This article was downloaded by: [University of California Santa Cruz]

On: 13 November 2014, At: 01:30

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Economy and Society

Publication details, including instructions for authors
and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reso20

Durkheim's scenography of
suicide
Mike Gane
a

Department of Social Sciences , Loughborough

University , Leics, LE11 3TU, UK E-mail:
Published online: 16 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Mike Gane (2005) Durkheim's scenography of suicide, Economy and
Society, 34:2, 223-240, DOI: 10.1080/03085140500054602
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085140500054602

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed
in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the
views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should
not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,
claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection
with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Economy and Society Volume 34 Number 2 May 2005: 223
/240

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

Durkheims scenography of
suicide
Mike Gane

Abstract
Durkheims classic study Suicide still has many surprises and mysteries over 100
years after it was written: why was the order of analysis reversed in this study? Why
did Durkheim have recourse to theory? Why did the study require dramatizations of
its individual forms? This paper tries to answer these questions with reference to
Durkheims failure to find a link between the way individual suicides are committed
and social causation. This simple and unexpected finding suggested to Durkheim
that analysis of suicide rates was more complex than he had anticipated. Because he
could not establish a continuous causal chain via the means employed to commit
suicide, he looked elsewhere and claimed to have established it in the emotional
character of the act itself. This led him to a highly speculative construction of a set
of ideal typical scenographies of suicide to save his conception of expressive
causation, rather than restructure his theory of suicide to meet the complexity he
had found, and particularly his conclusion that the form of death chosen
is . . . something entirely foreign to the very nature of suicide.
Keywords: suicide; causation; sociology; egoism; altruism; anomie.

The analysis of the suicide act in Suicide is complex and still poses many
problems. One of them concerns the scenography of suicide. What is the
nature of Durkheims dramatization of suicide in his study and why did he
need to attempt a characterization of the act at the individual level at all? In
order to answer this question, it will be necessary to examine the way the
argument is constructed, what difficulties Durkheim had in working with
official statistics, how he proposed to overcome them, and the difficulties he
encountered when he thought through the causal chain from the social forces

Mike Gane, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Leics LE11 3TU,
UK. E-mail: m.j.gane@lboro.ac.uk
Copyright # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140500054602

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

224

Economy and Society

to the framing of the act. It is necessary to examine his argument for the
social causation of suicide rates and the contribution he made to the theory
of social integration and regulation through his analysis of suicides. My
argument is that, despite his distrust of the accounts of the meaning and
motives from the victims, Durkheim needed to trace the logic of the act in
order to remain on the ground of a particular notion of the relation of cause
and effect. Because his empirical studies actually suggested there was no single
continuous chain through suicide studied at the social level, Durkheim,
remaining true to his notion of a continuous cause, was forced into a
supplementary analysis, drawing on a mix of clinical and literary examples,
developed through ideal types in order to fill this gap. The nature of the
different kinds of theorizing is explored here in order to highlight the way that
he came to evoke specific dramatizations to follow the social cause into the
individual act.
This paper examines one or two points in Suicide concerning the act of
suicide itself. The concern is focused on two specific but contradictory
statements. The first is:
There are really very different varieties of suicides, and these differences appear
in the way suicide is performed. Acts and agents may thus be classified into a
certain number of species; these species also correspond in essential traits with
the types of suicide we have established. . . . They are like prolongations of these
causes inside of the individuals.
(Durkheim 1970: 287)

The second statement, a few pages on, says:

One might think a priori that some relation existed between the nature of
suicide and the kind of death chosen by the one who commits it. It seems quite
natural that the means he uses to carry out his resolve should depend on the
feelings urging him on and thus express these feelings. We might therefore be
tempted to use the data concerning this matter supplied to us by statistics to
describe the various sorts of suicides more closely, by their external form. But
our researches into this matter have given only negative results. . . . The social
causes on which suicides in general depend, however differ from those which
determine the way they are committed; for no relation can be discovered
between the types of suicide which we have distinguished and the most common
modes of performance.
(Durkheim 1970: 290
/1)

Obviously there is an immediate problem here focused on the word

performance. Durkheim was unlikely to commit such a glaring inconsistency.
In fact he used different expressions in the French to render the idea of
performance. Looking at the terminology in French it is clear Durkheim saw
an important distinction here. In the first passage the translator has rendered
la manie`re dont Suicide saccomplit as the way suicide is performed, and, in
the second, has rendered les modes dexecution les plus repandus as the most

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

Mike Gane: Durkheims scenography of suicide

225

common modes of performance. Certainly at the level of terminology, the

analysis in Suicide is sharp and precise. The term performance in English is
covered by a number of expressions in French and Durkheim takes advantage
of this. The analytical manoeuvring is also fleet-footed.
It is instructive to re-examine Durkheims theory via two different
interpreters. Pope tried to make the theory more coherent by presenting
it as involving seven steps, each step determines the next: a) morphology
determines b) number of people in a given group, determines c) rate of
social integration, determines d) collective sentiments, determines e) level
of integration-regulation, determines f) level of egoism-anomie/altruism,
determines g) suicide rate (Pope 1976: 60). Cuin, on the other hand,
suggests that Durkheim starts from the moral state of the community,
which influences, on the one hand, the suicide currents and, at the same time,
other individual dispositions. The movement of these two produces the suicide
rate (Cuin 1997: 183). Both of these interpretations seem incomplete
considered in the light of the discussion in this paper, because Durkheim
evidently thought the analysis could go even further, down to the individual
forms.

