Is Society Anything More Than the Sum of Its Individual Parts?

Suicide is regarded as the most common of individual actions, which Durkheim believed was influenced by the ‘social collective’ and not as a result of psychological causalities as other studies had tried to imply.

People who commit suicide do not really want to end their lives as many seek the attention and acceptance they so dearly want from society. Thinking along the lines of the Sociological Imagination we need to understand the social forces, or the lack thereof, that drives people to commit suicide. Emile Durkheim discovered that levels of integration into society played a big role with suicide.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was a French sociologist who strongly influenced the discipline of sociology. It was apparent to Durkheim that since the French Revolution, the nation had been wracked by conflict and moral crisis (Stones, 2008). At the individual level, rising suicide rates reflected a growing sense of malaise. Durkheim’s goal was to develop a sociology that would help France overcome this continuing moral crisis. By tracing the influences on Durkheim to his predecessor August Comte and the German scholars of experimental psychology, it is possible to understand how Durkheim came to the conclusion that society is greater than the individual, and how his idea of a collective

Durkheim proceeded to distinguish suicide into four different groups that related to the individual’s integration into society and in turn the social regulation of society over its members. ‘Consequently, we shall be able to determine the social types of suicide by classifying them not directly by their preliminarily described characteristics, but by the causes which produce them…. We will first seek the social conditions responsible for them; then group these conditions in a number of separate classes by their resemblances and differences, and we shall be sure that a specific type of suicide will correspond to each of these classes.’ (Durkheim, 1897) The four suicide groups were identified as Egotistic, Anomic, Altruistic and Fatalistic.

Egoistic suicide which is when individuals are not integrated well enough into society for example people who live alone compared to those who live with family. Secondly Altruistic suicide which is when individuals are felt to be too integrated into society causing suicide, for example members of the armed forces were said to have greater suicide rates than civilian personnel as they were too strongly integrated into a united body. Durkheim also put forward the idea of Anomic suicide, this is when the norms and values in society become unclear or confused in times of great social change and an individual is not taught to adapt to changes well enough. For example an unexpected death of a family member is sudden social change which can cause Anomic suicide. Lastly, he suggested Fatalistic suicide. Fatalism is the excessive amount of regulation which leads to one committing suicide.

Before discussing the social factors that affect suicide rates, Durkheim attempted to narrow down the ideas behind the reasoning of individual suicides and the level of suicide rates. One proposal to explain the suicide rate was the environment, such as the climate or conditions. Durkheim agreed, after analysing Europe that the suicide rate

The first sociologist to theorize on suicide and its sociological interpretations was Emile Durkheim. Durkheim worked during the late 1800’s identifying social structures as the key determinant in self-destructive behaviour. In his work Suicide: A study in Sociology, Durkheim stated that “suicide rates increase when a society’s value system breaks down.”2 Durkheim believed that the shared values of a society and the mechanisms in place that ensure that its members adhere to these values, is interpreted as a person’s “social structure.” Durkheim suggested two basic factors in social structure that heavily influence the incidence of suicide. These are regulation and integration. He believed that an individual needs to become part of, and find direction in his own society. Without these factors in place, suicide becomes a common substitute. Teens are often anxious about fitting in to their society (especially among peer groups) so it is clear that integration is essential to adolescence. Durkheim also suggested that it is these two factors

Durkheim’s theories and work on suicide classified the phenomenon into four types; Egoistic, Altruistic, Anomic and Fatalistic (Ritzer Pg 200-202). Durkheim’s concept of social integration ties into egoistic suicide as it

Susanna Kaysen once said, “Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder…you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.” Being the 10th leading cause of death in the world, Suicide is a serious public health problem that many people know about but will never fully understand. The never-ending question tied to this phenomenon is what can cause a person to take his or her own lives. With the help of Emile Durkheim’s theory I can finally somewhat understand that it is not just an individual factor but also based on the society around the individual.

According to Item A, suicides are based on coroner’s interpretations and differ across cultures as Danish coroner's base their verdicts on probability rather than English coroners who must find evidence to support their verdict as suicide. Durkheim identifies the difference in suicide rates across cultures and societies. Durkheim defines suicide as “all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from positive or negative act of the victim himself”. He used suicide to demonstrate that positivistic and scientific methods of researching social topics was possible whereas interpretivists argue that to understand the

Durkheim does not see egoism, altruism, anomie and fatalism as types of suicide, but types of social structure that highlight the presence or lack of integration and regulation. It must be stressed that this excess/lack of integration and regulation are not seen as direct causes of suicide, rather Durkheim sees a number of voluntary deaths in society as inevitable; integration and regulation are merely prophylactic to suicidal impulses, which when taken to excess or dramatically reduced, fail to act as a preventative, and so suicides occur. This clarification is an important strength of Durkheim’s theory: it allows the biography of the individuals who kill themselves to vary, while still explaining underlying pressures/lack of to explain their deaths, and the varying suicide rates between groups.

“A picture is made up of so many square inches of painted canvas; but if you should look at these one at a time, covering the others, until you had seen them all, you would still not have seen the picture. There may, in all such cases, be a system or organization in the whole that is not apparent in the parts. In this sense, and in no other, is there a difference between society and the individuals of which it is composed; a difference not residing in the facts themselves but existing to the observer on account of the limits of his perception. A complete view of society would also be a complete view of all the individuals, and vice versa; there would be no difference between them.” Charles Horton Cooley, in “Human Nature and the Social Order”.

Durkheim’s findings suggested that suicide rates vary between societies but do show regular patterns over time. He concluded that this was evidence that there are consistent social forces that influence the rate of suicide in society. In sum, Durkheim believed that for society to maintain a state of equilibrium there needs to be an appropriate degree of integration and regulation; a consequence of any imbalance is an increased rate of suicide. However, despite Durkheim’s study of society being viewed by many as a classic, it has been met

To break down why people commit suicide, in a social aspect, sociologist David Emile Durkheim, broke it into four different terms of situations that are called: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic. Durkheim says, “Egoistic suicide occurs in a society where there is excessive individualism, that is, low social interaction” (“Altruistic”). This means there is little interaction between the individual and a cohesive social group that could give the individual a feel of purpose in their life. People with more interaction create goals, values, and bonds with people around them in a social group that increases their

Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a purely individual decision but French sociologist Emile Durkheim recognized that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed in the influence of society on the individual and that if anything can explain that relation, it is suicide. His use of the data of suicide, not specific cases and reports, to study the societal trends reveals his true subject of study: society as a whole and its role in the individual experience. Durkheim uses the study of suicide via the quantitative methodological approach as a tool to study society as a broader whole.