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Emile Durkheim taught the modern world how to think about suicide. Before him, suicide seemed a matter of purely individual despair. Durkheim saw that suicide has a social dimension. People from different religions, classes, and religious backgrounds destroy themselves in different proportions. Durkheim asked why this should be. He observed that groups in which there is a good balance between individual initiative and communal solidarity have the lowest rates of suicide. That observation led him to argue that modern society is deeply out of balance, that it lacks a life-sustaining equilibrium between the personal and the collective.
Suicide, published in 1897, became a classic as much for how it was written as for its argument. Even though Suicide is long it is economical, every detail contributing to the whole. This exemplary new translation by Robin Buss will particularly help readers in English to follow Durkheim, for now we have a prose text which mirrors his lucid, jargon-free French. In form, the author takes his reader on something akin to an archaeological dig, sifting through evidence from psychiatry, race, heredity, climate and geography to get at the social core buried beneath. The form reflects Durkheim's conviction that social bonds lie below the surface of people's everyday consciousness.
The word 'classic' misleads if it suggests a timeless revelation. Indeed, Durkheim differed from the two other great voices of sociology in his time, Karl Marx and Max Weber, in that he did not try to look forward into the future. Durkheim could not foresee the realm of the suicide bomber, killing himself and randomly destroying others in the name of a collective ideal. Still, the book may help us make sense of "aggressive suicide" by pointing to the kind of factual evidence we should seek about it.
At the time Durkheim wrote, European attitudes to suicide were shaped by three forces. The oldest was virtuous suicide, first practiced by Socrates, cup of poisonous hemlock in hand, serving as his own judge for crimes he committed against the state; virtuous suicide took a later Roman form when aristocrats committed suicide rather than bring dishonour upon their houses. From its earliest days, Christianity had rejected the virtue in virtuous suicide. Christian theologians asserted that no human being had the right to dispose of life as he or she pleased; Only God could decide for death. This belief was elaborated in Church law during the Renaissance, when moral horror at suicide joined prohibitions against infanticide, abortion, and contraception; later, capital punishment joined the list. All came to seem the same crime, that of judging for oneself when life should end.
Closer to Durkheim's era, suicide took on a different complexion. A century before him, in the late 18th Century suicide seemed a thermometer of human subjectivity; the most fevered, sensitive souls appreared most likely to succumb to it. The ancient Roman's virtuous decision to destroy himself rested on family honour; Romantic suicide rested on personal feelings. Romantic suicide came to be associated particularly with artistic sensibility; this was how the late 18th Century understood, for instance, the story of the young Thomas Chatterton [1752-1770], the artist who committed suicide in his garret when his beautiful "medieval" lyrics were discovered to be his own forgeries. Popular reports emphasized a boy dwelling in a fragile fairy tale of his own making, rather than a crook found out.
Even more famously, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther was read by an immense public as a tale of a young man simply too sensitive to live, a tale inspiring a rash of real suicides by both young women and men. The story was loosely based on Goethe's friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, in love with another man's wife, who committed suicide in 1772, aged twenty-five. Goethe transformed Jerusalem's erotic passion into a more complicated fictional event. Morbidly introspective and passive, Werther's artistic temperament yielded nothing concrete, his life was destroyed by Sehnsucht, by yearning for what could not be. In death, Werther acquired the allure of disappointed idealism.
It took Goethe's readers several generations to understand that the writer had also given his character a less appealing social dimension; Heinrich Heine, writing in 1828, observed that the greatest of young Werther's sufferings was exclusion from the aristocratic society he craved. Throughout the 19th Century, newspapers noted the oddity of suicides among people doing well economically, or the greater proportion of widowers than widows who kill themselves -- ordinary people, neither sinners nor sensitive souls.
This is where Durkheim picked up the issue in 1897. By using numbers rather than news stories he wanted to show how experiences like migration or economic upheaval, or yet again certain kinds of institutions, could drive a person to suicide. To many of his readers Durkheim's statistics, charts, and maps, his measurement of groups and indifference to individuals, indeed seemed inhumanly cold. Like Goethe's public, it has taken several generations to see him more in the round. The book does not deny feelings; rather, announces a new understanding of human emotion which Durkheim called 'sociological.'
Emile Durkheim is not entirely absent as an individual from the story he has to tell in Suicide. Born in 1858 into a Jewish family in Lorraine which had produced eight generations of rabbis, Durkheim originally planned to follow in the steps of his ancestors. His childhood, particularly his adolescence, was a time of ever-increasing anti-Semitism in France, the Jews being variously blamed for French defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1870, the growth of urban capitalism, the diminishing hold of Catholicism on the population, and modern art -- the cocktail as usual. These prejudices did not, however, drive the young Durkheim further into his own community. Thanks to his brilliance, he made his way to Paris, first to the elite secondary school Louis-le-Grand, originally a Jesuit institution, and then to the even more elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, which served all of France as a farm for breeding talent.
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