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Exploring Suicide Essay

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Exploring Suicide
Works Cited Not Included Durkheim became interested in the subject of suicide while in France in the late 1880’s, he offered a series of lectures to the public and later published what was his third major work ‘le suicide’ in 1897. ‘Le Suicide’ is of great importance because it is his first serious effort to establish empiricism in sociology, an empiricism that would provide a sociological explanation for suicide which was traditionally regarded as exclusively psychological and individualistic. Durkheim proposed this definition of suicide "the term suicide is applied to all cases of death …show more content…

They may be enforced with law, with clearly defined penalties associated with violation of the sentiments and values of the group. Sanctions may be associated with social facts, for example as in religion, where resistance may result in disapproval from others or from spiritual leaders. Individuals may be unaware of social facts and generally accept them. In this case, individuals may accept the values and codes of society and accept them as their own.

After Durkheim wrote ‘The Rules of Sociological Method’, he tackled the subject of suicide as an example of how a sociologist can study a subject that seems extremely personal, with no social aspect to it even being anti-social. It could be argued that suicide is such a personal act that it involves only personal psychology and purely individual thought processes. Durkheim's aim was not to explain or predict an individual tendency to suicide, but to explain one type of nonmaterial social facts, social currents. Social currents are characteristics of society, but may not have the permanence and stability that some parts of collective consciousness or collective

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