ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim's On Suicide has served as an inspiration for generations of followers. Durkheim's influence on sociology and social thought is still recognized today. After Durkheim was given a position at the prestigious university La Sorbonne in Paris in 1902, sociology emerged as a bone fide discipline in French academia. Much of Durkheim's legacy draws on his later work. However, in the universities of 1930s America it was his early works that became influential. Since the 1980s there has been an emerging school of "Durkheimian" cultural sociologists. Functionalism is the sociological perspective that analyses how social institutions contribute to the working of society as a whole. Unfortunately, when criticism of functionalism emerged in the mid-1970s, Durkheim's reputation suffered with it. Along with The Rules of Sociological Method, On Suicide played a key role in preparing the ground for modern empirical sociology, which is the dominant way of doing sociology today.
