Émile Durkheim was a pioneering French sociologist who wrote Suicide: A Study in Sociology among other research that helped to establish sociology as a formal science at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
In the sociology theory course I’m currently taking as a college undergrad, we’ve studied Marx and Engels, we’ve read Max Weber, and now we’re studying Émile Durkheim. While reading Marx, Engels, and Weber, I became increasingly frustrated with the archaic worldviews and conclusions that are no longer relevant to today’s societies postulated by these nineteenth century thinkers. I formed the personal opinion that while scholars should be aware of these texts, they shouldn’t form the entirety of a modern sociology theory course. A historical foundation perhaps, but not the only material. Aren’t there modern sociologists?
Enter Durkheim, and my inner frustration with the course material evaporated into pure shock. Émile Durkheim used the data showing regular rates of suicides across countries and years as evidence that sociology should be regarded as an academic science. This premise is valid. However, in his book analyzing suicide rates, Durkheim explains the differential in the suicide rate of men versus women by stating that women commit suicide less often than men because their intellect is less developed. He writes that women’s brains are ‘rudimentary rather than highly developed’ (215), that ‘fundamentally traditionalist by nature, they [..] have no great intellectual needs’ (166), and ‘generally speaking, her [a woman’s] mental life is less developed’ (272). In a further passage, Durkheim says that while women are less intelligent than men, therefore committing suicide less often, the same does not hold true for the Negro race. In the Negro race, he posits, women have been shown to have a higher degree of intelligence than men, and while he had no conclusive data for suicide rates among Negroes, he stated that anecdotal evidence showed Negro women also commit suicide more often than men. (167) Thus, he further tied the act of suicide to an intelligence factor while simultaneously placing Black people on an entirely separate level of intelligence even than women of the white race.
These unscientific, misogynist, and racist views were certainly nothing new during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so in many ways Durkheim was merely a product of his time. However, he was a scholar, and he should have dug more deeply into the data rather than simply spouting the popular ideas of the day, nor should he have made a hypothesis regarding Negro suicide without corresponding data.
Regardless of what Durkheim believed and taught in his day, today we recognize those fallacies for what they are, white male supremacy. I wanted to understand why this material is still being taught in college courses so I asked to speak with my professor. The professor agreed that Durkheim was wrong in his ‘dismissal’ of women, but his view was that Durkheim is important enough in the sociological canon that we need to build on the good in his writings and ignore his hypotheses for the differential in the suicide rate between men and women, or come up with a better one.
I disagree with my professor. Durkheim didn’t ‘dismiss’ women, he posited a hypothesis that they were inherently less intelligent and developed than men. When I think of all the decades of Durkheim being taught to young men in university classes, I can imagine how those beliefs colored generations of minds as to the intelligence of women and the validity of Black people as humans, and not only helped to shape and form racist, misogynist beliefs but also validated them. Should we still be teaching Durkheim in light of the generations of wrongs perpetrated against women and people of color that his texts energized and condoned? Scholars who wish to further some of Durkheim’s ideas, such as the hypothesis that sociology is a valid science due to the invariable rates of population data such as births, deaths, and suicide can write new books citing those ideas of Durkheim’s that have stood the test of time. They can build on the initial troves of data cited by Durkheim. But Durkheim’s texts should not be taught as core sociological curriculum in university, with or without a weak apology from the professor that ‘this is no longer the way we think.’ Durkheim’s hypotheses regarding the intelligence of women are no small part of his work, they form entire chapters of his book on suicide. These views have already done much damage to society and will continue to do further damage as long as they are taught in academia.
If you are a sociology professor or scholar, I would love to hear your opinion. Should Durkheim still be taught? Or not?
References:
Spaulding, John A, George Simpson, and Emile Durkheim. 1950. *Suicide: A Study in Sociology* Riverside: Free Press.
