Emile Durkheim And Suicide Essay

Emile Durkheim is taken as one of the main fathers of Sociology as we know it nowadays. His main contribution was the definition of social facts and their function. He took social facts as something that controlled us in some way within society. Another important concept is Anomie. Anomie represents a situation where standards and rules in society are not clearly anchored.

At past, the suicide was taken as a desperate act of an individual, it was only an individual matter. But Durkheim looked otherwise, in his most famous book Suicide, which draws on statistics from the 19th Century, describes that the motives for this act can be more complex than it seemed like. He did not consider individual reasons for everyone, but he viewed this act in terms of a broader society. Suicide is becoming a tool for the analysis of a certain society. Durkheim was interested in suicide mainly to prove the strength of the newly created science of Sociology.

Durkheim progressed through the elimination method, when the factors are gradually eliminated so there are left only the key factors. He therefore came to the conclusion that it does not matter to race, genes, geographical location or climate. But he found that suicide was mainly related to the increase in human activity. The two main social facts in …show more content…
According to Durkheim, the number of suicides is increasing not only in times of economic crisis, but also in times of prosperity. The sociologist explains this by the fact that in these times there is an excessive loosening of normative regulations that govern the conduct of people. People lose a realistic view of reality. The Anomic state of society arises because of the need to modernise the hitherto obsolete way of life. The modernization raises the individual's feelings of uncategorized and despair, which provided them with earlier