. The Catholic faith allows for priestly intervention between the deity and the believer according to an ordered system of beliefs and practices. As a result it was thought that the Catholic church lead to a 'more strongly integrated' social community than Protestant individualism, in which lay the key to suicidal immunity. This notion also explained the lower rate of suicide of England as the Anglican church maintains priestly hierarchy and traditional forms of worship.
Similarly, higher education stimulates a similar spirit of free enquiry and scepticism; as a result, intellectuals tend to have a weak attachment to the central values and traditional symbols of society. Durkheim concludes that the best insulation from this current is provided by the bonds of social integration.
Durkheim establishes a causal generalisation linking social solidarity and suicide. Durkheim identified 'Egoistic' suicide as suicide based upon the fact that these individuals were reliant only upon their own resources, without the support of society. It is therefore proposed that egoistic suicide 'varies in inverse ratio to the degree of integration of the social groups to which the individual belongs' (Suicide pp223). This applies not only to religious belief, but also to marriage and divorce, large and small family size and educational trends.
A second form of suicide to be identified is that which springs from exactly the opposite reasons for egoistic suicide, that of 'altruistic' suicide. In this instance a great degree of social integration drives the individual to suicide due to his lack of identity in society or to his wish no longer to be a burden to that group. Where the society becomes everything, the individual becomes nothing (Parkin 1992).
This form of suicide is most commonly found in those simple societies based on mechanical solidarity where the fate of one is little in comparison to the survival of the group. In modern societies such suicide is uncommon, with the exception of the Kamikaze pilot of the second world war.
A third form identified was linked to the state of moral order identified in the Division of Labour, that of 'Anomie'. The cyclical nature of economics, disrupting the nature of social stability and leading to a demoralisation of society, drives up the suicide rate in both times of depression and expansion. The causal factor is identified therefore not as the material circumstances themselves, but due to the social instability they create, in the words of Durkheim "Every break in equilibrium ... gives boost to voluntary death.' (Suicide pp 271). Sudden increases in wealth, such as the winning of the National Lottery, lead to a social declassification, and anomic suicide flourishes wherever there is a collapse of the rules and conventions which pose realistic limits on the desires, expectations and aspirations of the fated individual. Those in industry and commerce are more prone to anomic suicide as a re divorced men who a re exposed to the cruel onslaught of unchecked sexual passions.
'Fatalism' might be thought of as a fourth classification of suicide, again the opposite of anomie, the existence of too many rules and restrictions driving the victim to suicide.
The differences between anomic and egoistic suicide as set out by Durkheim are not always clear. Society is the source of moral regulation and it might therefore be argued that inadequately integrated individuals are in a situation of anomie. Durkheim noted that the social origins of the two overlapped as each type of suicide is the product of the social changes which undermine mechanical solidarity. Egoistic suicide might therefore be thought of as an inevitable offshoot of the rise of moral individualism, and anomic suicide the outcome of the transitional state of the contemporary socio-economic order. It will decline, yet not disappear, with the remoralisation of the industrial system.
As an application of The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide is highly successful, yet its major critics fault Suicide on a number of quite crucial points. The consideration of the failings of this method in its explanation of suicide is therefore useful as a critique of Durkheim's theories.
A notable factor dealt with by Durkheim in the first chapter of Suicide is his dismissal of non-social influences on suicide. He considers these factors independently as part of an argument by elimination. He reasoning was that as suicide rates did not show correlation to any one factor, the explanation must lie in social facts alone. This is at best a tenuous assumption and one which certainly has a detrimental effect on the validity of his application.
As I have already mentioned, the use of statistics in the application of his method owed a great deal to the number of moral statisticians who had written before him. Virtually the entire basis of Suicide rests on these statistics, yet Durkheim mentions nothing as to the debate concerning the validity of official data, nor their usefulness in the study of suicide.
The accuracy of the data has long been questioned, not only due to the inadequacies of data collection and analyses at the time of writing, but also at the level of recording a 'suicide' by the coroner. The suicide rate is therefore more than an index of the incidence of self destructive acts. Consider for example the observation that a more integrated society exhibits lower levels of suicide over time. It is important to consider the very real probability that precisely because these societies were highly integrated, there would be pressure on the coroner to record a verdict of accidental death in any case of doubt, due to the shame brought upon surviving relatives.
