Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
20 - As real as cosmic forces
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
Summary
To tell the truth, we do not possess a criterion that allows us to measure exactly the degree of happiness of a society. But it is possible to estimate comparatively the state of health or disease in which it finds itself, for we have at our disposal a well known fact that translates social malaise into figures: namely the relative number of suicides … In order that these abnormal acts should increase, it is necessary that the occasions of suffering should also increase, and that at the same time the force of resistance of the organism should be decreased. One can thus be assured that societies where suicides are most frequent are less healthy than those where they are more rare.
This switch from health to disease had been prefigured in the early days. In 1799 Sir John Sinclair had wanted to measure the ‘quantum of happiness’, but by 1825 legislators were trying to determine the ‘quantum of sickness’. Durkheim's first study of suicide neatly draws together these and later strands: happiness/health, normal/abnormal, and the medical model of suicide. Condorcet's moral science had been turned into empirical investigation, but the adjective ‘moral’ had not yet been hidden from view. The paper was subtitled ‘a study of moral statistics’. Five years later, Durkheim's first book announced, on its first page, that it was ‘an attempt to study the facts of moral life according to the method of the positive sciences … We do not wish to extract a morality from science, but to practise the science of morality.’
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Taming of Chance , pp. 170 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990