Emile Durkheim Suicide

This essay will assess the book of Emile Durkheim's study suicide, using reference to Durkheim's theory a conclusion will be provided of my considerations towards the study that is so widely regarded by sociologists and criminologists as a 'classic' study. Emile Durkheim was born in Epinal the French province of Lorraine on April 15th 1858. 'Durkheim was the first French academic sociologist' and 'his life was dominated throughout by his academic career' (Coser, 2013). Durkheim's career mainly consisted of four main works, with three of them being conducted in the 1890s. Durkheim's study Le suicide was first published in 1897, his aim was to express how 'action can be shaped by society' rather than 'exclusively on individual factors thus belonging

Durkheim's work was usually conducted by using two main approaches, positivist and functionalist. He decided to conduct a study on suicide because Sociology was a new and controversial field in the late 19th century, and he wanted to prove that Sociology could exist as a science 'he himself must establish the groups he wishes to study in order to give them the homogeneity and the specific meaning necessary for them to be susceptible of scientific treatment' (Durkheim, 1897). Durkheim chose the topic of suicide because there was an increasing number of suicide statistics within Europe in the late 19th century, 1840 in particular, this was because suicide was not recorded before then. By studying this topic he could investigate the social influences that led people to suicide, this meant Durkheim could conduct a scientific investigation that detailed why suicide was not thoroughly categorised as a psychological matter but also a sociological one 'Since suicide is an individual action affecting the individual only, it must seemingly depend exclusively on individual factors, thus belonging to psychology alone. Is not suicides resolve usually explained by his temperament, character, antecedents and private history?' (Durkheim,