Suicide (1897)
Why did Durkheim write on suicide? He evidently wanted to write a
quintessential foundational text for sociology. The decision to write a study
of suicide has always been understood as a challenging way of demonstrating
how the sociological method is applicable to a phenomenon that appears highly
individual, indeed singular, the best kind of proof of sociologys distinctive,
even exclusive, power to explain (Lukes 1973: 226). He also wanted to show
that sociology can produce recommendations for social action, having
concluded, in his previous studies, that French society was suffering from
insufficient integration and regulation.1
Durkheim worked on published official statistics and, with his
nephew Marcel Mauss, had access to unpublished statistics in Paris
where the sociologist Gabriel Tarde was Directeur de la Statistique
Judiciaire Francais between 1894 and 1900. Mauss worked for some
months at the end of 1895 and beginning of 1896 in Tardes office on about
25,500 suicide documents for 1889
/91 (Besnard 1987: 76
/7; Borlandi 1994:
6). Borlandi suggests that Durkheim had written the text of le suicide up to
chapter 2 of part 2 before the results of this new research were available. It is
only in the third chapter of part 2, after his resumption of writing in 1896, that
he begins to use the information provided by Mauss. The break in the
composition is perhaps explained also by the preparation Durkheim was
undertaking for a new lecture course, on Saint-Simon, at Bordeaux (Borlandi
1994: 7).

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

226

Economy and Society

Another resource for Durkheim also came via Tarde. During 1895 there was
an International Exhibition in Bordeaux where sociology was given space to
present itself. Durkheim persuaded Tarde to send two volumes (1882, 1887)
from the Compte General de lAdministration de la Justice Criminelle to
show at the sociology stall (Durkheim not only cites both volumes in the text,
but, as Borlandi notes, Suicide consacre une bonne place aux deux volumes ).
Durkheim had on display a map of the distribution of suicides in France by
arrondissements and this was included in the book (1970: 394). Tarde held the
view that there are only individuals and that society and social cause does not
exist: there can only be individual actions and interactions. The rest is only a
metaphysical entity, mysticism (Tarde 1969: 140)). The help that Tarde gave
Durkheim ironically became the empirical basis for the sharpest attack that he
ever received (Borlandi 1994: 6). Durkheim develops in Suicide the classic
case for the existence of unique structural social causes over and above
individual interactions and, inter alia , presents one of his tactical critiques of
Tarde (1970): 123
/42, 306
/25; for a discussion of the wider confrontation,
see Gane (1988: 76
/83; Besnard in Borlandi and Mucchielli 1995: 221
/43;
Mucchielli 2004: 45
/72).
But once the debate began on Durkheims study it has never ceased. Most of
the sociological studies published recently still debate with this text (e.g. Baller
and Richardson 2002; Stockard and OBrien 2002). But the text is more
influential than its contribution to suicide studies; it also presents a general
theory of social structure and social integration as well as a general theory of
homo duplex and the category of the person (Parsons 1937; Miller 1996:
105
/16). The study states explicitly that its objects are social suicide rates,
though by 1897 such an analysis was by no means novel. Its method is
described as comparative and aetiological, but what he meant by that is still
debated. Many commentators have judged it a nave piece of positivism
(Mucchielli 1998: 187
/206). Collins pronounced: It is a sealed classic,
safely dead and turned over to the intellectual historians (in Alexander 1988:
108). Some have seen it riddled with contradictions and unsuccessful attempts
to sustain key theses (Pope 1976); Pope has more recently written however that
numerous studies have repeatedly confirmed most of Durkheims basic
findings, and indeed sociology has found it difficult to move substantially
beyond [its] theory and findings (in Stones 1998: 52). Others have seen it as a
distinctive solution to comparative analysis (Turner 1996), and as the genuine
beginning of an empirically based social science which made heuristic
discoveries (Baudelot and Establet 1984; Besnard 1973, 1976, 1993, 2000).
What is specific about Durkheims contribution? Superficially this does
seem very easy to identify. Take, for example, the recent contribution to the
study of suicide by Breault and Kposowa (in Pickering and Walford 2000:
156
/79) that examines social integration and marital status (multivariate
analysis of 30,157 suicides). This study claims to show that the divorced/
separated have a significantly elevated risk of suicide, or approximately 68%
greater than the married. Contrary to Durkheim, the widowed do not have a

