Suicide as a Social Fact

Of all the acts a human being can perform, suicide seems the most radically individual. It takes place, typically, in isolation. It is preceded by subjective anguish that is difficult to communicate. Its causes, on first description, appear to lie inside a single biography: a specific depression, a particular loss, a private despair. If any human event belonged wholly to the individual and to psychology, one would expect it to be this one.

This is what makes Emile Durkheim's 1897 Le Suicide a methodological provocation. Durkheim took the act most commonly assumed to be psychological and showed that its rate — the number of suicides per 100,000 inhabitants in a given population — varied in patterned, stable, and sociologically intelligible ways across countries, religions, marital statuses, occupations, and economic conditions. The rate behaved like a social fact: a recurrent feature of a collectivity that exerted itself on individuals and that could be studied only at the level of the collectivity (Durkheim 1897/1951, pp. 45-50; see also Durkheim 1895 on the concept of the social fact).

The move is subtle and deserves careful unpacking. Durkheim did not deny that every suicide has an individual history. He did not claim that the sociologist could predict which particular person in a population would take their life. His claim was narrower and more powerful: if one asks why this rate rather than some other rate, the answer cannot be biographical. A country with a suicide rate of 26 per 100,000 and a neighboring country with a rate of 8 per 100,000 are not differing in the sum of their individual biographies; they are differing in the social conditions that shape how individual biographies unfold toward this outcome (Durkheim 1897/1951, pp. 297-300).

The analogy Durkheim relied on repeatedly was with mortality statistics. No epidemiologist studying cholera would treat each case as a purely individual event, even though each case is individually experienced. The variation in rates across neighborhoods, water supplies, and housing conditions is what reveals the mechanism. Durkheim's claim was that sociology should adopt the same posture toward acts that are, in their subjective experience, intensely personal. The rate, not the case, is the sociological object (Lukes 1973, pp. 191-195).

Two methodological consequences follow. First, the sociologist must work with population-level data. Suicide is organized around the systematic comparison of rates: across Protestant and Catholic regions, across marital statuses, across periods of economic expansion and contraction. The chapters are built as successive controlled comparisons, each one isolating a social variable while holding others approximately constant (Pope 1976, pp. 12-18). Second, the sociologist must resist what Durkheim regarded as the standing temptation of nineteenth-century social science: to explain collective phenomena by aggregating individual psychologies. Durkheim insisted that 'whenever a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false' (Durkheim 1895, p. 129). The rate of suicide is the outcome of social currents — suicidogenic currents, in his terminology — that circulate through collective life and whose intensity varies by type of society (Durkheim 1897/1951, pp. 299-300).

This is why Suicide functioned, in the discipline's self-understanding, as a founding act. It was a demonstration rather than a manifesto. Durkheim had argued in the 1895 Rules of Sociological Method that sociology required its own subject matter and its own logic; in Suicide, two years later, he showed that subject matter and that logic operating on data. The argument was powerful precisely because it was applied to the hard case. If sociology could illuminate suicide — the act that seemed least amenable to social analysis — it could illuminate almost anything. The book has been read, taught, and criticized continuously for more than a century for this reason (Berk 2006, pp. 60-64).