ABSTRACT
Durkheim’s Suicide is firmly ensconced in sociological literature as an exemplar of the scientific method applied to social phenomena, and of a sociological approach to suicide. While not all agree on its methodological soundness or theoretical fertility, it is still seen as a watershed in the history of sociology, and as a touchstone and benchmark for subsequent work in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, and in the sociology of suicide. This status has had certain interpretive consequences. Commentators have discussed several possible influences on Durkheim’s theoretical perspective, method and substantive descriptions: his sources, his familiarity with other work on the topic, and literary, philosophical and methodological precedents for his choice of topic and approach (e.g. Lukes 1973; Morrison 1998). Despite this work, however, certain elements of the intellectual, cultural and even political context in which Durkheim wrote remain to be fully examined. Such study is needed to provide a more nuanced view of Suicide as a specific and finely tuned intervention, not only into discussions of social science methodology or the aetiology of suicide, but also into broader questions of the nature of modernity and of forms of moral responsibility appropriate to it. The following discussion does no more than to suggest some avenues for such exploration, and to indicate some of their possible implications for an appreciation of Durkheim’s work. Specifically, it proposes that Suicide has a significant moral and pedagogical dimension; indeed, that its very emphasis on scientific method may have had a rhetorical effect, repositioning the topic (of suicide, and more generally, of the consequences of ‘civilization’) on new ground. From Durkheim’s point of view, one might suggest that such ground not only made suicide available to social science, but also located it in terms of a moral discourse which sought to transcend essentialism and personalism while still making authoritative claims on its hearers.
