ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim argues that two social conditions in particular affect the suicide rate: social integration—the degree to which members of society are bound together; and social regulation—the control that social values and norms have over individuals. On Suicide was part of Durkheim's larger project to establish sociology as a reputable academic subject. The key idea of On Suicide is that explaining suicide rates is different from explaining individual suicides. One of On Suicide's key themes is the importance of social factors, such as industrialization, in suicide rates. Industrialization was the shift in society at that time towards using new machines to complete tasks in the working environment more quickly and efficiently than humans, and therefore threatening the livelihoods of a large number of people. Anthony Giddens convincingly argues that the real originality of On Suicide lies in the way it puts preestablished empirical links, provable through the use of data, into a coherent theoretical framework.
