A Critical Analysis Of Durkheim's On Suicide

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Within Durkheim’s text On Suicide, he arrives at his arguments by first explaining why an existing argument is invalid. There are several examples of this method within the text, however there are three prominent ones that will be the main focus of this analysis.
The first example of this method would be Durkheim’s description and then rejection of the validity of insanity as a driving force of suicide. Durkheim distinguishes that insanity is too broad of a term and is not easily backed up by statistics when analyzing its influence on suicide. However, Durkheim argues one exception to this and he labels it ‘monomania’, “the monomaniac is a patient whose consciousness is perfectly healthy except on one point: he exhibits only one flaw and this …show more content…

Because the ratio of married men’s deaths to unmarried was consistent in other countries, it lead to the assumption that married life brought with it an increased chance of suicide. But after looking deeper into this assumption it becomes evident that this is an imbalanced ratio as many unmarried men are under the age of 16 where the chance of suicide is a rarity, creating a gap in the suicide population in relation to age (Durkheim, 2006: 179-180). The ratios are similar in Italy and France, when the numbers are modified to take into account the age barrier the numbers fall into a more equal ratio with married men just slightly above the number of unmarried men. With further investigation it can be see that the institution of marriage actually reduces the risk of suicide and the state of being unmarried aggravates this tendency. Finally, it is decided that comparing these two groups generically isn’t possible so they are broken down into different stages of life to gain a more balanced population, however the statistics available only offered suicide and age not marital status. After establishing four rules that arose from the information (Durkheim, 2006: 186-189), it is decided that this argument of married men killing themselves more frequently is abolished. The institution of marriage provides mainly protection not

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