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

Mike Gane: Durkheims scenography of suicide

227

higher risk for suicide and . . . singles are significantly less likely to be
suicide victims (ibid.: 162). The study goes on to look at suicide rates for
white males, white females, black males, black females, Hispanic males,
Hispanic females, Asian males and Asian females, Native American males and
Native American females. The study concludes that it has found remarkably
little support for Durkheims theory of social integration. Durkheim predicts
single people have the highest suicide odds ratios, followed by the divorced and
widowed. That pattern applies to none of the ten sex and race/ethnic groups
studied here (ibid.: 173). Recent statistics suggest that suicides in Britain have
fallen to the lowest levels since the Second World War; down particularly are
rates for 45
/74-year-old women. Even for 15
/34-year-old men the rates are
down by 31 per cent since 1998. It has been suggested that suicide currents
have remained the same but changes in technology have made suicide harder to
accomplish.2
Durkheim did not, however, present his study through a simple list of
empirical connections determined by the nature of the act itself but by a
theoretical framework which organized his material into four suicide types,
each of which is the effect of a unique cause. Nowhere in their study do
Breault and Kposowa mention egoism, anomie, fatalism or altruism, the
conceptual framework of analysis Durkheim employed. They do say,
paradoxically, that Durkheims error, repeated by many sociologists since,
was in seeing sociology as a distinct methodology rather than a set of
theoretical notions inspired by group and social interaction that could benefit
from a variety of methodological approaches (2000: 158). It is precisely
because Durkheim saw his sociology as theoretical and etiological in this
particular study, and that he did indeed adopt a variety of methods and indeed
techniques, that the particular findings of Breault and Kposowa are interesting
from a Durkheimian perspective.
Baudelot and Establet (1984, 1997) also found that the empirical
relations had changed since Durkheim; they noted particularly the reversal
in the urban/rural ratios, Paris having the lowest rates and the rural
communes the highest (figures for 1975), but they did not conclude that
Durkheims theory of social integration had therefore been invalidated,
rather that the patterns of integration have changed. Durkheims study was
not organized on the basis of empirical variables, even though perhaps
the method he outlined in his 1895 book The Rules of Sociological Method
(1982) had specified that it should have been. It was organized on the basis of
a theory of basic social causes. There are a number of important controversies
about the theory itself, indeed there is no one agreed account of the theory;
see (Popes (1976: ch. 4) critique of Parsons and subsequently Cuin (1997)
and the history of the reception of Suicide by Besnard (2000: 97
/125)).
The problems dealt with in this paper relate to Durkheims consistent
emphasis on the inner causal connections, or, as he expressed it, the
prolongation of causes into effects, in the face of significant difficulties of
finding evidence for them.

228

Economy and Society

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

Cause and effect

Durkheim had become interested in the analysis of moral statistics early in
his career and wrote a study on suicide rates and birth rates in 1888 (Suicide et
natalite: etude de statistique morale ), showing that they vary together, notably a
high suicide rate together with a low birth rate was the situation in France
(Durkheim 1975: ii, 231). These rates vary together, he claimed, because there
is a common cause of both phenomena, what he calls domestic sentiments
(ibid.: 235). In The Rules (1982: 138) Durkheim investigated the notion of
cause in more detail. He specifies a notion of the inner social environment, and
within that environment the key motor is its moral life, repeated through each
particular environment such as the domestic one. Elsewhere in his writing
(1978: 83) this inner environment is divided into a social morphology (the
physical volume and density of populations) and a social physiology (morality,
law, religion, etc., of social life). Durkheim notes that, although it is the social
physiology which is the driving and causal force, this often cannot be
determined directly. Thus social classification of any social phenomenon must
be based on the directly given evidence of morphology (1982: 111) and analysis
must always proceed from morphologic facts to deeper, hidden levels of
causation.
Durkheim is persistent: concomitance can occur, not because one of the
phenomena is the cause of the other, but because they are both effects of the
same cause, or indeed because there exists between them a third phenomenon,
interposed but unnoticed, which is the effect of the first phenomenon and the
cause of the second. His example, from The Rules, is again suicide:
it can be established absolutely certainly that the tendency to suicide varies
according to education. But it is impossible to understand how education can
lead to suicide. . . . Thus we are moved to ask whether both facts might not be
the consequence of one single state. This common cause is the weakening of
religious traditionalism, which reinforces at the same time the desire for
knowledge and the tendency to suicide.
(Durkheim 1982: 152
/3)

The aim of this method of analysis is to reveal the causal relationship, not
externally . . . but from the inside (1982: 151). Durkheims analytic principle
here was expressed in a famous phrase to the same effect there always
corresponds the same cause. And so if suicide depends on more than one
cause it is because in reality there are several kinds of suicide (1982: 150).
Because morphological features carry the external signs of these causal
relations sociologists must start their research by identifying and observing
them.
Sociologists were enjoined to identify these signatures and to make them the
initial materials of an objective comparative analysis. Research he says must
only include a group of phenomena defined beforehand by certain common

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

Mike Gane: Durkheims scenography of suicide

229

external characteristics and all phenomena which correspond to this definition

must be so included (1982: 75). But his attempt to define and group together
suicides on the basis of the way they are committed (1970: 291) or even by
their presumptive motives (1970: 148
/51) were unsuccessful because
evidence was unreliable and in view of the manner of execution of most
suicides, proper observations are next to impossible (1970: 146).
It is somewhat surprising, considering the number of commentaries on the
procedures adopted in Suicide, to find that discussion of the methodological
differences between Suicide and The Rules of Sociological Method are rare. In
fact, Durkheim did follow one of his recommended procedures by starting
from a definition of the object of research, which was designed with a number
of objectives in mind, not least to distinguish suicide from attempted suicide
and suicide from a larger sacrificial act of suicide dominated by knowledge that
it would kill others. His definition of suicide, it should be noted, was: the term
suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a
positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this
result (1970: 44). He suggested that at least one part of the study, that which
dealt with madness and suicide (1970: 62
/7), had been done using his
preferred method
/ a classification of such suicides according to how the act
was accomplished, its morphology. However, the specific connections he had
hoped to follow, that is, to trace the causal line from the way the suicide had
been committed to the type of suicide, could not be established in all the other
cases in his study (1970: 140, 291; see Gane 2003: 75).
This seems to be a major if disconcerting discovery with considerable
methodological implications. Durkheim, characteristically, drew out the main
implications with great clarity: no relation can be discovered between the types
of suicide which we have distinguished and the most common methods of
performance (1970: 291). Indeed, an even more strikingly: The form of death
chosen is therefore something entirely foreign to the very nature of suicide
(ibid.: 291). What Durkheim means by this is that the statistics show that there
are specific consistencies for the form of death chosen
/ the means of
committing suicide (given in Durkheim 1970: 291, Table 30). These regularities,
however, do not co-vary with the suicide rates themselves
/ indeed, they appear
to be even more stable. He insists that the two sets of facts are not connected
substantively or methodologically. Thus, for Durkheim, when we are studying
the forms of enactment, framing and performance of suicide as an act we are not
studying one unique phenomenon, but a complex of at least two phenomena,
separate and distinct internal and external elements which come together. The
act, from a sociological point of view, is not continuous.
What Durkheim did in the face of this situation, which seems so devastating
for his own assumptions, was, dramatically, to reverse his analytic procedures
and to group the suicides on the basis of the causes of suicide. He claimed,
somewhat surprisingly, that these are indeed already known. As it was very
widely assumed in nineteenth century that suicides increased with civilization,
there was no novelty in suggesting this connection. The comparative analysis

