10 - Interregnum on Suicide (1897)

Summary

Durkheim's next book after The Rules was his Le suicide, first published in France in 1897. From our present perspective, Suicide is a remarkable book, not for what it has to say about its intended subject matter, but for how little it has to say about either the concept of the collective consciousness of society or the concepts of crime and punishment generally. There is also, as I say, no mention of either the concept of mechanical or organic solidarity – although there is a certain amount of talk of organic and inorganic conditions in society – but instead the argument about pathology and morphology is restated here almost word for word from The Rules. I have already cited in Part I of this study what Durkheim has to say in Suicide on the subject of the common and collective consciousness and this does not need to be repeated here. What we can do here however is look very briefly at what Durkheim has to say on the subject of suicide as a crime – and it is remarkable how little he has to say about this subject given his interest in crime and punishment in his earlier work – and we will also look in detail at what he has to say here about the possibility that crime is morphological for societies characterized by organic solidarity.