Durkheim's weakest monograph? A Popperian reconsideration of Suicide

Wout Ultee

Chapter 17 in The Elgar Companion to Émile Durkheim, 2026, pp 289-309 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Around 1900 Émile Durkheim reinvigorated sociology by taking it as the science of societies and publishing monographs following scientific methods. Half a century later Karl Popper corrected long established ideas about the methods of the natural and social sciences, and these alterations now are influential in mainstream sociology. This contribution determines the extent to which Durkheim's Suicide adheres to Popperian standards for problem selection, theory formation, and testing by novel evidence. It does so, in all three respects. Durkheim regarded an inventory of all conditions leading an individual to commit suicide as infeasible, and opted to explain suicide rates. In the course of Suicide, his explanations of suicide rates increased in falsifiability, becoming more and more informative. To test these many-layered explanations, he analyzed until then unseen tables with suicide rates for inhabitants of France according to all combinations of their sex, age, marital status, and place of residence.

Keywords: Suicide rates; Multi-layered theories; Unfalsifiable hypotheses; More informative hypotheses; Severe testing; Fatalistic suicide (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035322923
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