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

230

Economy and Society

Durkheim had in mind, however, was quite new. As Stephen Turner

emphasizes, the novel feature of Durkheims treatment of suicide is neither
the thesis of social determination, which was conventional, [and] not the
actual explanation . . . but the specific statistical reasoning he uses and the way
he interprets his results . . . to produce a genuinely novel result (1996: 335).
One of the problems in the way that statistics were being used by the 1890s was
that it had become so easy to produce correlations that there had emerged,
Turner notes, a crisis over the place of causal explanation in statistics. With
the earlier work of Morselli, analysis stopped with the demonstration of
regularity between two variables. Durkheims own strategy was to examine
relations between rates in which perfectly equivalent rank-orderings at some
level of aggregation can be discovered . . . [indeed] he uses the term law to
describe these relationships, and these relationships alone (ibid.: 367). Thus
Durkheim would not accept simple statistical relationships. What he looked for
was the parallelism of rankings between the series analysed. Durkheim used
the term basic cause against surface effects in the context of what Turner
calls other interfering nonbasic causes (ibid.: 367). This is the method
Durkheim refers to as concomitant variation. Establishing such a parallelism
meant for Durkheim there was a real discovery of an inner relation between
the facts.3
Turner has examined some of the efforts Durkheim must have gone to in
order to produce a demonstration of these parallelisms. With reference, for
instance, to the table XIX (1970: 164), which compares suicides and
educational levels in Italy, Turner notes:
It would be hard to imagine what sort of hypothesis would attempt to relate
suicide rates for a given period to illiteracy rates for a later period . . . it is not
easy to find series that match this nicely with one another, and whatever search
procedure Durkheim or his helpers employed to find this particular match, it
must have been quite involved.
(Turner 1996)

Similar tables can be found in Morselli, but they would have had to
be reworked from the original official statistics in order to be available in
Durkheims different form (Turner 1996: 370). For Turner the theoretical
achievement of Suicide is the construction of a synthetic explanation which
reduced a number of highly diverse relationships to a few basic social forces,
each of which can be illustrated by a table with a few perfect or near perfect
parallelisms (1996: 374).
Durkheim himself described this technique in The Rules, and says precisely:
what must be done is not to compare isolated variations, but series of variations,
systematically constituted, whose terms are correlated with each other in as
continuous a gradation as possible and which moreover cover an adequate range.
For the variations of a phenomenon only allow a law to be induced if they

Mike Gane: Durkheims scenography of suicide

231

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

express clearly the way in which the phenomenon develops in any given
circumstances.
(1982: 155, from a paragraph added to the text in 1895)

Durkheim then presents suicide as a possible topic for such analysis. But
what Durkheim does not do in The Rules is to define exactly what governs
the choice of the series to be analysed. He hopes that, for instance, by
comparing the curve which expresses a suicide trend over a sufficiently
extended period of time, with the variations which the same phenomenon
exhibits according to provinces, classes, rural or urban environments, sex, age,
civil status etc., we can succeed in establishing real laws (1982: 155). However,
if such parallelisms are discovered, why did he need a theory of causation at
all? This is Comtes and official positivisms own query: is not the search for
causes quite unnecessary, indeed a step back into the metaphysical (cause as
rationalized divine will); for positive methodology should stop at the discovery
of laws of co-variation which theory must then interpret (Cherkaoui in Cuin
1997: 166). But, for Durkheim, Comtes position is quite contradictory
because his own work is organized on the basis of the law of the three states
and is predictive yet can be predictive only if it understands causation
theoretically, and, without a causal theory, it is purely arbitrary for Comte to
consider the third stage to be the definitive stage for humanity, said Durkheim
(1982: 140).
If we examine Suicide in this light, it is clear that what is regarded as a basic
cause is a concept used to guide the construction of the analytic series, to
organize the presentation of the results from a large number of such series, and
to interpret the analysis. One such comparison is that concerning level of
education and suicide. Of course, both of these are concepts belong to a
certain order of facts (institutions). Then other similar institutional comparisons are introduced to the analysis, such as religion and suicide, marriage and
suicide, politics and suicide. Durkheim says of this approach to suicide
statistics that if without asking why they differ from one another, we will first
seek the social conditions responsible for them; then group these conditions in
a number of separate classes by their resemblances and differences, and we
shall be sure that a specific type of suicide will correspond to each of these
classes (1970: 147). On the basis of his series Durkheim draws up a final
summary of the relations discovered by concluding that suicide varies
inversely with the degree of integration of religious society, domestic society
and political society (1970: 208). Using a concept at a higher level of generality
(suicides are found across many such institutions where individuation is
progressive) he calls these instances of egoistic suicide (1970: 209). Thus it is
illusory if it is thought that Durkheim derives this theoretical concept from his
comparisons. If, in the exposition, Durkheim seeks to introduce the problem of
how suicides can be caused by excessive individualism after these empirical
relations have been established (1970: 209
/16), it is important to note that the
material has already been grouped by the concept of egoism.

