Revisiting Durkheim’s Sociology of Suicide: A Constructive Framework for Unification and Contemporary Understanding

This book explicates Durkheim’s theory of suicide, reveals its ambiguities and contradictions, and sets forward a new framework to unify its various hypotheses. Since Durkheim never fully integrated his theory, this has led to varying interpretations of Durkheim’s theories among scholars, and subsequently, this caused a failure to create a cumulative body of findings about suicide due to inconsistency.This book hopes to remedy that condition by clarifying and unifying his overall theory, so it can be understood and tested for sociological theory and thinking today.Durkheim produced his groundbreaking treatise, Suicide, establishing sociology as a distinctive field of study and demonstrating that social forces are real and can be studied scientifically.He argued that the volume, types, and patterns of suicide are a result of the social forces generated by the moral structure of each society and named these forces integration and regulation.This demonstrated that suicide is not alien to