Overview

This book explicates Durkheim’s theory of suicide, reveals its ambiguities and contradictions, and sets forward a new framework to unify its various hypotheses. Since Durkheim never fully integrated his theory, this has led to varying interpretations of Durkheim’s theories among scholars, and subsequently, this caused a failure to create a cumulative body of findings about suicide due to inconsistency. This book hopes to remedy that condition by clarifying and unifying his overall theory, so it can be understood and tested for sociological theory and thinking today. Durkheim produced his groundbreaking treatise, Suicide, establishing sociology as a distinctive field of study and demonstrating that social forces are real and can be studied scientifically. He argued that the volume, types, and patterns of suicide are a result of the social forces generated by the moral structure of each society and named these forces integration and regulation. This demonstrated that suicide is not alien to society but instead is a byproduct of the way society is organized. Though his work is over a century old, the problems it confronts, of society’s inability to maintain unity and cohesion in the face of increasing diversity, are as relevant today as in Durkheim’s time. By illuminating the contours of Durkheim’s famous volume and providing a critical new perspective that shows how its features work, this volume will be an essential resource for sociologists and social theorists of classical and historical sociology, as well as a key volume for courses in sociology of mental health and cultural sociology. It will also serve as an important guide for students and instructors in studying a foundational text and thinker for the discipline.

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9781041133346

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Reviews

This book offers a useful survey of Durkheim’s theory of suicide from the perspective of present day sociology. It is an introductory work that disentangles layers of interpretative threads around this key text, and provides a notable framework for understanding the relevance of Durkeim’s foundational text for today. Stephen Turner, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida This is one of the most interesting books on Durkheim in recent years, let alone one focused on Durkheim’s foundational text. The book outlines Durkheim’s categorization of “types of suicide” very clearly, and the underlying theory of socio-cultural integration of societies. It not only helps sort through the layers of interpretation around Durkheim’s text that have built over the years in a helpful way, but introduces its own, and new, critique of Durkheim’s analysis; and moreover, it offers some ways to clarify Durkheim’s meanings on some of the ambiguous statements that he made in Suicide. It offers something new for today’s readers and students, and shows how this pivotal, founding sociology text is still relevant to today’s society and our understanding of it. Jonathan H. Turner, University Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Author Information

Bernard B. Berk is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. He has taught at a wide range of universities including UCLA, UCSB, University of New Hampshire, CSULA, CSUN, and CSUSD. His areas of specialty include theory, deviance, criminology, penology, and mental illness. He has received numerous teaching awards.

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