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

232

Economy and Society

Durkheim did not invent these concepts, but the conceptual rigour with
which Durkheim developed his analyses of these rates was . . . novel (Turner
1996: 374). It was not just rigour but articulation, since Durkheim aimed to
show that the four terms egoism, altruism, fatalism and anomie do form a
theoretical system, one which can be used as the basis of a theory of social
equilibration and pathology. At the individual level these terms can be used for
an analysis of the process of suicide itself. However, although Durkheim
believed that there was causal chain by which morphology and cause were
ultimately united, he had not yet demonstrated it. As he had failed to
demonstrate the links in the chain from effect to cause, he nevertheless held
out the hope that the chain could be established from the other direction:
once the nature of the causes is known we shall try to deduce the nature of the
effects, since they will be both qualified and classified by their attachment to
their respective sources. . . . Thus we shall descend from causes to effects and
our aetiological classification will be completed by a morphological one which
can verify the former and vice versa.
(Durkheim 1970: 147)

The scenography
If Durkheim was convinced that, for the sociological study of suicide itself, the
mode of committing suicide could play no part, why is it that at a crucial point
in his analysis did he turn to examine what he calls individual forms of
suicide and attempts to provide a characterization of the act of suicide itself in
its various modalities? Why, after effectively inverting all the common-sense
notions of the priority of individual choice in the determination of suicide, did
he appear to examine again the site of the individual act? Why, in his own
words, did he need to return to the individual [to] study how these general
causes become individualized (1970: 151)? Durkheims reasoning suggests that
Acts and agents may thus be classified in a certain number of species; these
species also correspond in essential traits with the types of suicides we have
established. . . . They are like prolongations of these causes inside of
individuals (1970: 287). He then attempts to construct a more comprehensive
morphological table which suggests the fundamental forms of suicide are
always associated, not with specific means of committing suicide, but with
certain highly specific emotional states: egoistic suicide is performed with
apathetic emotional detachment, altruistic suicide performed with calm resolve
and anomic with agitated irritation and disgust (1970: 293). More complex
forms are discussed subsequently as combinations of these fundamental ones.
Durkheim confronts the problem of interpreting the actual means of
committing suicide in relation to these emotional states and he is surprised and
disappointed by his findings, because they do not support his expectations.
Looked at from the point of view of his morphology, he says, it

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

Mike Gane: Durkheims scenography of suicide

233

might . . . seem that suicide from melancholy finds its natural expression in
hanging. Actually it is most employed in the countryside, yet melancholy is a
state of mind more characteristic of the city (1970: 292, trans. modified). He
looks at the intuitive proposition that altruistic suicide would be carried out by
firearms. If altruistic suicides occur somewhat in inverse ratio to intellectual
development it is very probable that they are more common in Italy than in
France, and, because suicide by firearm is more common in Italy than France,
it may indicate a relationship with altruistic suicide. But it happens that in
France it is the intellectual classes . . . who kill themselves most often in this
way (1970: 292, trans. mod.). Thus in relating the suicide to the choice of
means employed to commit suicide he is forced to admit that the motives
which set his choice are of a totally different sort from that behind the resolve
of the act itself.
Two main reasons are given for this. First, the totality of customs and
usages of all kinds, placing one instrument rather than another at his
disposal . . . he tends to employ the means of destruction lying nearest to his
hand and made familiar to him by daily use. And, second, perhaps the most
powerful cause is the relative dignity attributed by each people, and by each
social group . . . to the different sorts of death. They are far from being
regarded as on the same plane. Some are considered nobler, others repel as
being vulgar and degrading (1970: 292
/3).
Thus we find that Durkheims analysis is carefully calculated. Analytically
there is the major division between morphology and aetiology, that is between
the actual forms of the act itself and the social causes of suicide. Then there is a
sub-division concerning what he calls, on the one hand, the emotional
character of the performance of the suicide (apathetic/energetic) and, on the
other, the means of committing suicide (hanging, drowning, shooting). The
important discovery of the absence of causal link between the latter and suicide
itself is reported dramatically:
intimately related as these two elements of a single act seem, they are actually
independent of each other. At least there are only external relations of
juxtaposition between them. For, while both depend on social causes, the social
conditions expressed by them are widely different.
(Durkheim 1970: 293)

Durkheim here presents one of the crucial conclusions of the study, and yet it
is passed over in a couple of paragraphs. It is, however, fundamental to the
whole logical structure of his book, since this fact is responsible for his forced
abandonment of the procedures he espoused in The Rules of Sociological
Method .
It is important to establish what is at issue here. The elements that
influenced Durkheims consideration in the analysis of framing and enactment
should be examined carefully. The first was an acceptance that any direct
observation of suicide was impossible; even the victims own account was
unreliable because the victim is only too apt to be mistaken concerning

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

234

Economy and Society

himself and the state of his feelings; he may believe he is acting calmly, though
at the peak of nervous excitement (1970: 146). Second, Durkheim was in the
process of developing a theory of homo duplex and suicidogenic currents that
act on individuals through unconscious forces (1970: 297). Durkheim thought
the tendencies to languorous melancholy, active renunciation or exasperated
weariness [are] derivative from these currents. These tendencies of the whole
social body, by affecting individuals, cause them to commit suicide (1970:
300). Durkheim was beginning to work with a sociology of social emotional
currents and states. These are sometimes direct causes or they are important
intermediate facts, inserted between causes and the individual suicide.

