Durkheim was certainly not the first one to point this out.
Since the middle of the 19th century, statisticians who collected and
analyzed demographic figures and crime statistics that had been compiled with
more and more precision, were amazed by the regularity of suicide rates.
One way to express their surprise was to say,
at the 1st of January, we can already predict with a small
margin of error how many people in the coming year will take their own lives.
How many in a certain district of country, in a given profession, how many men,
how many women, how many young people, how many of the elderly?
And of course one cannot say beforehand who will do it, but
one can describe the demographic and the sociological characteristics of the people
who will do it even before they do it.
Now this really was a source of wonder for those [FOREIGN],
the moral statisticians, the criminologists,
the proto-sociologists, and also the amateur philosophers.
There were even those who believed that this observation demonstrated that
there is no such thing as a free will.
Now that was not at all the kind of argument that Durkheim wanted to go into.
Durkheim wanted to better understand the regularity of suicide rates.
And to do that, he first had to get rid of
all kinds of arguments that he felt pointed in the wrong direction.
Of course those arguments very often involved reduction to the level of
the individual human being,
exactly that kind of explanation that he rejected, as we have seen.
For example, he tries to show, using a large amount of
quantitative data that suicide rates have nothing to do with
the supposed mental illnesses of certain individuals.
Or with the proclivity towards depression that might run in the family or
that is supposed to be more pronounced in certain human races or sub-races.
A theory that he may have thrown away a bit too hastily is the theory
defended by one of his adversaries in the department of mass psychology.
Monsieur Gabriel [FOREIGN] that sometimes
suicides are propagated through processes of Imitation.