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
8 - Suicide is a kind of madness
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
London, 1 December 1815 It is clearly evident that, of late years at least, suicide has been immeasurably more frequent in Paris than in London. Whether this deplorable propensity be the consequence only of recent political events which, having annihilated religion have deprived the wretched of its resources and consolations in affliction, and by their demoralizing effects dissolved the social compact that alone makes life a blessing, is not easy to determine.
Durkheim's Suicide of 1897 was the masterpiece of nineteenth-century statistical sociology. The choice of the most morbid of behaviours was no accident: there were mountains of suicide data upon which Durkheim could build. They came from the French fascination with deviants, especially those who were degenerate or could not contribute to the growth of the French population.
Durkheim invented his idea of anomie, of social and moral decline, of alienation or disintegration, in the context of suicide. That was his measure of communal pathology. In this way a medical notion (pathology) was transferred to the body politic on the back of statistics. As my epigraph illustrates, the connection between suicide and anomie was fixed much earlier. This little salvo fired in 1815 at the demoralized French — the French whose morals had been destroyed by revolution and Napoleon — inaugurates numerical sociology. I do not mean that suicides had not been counted before. The extraordinary records of suicide in Geneva from 1650 to 1798 have been carefully studied, and there are doubtless many more, in Switzerland alone, of comparable precision.
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- Information
- The Taming of Chance , pp. 64 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990