Dramatizations of suicide
Durkheim is frank about his discussion of the dramatization of individual
forms of suicide: it is not firmly based on empirical evidence but is constructed
around the notion of the victims emotional state through a logical deduction
from the theoretical forms established in the main part of the book and from
evidence drawn from a wide range of sources including literary fiction. The
dramatizations have the status of illustrations of the principal types of such
states and their variations. They are useful to the exposition of the argument of
the study, he says, in that they concretize the more abstract concepts, and they
add a new element to the primary classification at the level of morphological
analysis. And the frankness is evident: we can only emphasize the most
general and striking characteristics without even having an objective criterion
for making the selection . . . we do not forget that a deduction uncontrolled by
experiment is always questionable (1970: 278).
His illustrations are drawn from real historical accounts, from novels (by
Lamartine, Goethe and Chateaubriand) and his own made-up examples. What
he produced is sometimes called the psychological forms of suicide, and the
account is dominated by a theatricalization of mood or attitude resulting from
the way that the fundamental resolve of the impulsion is composed and acted
out. The characteristic mood of egoistic suicide, for example, is suggested by
the specific reflective detachment of the individual from social groups: its
mood is tranquil, meditative, intellectual, ironic. In this case there is often an
element of self-analysis reflecting the emptiness of existence. Egoistic suicide
has two main variations. The first is a lofty pure melancholic dreamy form
(and here the pain can be a made a feature of the suicide). Durkheim cites the
examples of a businessman who goes to an isolated forest to die of hunger
(during an agony of almost three weeks he . . . kept a diary), of another who
asphyxiates himself . . . and jots down his observations bit by bit and of
someone who builds a complicated apparatus to accomplish his own death
without having his blood stain the floor (1970: 281).
The second egoistic type is the Epicurean type, which is characterized by
indifference and scepticism (here the victim minimizes the pain of the suicide).

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

Mike Gane: Durkheims scenography of suicide

235

Durkheim theorizes this by examining Epicurus view that one should live as
long as it is interesting to live and, as sensual pleasure is a very slight link to
attach men to life, he exhorted them always to be ready to leave it, at the least
stimulus of circumstance. In this case philosophic, dream melancholy is
replaced by sceptical, disillusioned matter-of-factness, which becomes especially prominent at the final hour (1970: 282). The victim, who makes no long
preparations, wishes only to terminate a thenceforth meaningless existence.
The character of the act itself is thus without hate or anger and assigns
himself the single task of satisfying his personal needs (1970: 282).
The characteristic mood of altruistic suicide is not ironic or apathetic, but
by contrast energetic, active and often full of affirmative emotion. Altruistic
suicide . . . involves a certain expenditure of energy, since its source is a violent
emotion (1970: 283). This is the suicide carried out in the form of a duty or
obligation, where the individual kills himself at the command of his
conscience . . . thus, the dominant note of his act is the serene conviction
derived from the feeling of duty accomplished; the deaths of Cato and of
Commander Beaurepaire are historic types (1970: 283). There are three
forms: it can be obligatory or optional or another form he calls acute
(where the individual kills himself purely for the joy of sacrifice (1970: 223)).
The sacrificial form can be an affirmation of a unity with a deity or a sombre
form of appeasement to a deity. There is no scepticism or self-doubt here, but
rather firm resolve and ethical determination. Durkheims interpretation is
that the victim has a goal but one outside this life, which henceforth seems
merely an obstacle (1970: 225). In modern society the main site of such
suicides is military society. Durkheim gives an example (from Leroy) of the
mood by citing the victim, an officer: I have just hung myself, had lost
consciousness, the rope broke . . . My new preparations are complete, I shall
start again shortly but shall smoke a pipe first; the last I hope (1970: 284). Yet,
if there are a number of contrasting examples given, the underlying active
mood is constant:
there is no resemblance between the religious fervour of the fanatic who hurls
himself joyously beneath the chariot of his idol, that of the monk overcome by
acedia, or the remorse of the criminal who puts an end to his days to expiate his
crime. Yet beneath these superficially different appearances, the essential
features of the phenomenon are the same.
(Durkheim 1970: 283)

The anomic suicide is characterized by a mood of anger and disappointment. It is not ironic or empty, but full of pain and disillusionment. There is
blame and recrimination, and it is this form which is associated with the
combination homicide-suicide, the murder of someone accused of being the
origin of personal suffering. The emotions are troubled, anguished; life is full
of sharp conflicts. Instances include disappointment in love (e.g. Goethes
Werther) and disillusionment after the failure of a project. There is also a form

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

236

Economy and Society

in which, after a long struggle, the individual lapses into a sort of melancholy
resembling somewhat that of the intellectual egoist but without its languorous
charm but where the dominating note is a more or less irritated disgust with
life (Chateaubriands fictional Rene and the suicides described by Seneca).
As some commentators have noted, following indeed Durkheims own
remarks, this series of types of moods is illustrative and constructed as a
limited set of theoretically elaborated possibilities. But what is curious is how
the examples given here compare with those of the earlier substantive chapters.
There are long lists of the recorded instances of altruistic suicides in Hindu
and Buddhist cultures in Durkheims chapter devoted to this type (1970: 222
/
5), but none of these is taken up in the discussion of morphology for a
possible theory of social framing. On the other hand, the chapter on anomic
suicide does not give the details of single individual suicide. Durkheim, it
appears, opts for an impressionistic psychology of emotion, mood and energy,
rather than a structural theory in his scenography. And Durkheim is never
tempted to do a full and complete analysis through all the stages of any one
suicide. He distrusts the accounts of mood and of motive. This is left to
literary fiction. He concludes nonetheless that there are really very different
varieties of suicides, and these differences appear in the way suicide is
performed (la manie`re dont le suicide saccomplit ) (1970: 287). Some of these
forms combine, indeed two kinds have an affinity
/ egoistic and anomic. The
combined form, Durkheim suggests, is the basis for the suicide who is subject
to mood swings, mixed suicides where depression alternates with agitation,
dream with action, transports of desire with reflective sadness (1970: 288).
Anomic and altruistic causes combine to produce the classic suicides of the
besieged and Durkheim suggests the example of the mass suicide of the Jews
upon the capture of Jerusalem. Two causes act in the same direction, as in the
case of the military officer who commits suicide when forced to retire or the
bankrupt who spares his name and family the disgrace (1970: 70). Stoic
suicide can be considered a combined form, egoistic-altruistic, which combines
the most radical moral individualism and an immoderate pantheism (1970:
189
/90)