This problem is best considered alongside another of Durkheim's failings, his rejection of motive as an important factor. Despite the existence of a wealth of data on this subject, student of the subject had 'never in fact managed to derive a law of any interest' from such material (Suicide pp148). Although it is arguable that motive has little relevance when considering sociological analyses, Douglas draws attention to the importance of motive attributed not by the suicides themselves, but by others. He suggests that in times of doubt it is important as to what the police, jurors and coroners perceive as the motive of the victim. 'Did he fall or did he jump?', 'Did she fall asleep at the wheel or did she drive into the wall?'. It is therefore evident that the official statistics for suicide are themselves a social construction based upon the perceptions, intuitions and subjective judgements of fallible human actors. These statistics therefore fail in Durkheim's definition to qualify as true Social 'things'. Viewed in this way, the rate of suicide seems to be very different from the rainfall rate.
It is interesting to note that Durkheim indeed foresaw this problem only to dismiss it. One of his reasons for disregarding motives for suicide was that the official statistics for motive 'are in fact the statistics of the opinions about motive held by officials, often low-ranking officials.' (Ibid. pp144). These people were not able to interpret and explain complex social facts. It is therefore argued by Douglas that Catholics are more likely to press for a verdict of accidental death as suicide carries a greater stigma amongst Catholics than amongst Protestants. Indeed their greater social cohesion might facilitate this process of coercion.
Importantly one must realise that all social facts that are recorded are subject to a certain degree of subjectivism. Indeed the entire positivist school would fall victim to such data. Counter theory to the 'coercive' argument suggests that all might not be as once thought. To propose that a more integrated society would succeed more readily in coercing officials to record verdicts of accidental death, would be to suggest that more influential groups would be more successful in achieving verdicts of non-suicide. Evident one would expect, would indicate a greater rate of suicide amongst blacks in the multiracial societies of the Deep South. This is in fact not the case. The same argument applies to education, that the more powerful educated would enable lower rates to be recorded. This is not the case. Having said this however, Durkheim is still not to be excused from the unquestioned reliability of his data.
A Suicide rate might therefore be viewed as a social fact about itself, being a complex outcome of the interaction between a great many actors. These social facts (Suicide) cannot be studied by means of suicide statistics as they themselves are involved in the very creation of those statistics. If the formulation of those statistics is not studied directly, one of the most important areas of social interaction relevant to the occurrence of a suicide avoids analysis as it does in Durkheim's Suicide.
Another complaint might be that Durkheim uses only statistics of completed suicide, and ignores the equally important attempted suicide. The study of attempted suicide is most surely fundamental to the understanding of completed suicide. The final action is a cumulation of interactions between the individual and his peers, becoming a function not only of the individual but also they way in which those peers deal with the victim, whether they recognise the signs and the provision they make for the individual. The suicide act does therefore not simply depend upon elements intrinsic to the act itself, but upon other features of the social context involved, and upon complex events which intervene between the act itself, and its appearance as a statistic.
In The Rules Durkheim implies the need for definition of the subject of study. In Suicide the definition is :
"all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result"
(Ibid. p 44)
In substituting 'know' for 'intend' Durkheim removes the notion of motive from the definition, yet 'doing and knowing' a result different from 'doing and intending' a result. Consider the example of a soldier rushing enemy lines. The soldier intends that the action will result in death, he is committing suicide. Were that soldier to know that the action would very probably lead to death and not to intend it, the soldier is also classed as having committed suicide. Despite the length to which Durkheim goes in order to exclude this element of intent, official statistics are invariably complied with purposeful death as deciding criteria thereby eroding the relevance of Durkheim's definition.
Durkheim's treatment of social facts as things has been another source of disagreement. Durkheim endeavours to compare the social and physical worlds. The social world is in itself pre-interpreted. Suicide was not invented by the sociologist as particle acceleration by the physicist. The latter does not presuppose that the particles understand the notion which derives their behaviour. It therefore is difficult to maintain the proposition that it is possible to commit suicide if you are ignorant of its lethal consequences. There is more to the existence of suicide, it involves cultural meanings that actions understand and apply in their own choice of action.
Le Suicide written by Emile Durkheim in 1895 is widely agreed to have failed to explain individual cases of suicide, yet the aim of the work was not to pinpoint individuals at risk, instead to account for the differential rates of suicide amongst various categories of the population. The importance of this text lies in the application of Durkheimian theory to a complex phenomenon requiring explanation. I do not believe Durkheim's sole reason for writing the text was explanation of suicide, instead he used suicide as a tool for the demonstration of his new method. Durkheim sought to establish the autonomy of sociology by employing rigorous empirical research and analyses, and to stress the holistic approach to society. In addition Durkheim formulated a theory of social order based upon the normative structure of the 'conscience collective'. In doing so Durkheim formulated new school of thought whose contribution to sociology is invaluable.
