Durkheim Scholarship and Suicidology: Different Ways of Doing Research in History of Social Thought, and Different Interpretations of Durkheim's Suicide

Abstract

Steven Stack has argued that we failed to do an adequate review of the relevant literature. Our paper (Breault and Barkey, 1982) was not a review article. We used what we thought were the most relevant materials, and materials that we believed had significantly advanced research in the field. We deliberately ignored a tradition in the Durkheim literature which is overly concerned with indirect tests of Durkheim's theory. (One theory in this general tradition is status integration theory [Gibbs and Martin, 1964]). At its worst, this tradition has interpreted Durkheim's variables incorrectly; has employed indicators that only poorly correspond to the variables used; has assumed that in order for Durkheim's theory to be tested, it must first be transformed; and has argued that Durkheim's theory fails to explain suicide in a logical sense. Stack's work is far too dependent upon the assumptions of this older tradition. Most of the work we cited (e.g., Danigelis and Pope, 1979; Krohn, 1978; Marshall, 1981; Pope and Danigelis, 1981; Stark et al. 1983) suggest that direct tests of Durkheim's theory are feasible in a methodological sense and that this is the most useful approach in terms of Durkheim scholarship. In the present forum, we will discuss some of the work of this other tradition. Appropriately, we focus on three of Stack's papers. In Stack's (1979) article on Durkheim's fatalistic suicide, he tests Durkheim's theory with indicators of totalitarianism and finds support for Durkheim's theory. This enterprise represents a failure on the part of Stack to understand the role of fatalistic suicide in Durkheim's work. Durkheim argued that fatalistic suicide is rare in modern society (is said to have historical interest and little contemporary importance [Durkheim, 1966:276]), and that modern society is characterized by anomie and egoism. Moreover, rather than fatalism being the typical reaction to oppression in modem society, Durkheim argued that the common mode of expression is anomic protest. Any test of fatalistic suicide with modern data, then, is wholly illegitimate-if, that is, one is testing Durkheim's theory. Turning to Stack's (1981) paper on religion and suicide, the work of Pope and Danigelis (1981) and Stark et al. (1983) brings out (as Stack fails to do) the important finding that the thrust of Durkheim's theory is correct: religion