Durkheim’s Social Fact and Suicide

• Social Fact

– The Subject of Sociology

– Normal and Abnormal
– Social Fact as things
– Determining Factors

• Concept of Social Fact

– Ways of acting, Thinking and Feeling

– Exteriority – External to Individual
– Generality – Material and Moral
– Morphological – Material objects
– Institutions – Rules, Norms and Values
– Collective Representatives – Social Values, Collective
Ideals
• Mechanical Solidarity
– Solidarity of Resemblance
– Society is Coherent
– Not differentiated

• Organic Solidarity
– Coherent Unity
– Through differentiation
– Differentiation of Function and Structure
Types of Social Facts

Normal
– Certain Social Facts – Normal
– Some Petty Crimes – Normal

Pathological
– Any deviations- Pathological
– Certain crimes - Pathological
• The Study of Social facts

– Growth in Division of Labour

– Growth in Population, Volume, Density

– Leads to growth in Social Difference

• Objectivity towards Social Facts

– Externally observable characteristics

– Moulds in which actions shaped

Criticism

– Social Fact – Resistant to Change

– Durkheim’s Sociology – Conservative

– Human Nature, Ideals, Variables

Suicide – an example of Social fact

– Suicide as social fact

– Not an individual act of suicide
– Suicide rates disclosed by ‘statistics’
– Suicide – an affect of imbalance of social structural force
– He defined suicide without reference to mental elements

– Statistics showed suicide rates constant

– Hence collective tendency towards the suicide

– Collective Tendencies produce classification of types of suicides

– Too much individualism or too much social pressure

– Two pairs of imbalances –

• Degree of integration (Egoistic and Altruistic suicide)

• Degree of Moral Regulation (Anomic Suicide)