Suicide in pre-industrial England.

Abstract

Suicide has for more than a century been viewed as a phenomenon typical of 'modern' civilizations. Whether explained as a consequence of the declining strength of traditional religious sanctions or the result of advancing industrialization and urbanization or some combination of these factors since the second half of the nineteenth century both sociologists and historians have attempted to construct social explanations of suicide on the basis of official suicide statistics. In Britain, as well as in most of Europe, recorded suicide rates showed a steady acceleration from the early nineteenth century, when such statistics first began to be collected widely. The official suicide rates varied enormously between one part of Europe and another, but almost all shared the rising trend. And, contemporaneous with the early sociologists such as Durkheim, students of that other potentially competing science, psychology, began to put forward their own explanations of suicide. Suicidal behaviour could be explained, according to the psychologists, in terms of mental illness and the varying states of individual consciousness. These two master paradigms began as rivals and, at least in the study of suicide, have continued to present alternative explanations, although they have shared a common tendency to limit their research into suicide to the nineteenth century and later. Emile Durkheim's investigation of suicide should be seen not only within the context of his battle to legitimize sociology as a science of human society, but also within its own ideological context. His own anxiety about what he felt to be a contemporary crisis weakening European civilization may have consciously or unconsciously moved him to investigate suicides. In doing so he confirmed, in effect, his own diagnosis of a 'pathological state just now accompanying the march of civilization' through the 'evidence' of rising suicide rates. The procedure then only had to be reversed to demonstrate the discovery of a new tool in human science. The level of suicide could be used as a barometer of the social health or morbidity of given societies. Hence sociology had proved itself, and Durkheim was able to demonstrate his own concern about the state of western society. Durkheim's model of suicide can thus be read both as its creator explicitly intended it to be as a value-free explanation of a social phenomenon and as a social polemic for his own time. Durkheim's two crucial variables in explaining the 'rise' of suicide, the level of social integration (i.e. shared values, norms, etc.) and the level of social regulation, could be applied to the study of the ills of late nineteenth-century European society. After all, Durkheim and many others in his