Overview
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was a French sociologist and one of the founders of modern sociology. His 1897 work Suicide: A Study in Sociology established the foundational framework for the sociological study of self-inflicted death and remains the field's primary organizing lens more than a century later.
Key Contributions / Features
- Suicide (1897) — proposed the integration × regulation typology: egoistic suicide (too little social integration), altruistic suicide (too much), anomic suicide (too little regulation), fatalistic suicide (too much). The framework explained cross-group variation in suicide rates as a function of social structure rather than individual psychology.
- Established that social facts — rates, norms, institutions — have causal force independent of individual-level characteristics, a foundational claim of sociology as a discipline.
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