Émile Durkheim's Suicide

Émile Durkheim--born in 1858 and died in 1917. He was born in a small town, Épinal in France. His father was a rabbi and he was expected to become a rabbi himself. However, as many young adults do, he rebelled against the family traditions and chose not to follow the path towards becoming a rabbi, but to ultimately walk away from his faith in Judaism. In 1879, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure, which was a prominent school in it's time. He was for some time a professor at the University of Bordeaux and for a short time he became politically active in the 1894, particularly in the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was falsely accused to be a German spy, and was imprisoned and Émile took part in the attempt to free him. Then in 1902, he …show more content…
Durkheim's alternative is mechanical and organic solidarity. Organic solidarity described legal-rational authority or modernity or capitalism. The first book was followed by another; The Rules of Sociological Method, which is considered his most positivistic statement. In 1897 he wrote Suicide. Suicide is a very important book because it's really the first piece of rigorous empirical social science, which he successfully takes a very unusual, very rare phenomenon, like suicide, and gathers data to carefully to test whether it to see if it can identify social determinants of the suicide phenomenon. Although suicide would seem to be an individual decision whether you take your life or not, Durkheim was able to show that in this very private action, when you take your life, there are social determinants, as to who is committing suicide or not. He is able to make a distinction between different types of suicide--anomic, altruistic, egoistic and fatalistic. Later in his life, in 1915 he wrote the book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, that reflected his renewed interest in the spiritual and the