Consider Emile Durkheim’s approach to the study of suicide. Why does he associate egoistic suicide with modern society and altruistic suicide with pre-modern suicide?
Emile Durkheim goes to great lengths in this article to describe the many different types of suicide and how they affect society. He believes that social influences have a large part to play with suicide rates in different countries. He looks to take the matter away from the individual and focus on how and why suicide rates among different classes, genders, and age groups are similar throughout different countries. Durkheim goes on to discuss the different reasons why people may commit suicide. These include people been over- integrated into society or altruistic suicide, under integrated into society or egotistic suicide, having too much moral regulation or fatalistic suicide and having too little moral regulation or anomic suicide. This assignment will discuss all these different factors and will comment on why Durkheim associates different types of suicide to different types of suicide.
Durkheim defines suicide as “The term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or a negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result” (E. Durkheim, suicide: A Study in Sociology, pg 214). A positive action like shooting or stabbing oneself is the same as refusing to eat food knowing that you will die as a direct result of your actions or non actions. There are exceptions to this definition. Durkheim takes the influence away from individual cases and concentrates on the individual in society. He looks at how certain influences in society can influence a person in society. He does not consider the emotional side of suicide but he looks at the details and quotas of “voluntary deaths” that are posted by each country. This is the reason he