ABSTRACT
Research into suicide as a social and psychological phenomenon dates back to the late eighteenth century. Few other types of human act can have attracted the same measure of continuous interest on the part of students in several disciplines: sociology, psychology, psychiatry and medicine. H. Rost's Bibliographie des Selbstmords, published in 1927, lists weH over 3000 items in the main European languages, and today the total must be more than twice as many as this. 1 So far as the sociologicalliterature is concerned, Durkheim's Suicide has long been, and continues today to be, the outstanding work. What has made the book pre-eminent is not the empirical materials upon which it is based, nor the statistical methods used to assemble and analyse them, all of which were made familiar by others previously; rather it is the consistency and force with which these are marshalled to document Durkheim's conception of sociological method. But the work was from the outset controversial, serving to give new focus to well-established debates in the literature on suicide. Critics objected in particular to Durkheim's attempt to treat suicide rates as 'social facts', and to his apparent disregard of the intentional or 'meaningful' character of suicide as a freely undertaken act. 2
Such critiques have been repeated in some more recent analyses of Durkheim's work. The most notable and ambitious of these is that set out by Douglas in his The Social Meanings 0/ Suicide (1967), and in the opening part of this essay I shall concentrate upon the issues which he raises in respect of Durkheim's views, and his strategy for resolving them. 3
Douglas's critique 01 Durkheim
According to Douglas, certain 'metaphysical ideas' dominate the nineteenth-century literature on suicide. These are essentially common-sense notions, taken over by academic writers on the
subject, and they pervade Durkheim's work just as they do that of the many authors who preceded hirn. The most important of such metaphysical ideas are the following. First, that 'social actions are in some way caused (or motivated) by meanings held by the individual and shared by other members of the society'; second, that, as observers, we know the 'meanings of other individuals' actions' in an unproblematic way; third, that 'meaningful social actions ... are just as subject to counting and quantitative analyses as are physical objects and properties'.4 These ideas were accepted, largely implicitly, both by those, like Durkheim. who favoured the statistical study of suicide as a general phenomenon, and those who opposed such an approach in favour of a case-study method. The former added to such implicit ideas a range of more explicit propositions, namely, that the stability of official statistics on suicide from year to year shows that they are reliable and valid; that such stability also demonstrates the operation of some sort of laws afIecting the behaviour of those committing suicide; and that these laws can be explained in terms of 'a reasonably small set of highly abstract social meanings [called the "social system" or the "social structure"] which are the causes of specific patterns of social actions such as suicide rates; and the only valid sociological theory of such patterns (or suicide rates) will be one in terms of states of this set of abstract meanings'. 5
Douglas's critique of Durkheim is based on the thesis that most of these ideas, both those implicitly taken aver as common-sense assumptions and those explicitly applied as a theory of suicide, must be either discarded altogether or radically revised. They crystallize, according to Douglas, into two sets of problems. One concerns the status of official suicide statistics and their application in social research; the other concerns how the meanings of suicidal actions are to be determined and described by those interested in explaining them.
