This argument leads to very simple methodological rule. Explain social effects by relating them to antecedent social effects. Never leave the level of social reality when you try to make sense of social effects, and that is exactly what Durkheim did in the book that he published only two years later in 1897. Under a title that sounds like a battle cry, [FOREIGN]. Suicide, a sociological study. Now let me first say a few words about this disturbing subject matter. Sociology teachers love to show their students the elegant argument and the clever classifications that Durkheim employs in this book. They may even become so spellbound by his reasonings that they forget for a second that for many of the students, this is not a subject that they approach with the detachment of the professional sociologist. It is something that may remind them of painful events in their private lives. Many people have known somebody who've tried to take his or her own life. And the subject may bring back sad memories and I'm aware of that, but in sociology there are many painful subjects that need to be discussed. Think for example of such topics as rape, or torture, or genocide. Sociology isn't just about consensus and harmony and cooperation. It's often about conflict, oppression, violence and pain. Durkheim's arguments may sound detached and technical, but he had actually witnessed a case of suicide from nearby. His cool approach was not at all the result of a lack of empathy. It was the outcome of his conviction that in order to study something that strikes you emotionally, you have to try to take your academic distance. And remember, when he wrote about suicide, Durkheim was not a value-free sociologist. Because he also hopes that his study could suggest some measures that might lower the suicide rates, at least in some sectors of society where they were in his eyes pathologically high. The incidence of suicide is, as we already saw, surprisingly predictable when you look at large numbers of cases. 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. Climate theories are discarded and speculations about the influence of the position of the stars and the planets are thrown away as well, always on the basis of an analysis of suicide statistics. Having destroyed all those rivaling theories, Durkheim now has cleaned the slate, so to speak. Now he is in a position where he can develop his own sociological theory of suicide.