From the scenography back to causal analysis

Having worked from the analysis of suicides grouped by cause, and then
proceeded to examine the individual forms, Durkheim does subsequently
return to elements of more complex comparisons where he draws on both
kinds of analysis. One example is his attempt to refute the propositions of the
Italian school concerning the links between suicide and homicide. Ferri and
Morselli argued that suicide and homicide vary inversely. Looking at the
evidence, Durkheim concludes that suicide sometimes coexists with homicide,
sometimes they are mutually exclusive; sometimes they react under the same
conditions in the same way, sometimes in opposite ways, and the antagonistic

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

Mike Gane: Durkheims scenography of suicide

237

cases are the most numerous. His judgement is that the suicide which varies
in the same proportion with murder and that which varies inversely with it
cannot be of like nature (1970: 355). Durkheim uses his morphological types
to demonstrate that egoism and homicide depend on opposite conditions, for
egoistic suicide is one that is low in energy, languid and indifferent, while
homicide is a violent act inseparable from passion. These acts spring from
antagonistic causes, and consequently it is impossible for the one to develop
readily where the other flourishes. However, this is not the case with altruistic
suicide, but altruistic suicides in the advanced nations are rare. Not so with the
anomic case where the state of exasperation and irritated weariness . . . may
turn against the person himself or another according to circumstances (1970:
357). Throughout, Durkheim concentrates on the mood, its character as
passive or active, energetic or languid, as an expression of the force of the
social cause itself.
It is clear that Durkheim wanted to be able to use his morphological types in
order to make comparative analyses back in the direction of his basic causes.
But it is with respect not to motive or to means or to frame that he attempts
this, but only with respect to the characterization of the energy and mood
dominating the act. This because these energies seem to mirror the intensities
of the currents of suicide in the wider society.

Conclusions
The discovery (if this is the right word) that the means of committing suicide
does not express the cause or its derived psychological form prevented
Durkheim from using his preferred analytic sociological procedures. He claims
he has reversed his method and derived his morphological forms from his
aetiological analysis. The consequence of this substantive and methodological
problem is that Durkheim was indeed forced to break with the presupposition
of sociological positivism (drawing theory from the empirical material).
Durkheim says the function of his attempt at deriving the morphology from
the aetiological analysis was to make the abstract analysis more concrete, to
connect it to the details of daily experience (1970: 278). No doubt Durkheim
early on tried to elaborate a theory of the forms of the suicidal act. He claims
that the elaboration of the individual forms is deduced from the causal analysis,
but his theoretical distinction
/ between the egoistic suicide (where intellect is
over-nourished) and anomic suicide (where emotion is over-excited (1970:
287) precedes it. It appears, that in fact, that this is an independent theoretical
explanation for which there is no evidence at a sociological level at all.
He did not try to learn about suicide from any analyses of attempted suicide
or from data from more complex forms of suicide combined with other acts
such as murder or terrorism. In these cases the mode of attempting and
committing suicide is essential to the accomplishment of the act. Motive would
also have to be considered. Durkheim explicitly puts a consideration of motive

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

238

Economy and Society

to one side. Not only because he thought accounts of motives are intrinsically
unreliable, but also for two other reasons. First, because he found, from what
accounts there were, that the proportions given to different motives stayed
very stable over time irrespective of the variations of the total number of
suicides. Second, the motives given for suicides were reported in the same
proportions for widely disparate professions. Durkheim held these reports to
be inherently implausible (1970: 149
/51). Indeed, even at the early point of
the discussion of this problem in the text Durkheim argues that the reasons
ascribed to a suicide are no part of [the] current itself and consequently cannot
help to understand it (1970: 151). Thus Durkheim does not take the
opportunity here to supplement his analysis in another direction using these
statistics and those for the mode of committing suicide, with national
variations, that he provides elsewhere (1970: 291), to discuss the distributions
of reported motive and means as determined social facts. This is surprising,
because such an analysis would have provided more comparative materials for
his scenographies of individual forms. Comparison with scenographies of
attempted suicides would also have provided more complexity, but this, it
seems, is not what he wanted.
We can say, however, that the real function of his attempts at dramatization of his types of suicide was to disguise the fact that his admission that
the form of death chosen is therefore something entirely foreign to the very
nature of suicide (1970: 291) was not simply limited to the means of
committing suicide. Because he did not want to admit a radical break between
the cause of suicide and the mode of committing suicide Durkheim was
forced to contribute something new to the scenography of suicide. His actual
empirical contribution here was, however, quite modest. His attempt to
theorize it (using his terms egoism, altruism and anomie as a basis for a theory
of social currents) has been remarkably influential, partly because his
dramatizations of human passions present a highly consistent and plausible
supplementary confirmation of his main theses. His recourse to literary and
historical cases allows his text to appear to be able to deal with a complexity of
a number of discrete elements in the performance of a single act (1970: 293).
But this is an illusion.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank members of the conference on Scenographies of
Suicide, who debated this paper, and the anonymous Economy and Society
referees for their helpful comments and advice.

