A Sop to Cerberus: Response to Besnard

Abstract

Besnard raises a variety of interesting and provocative points his commentary. Some of them make technical corrections which I freely accept, and I acknowledge that Besnard's command of French is superior to mine. So, for instance, I may have erred suggesting a footnote that Durkheim's use of category (in French, filles) leaves it unclear as to whether it refers not only to women who have never but also to ones. Still, Durkheim's discussion Divorce by Mutual Consent (hereafter, DMC) is ambiguous as to whether tabular data he presents under category of are meant to refer to divorced to all women who have been married, or those presently married. It is only if reader thinks of going to Table 22 of Suicide that he will realize Durkheim means just by married women, and that consequently latter's treatment of passage question DMC is that of a contextual variable. As text reads (in either French or English), divorce does not appear unfavorable to married might seem puzzling, given data presented. While I do provide note 2 of my article an explication of Durkheim's concept of coefficient of preservation, it might have been more accurate or more precise to have stated on page 1028 the greater occurrence of sexual anomie . . . , lower suicide rates of wives relation to those of unmarried women, and correspondingly, higher that of husbands relative to unmarried men. I thought context of discussion made it clear, just as it is case where Durkheim states in countries where there is no divorce, is less protected than husband . . . where is practiced . . . , husband is less protected than wife (a, 266; b, 298f) without bothering to make explicit that what is related here is married to unmarried persons of same sex, rather than wives and husbands directly. In any case, I wholeheartedly agree with Besnard that there is no substitute for using original text, and I acknowledge succumbing at times to temptation of using English translations which are more widely available to American readers. However, Mr. Besnard makes more serious accusations which cannot go unchallenged. While thanking me for having cited his 1973 article, he chides me same breath for not having read it completely. Let