Notes
1 Lukes (1973: 191
/5) discusses five reasons for Durkheims choice.

Mike Gane: Durkheims scenography of suicide

239

2 See discussion in Might as well live, The Economist (30 October 2004: 35
/6),
which suggests that these falls in the number of suicides can be accounted for not by
changes in the levels of social integration, but by the fact that it is now more difficult to
commit suicide by some traditional methods (gassing, overdosing, etc.), while others
remain (hanging accounted for 52 per cent of suicides in 2002).
3 Pope has shown that Durkheim could have established connections, say for example,
with respect to alcoholism, but failed to do so (Pope 1976: 161
/5).

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

References
Alexander, J. (1988) Durkheimian
Sociology: Cultural Studies, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Baller, R. D. and Richardson, K. K.
(2002) Social integration, imitation,
and the geographical pattern of suicide,
American Sociological Review 67(6):
873
/88.
Baudelot, C and Establet, R. (1984)
Durkheim et Suicide, Paris: PUF.
/
/ and
/
/ (1997) A propos des
variations concomitantes, in C-H. Cuin
(ed.) Durkheim dun sie`cle a` lautre,
Paris: PUF, pp. 131
/52.
Besnard, P. (1973) Durkheim et les
femmes ou suicide inacheve, Revue
Francaise de Sociologie 14(1): 27
/61.
/
/ (1976) Anti- ou ante
durkheimianism? Contribution au debate
sure les statistiques officielles du suicide,
Revue Francaise de Sociologie 17(2):
313
/52.
/
/ (1987) LAnomie: ses usages et ses
fonctions dans la discipline sociologique
depuis Durkheim , Paris: PUF.
/
/ (1993) Anomie and fatalism in
Durkheims theory of regulation, in S.
Turner (ed.) Emile Durkheim: Sociologist
and Moralist , London: Routledge.
/
/ (2000) Marriage and suicide:
testing Durkheimian theory of marital
regulation a century later, in W. S. F.
Pickering and G. Walford (eds)
Durkheims Suicide, London: Routledge.
/
/, Borlandi, M. and Vogt, P.
(eds) (1993) Division du travail: Durkheim
un sie`cle apre`s, Paris: PUF.
Borlandi, M. (1994) Informations sur la
redaction du Suicide et sur letat du
conflit entre Durkheim et Tarde de 1895 a`
1897, Durkheim Studies 6 (Fall): 4
/13.

** **
**
**
**
**
**

**

/
/ and Mucchielli, L. (eds) (1995) La
Sociologie et sa methode: Le Re`gles de
Durkheim un siecle apre`s, Paris:
LHarmattan.
Cuin, C-H. (ed.) (1997) Durkheim dun
sie`cle a` lautre, Paris: PUF.
Durkheim, E. (1894) Les re`gles de la
methode sociologique, Revue
Philosophique 38: 168
/78.
/
/ (1970) Suicide: A Study in
Sociology, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
/
/ (1975) Durkheim: Textes, 3 vols, ed.
V. Karady, Paris: Minuit.
/
/ (1982) The Rules of Sociological
Method , London: Macmillan.
/
/ (2002) Suicide, Paris: Quadrige/
PUF.
Gane, M. (1988) On Durkheims Rules of
Sociological Method , London: Routledge.
Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim, His Life
and Work , Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Miller, W. W. (1996) Durkheim, Morals
and Modernity, Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press.
Mucchielli, L. (1998) La Decouverte
du social: naissance de la sociologie en
France, Paris: La Decouverte.
/
/ (2004) Mythes et histoire des
sciences humaines, Paris: La Decouverte.
Parsons, T. (1937) The Structure of
Social Action , New York: McGraw-Hill.
Pickering, W. S. F. and Walford, G.
(eds) (2000) Durkheims Suicide: A
Century of Research and Debate,
London: Routledge.
Pope, W. (1976) Durkheims Suicide,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Stockard, J. and OBrien, R. M.
(2002) Cohort effects on suicide rates:
international variations, American
Sociological Review 67(6): 854
/72.

**
**
**
**

**

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 01:30 13 November 2014

240

Economy and Society

Stones, R. (ed.) (1998) Key Sociological

Thinkers, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Tarde, G. (1969) On Communication
and Social Influence, Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Turner, S. (1983) Durkheim as a
methodologist, I: realism, teleology,
and action, Philosophy of the Social
Sciences 13: 425
/50.
/
/ (1984) Durkheim as a
methodologist, II: collective forces,

**

causation, and probability, Philosophy

of the Social Sciences 14: 51
/71.
/
/ (1986) The Search for a Methodology
of Social Science, Dordrecht: Reidel.
/
/ (ed.) (1993) Emile Durkheim:
Sociologist and Moralist , London:
Routledge.
/
/ (1996) Durkheim among the
statisticians, Journal of the History of
the Behavioural Sciences 32(4): 354
/78.

**
**
**

Mike Gane is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social Sciences at

Loughborough University. He is the author of On Durkheims Rules of
Sociological Method (Routledge, 1988) and The Radical Sociology of Durkheim
and Mauss (Routledge, 1992). His most recent publications are French Social
Theory (Sage, 2003), and, edited with N. Gane, Roland Barthes, 3 vols (Sage,
2004) and Umberto Eco, 3 vols (Sage, 2005).