Abstract
Those are the familiar words of Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, published in 1897. I am concerned not with the truth of his opinion, but with how it became possible to think those novel thoughts. We here have the idea of laws, acting upon individuals, demonstrated by statistics, and not arising simply from facts about individuals by interaction and composition. These laws are autonomous, holistic, and not merely the summary of the determined choices of members of the population. This idea was unthinkable at the start of the nineteenth century. At that time one had the gaunt universal determinism of a Laplace, or the organic vitalism of a Bichat. The one said that statistical phenomena arise from minute fully deterministic causes. When we cannot rise above probabilities, it is because of our ignorance. The other denied determinism in the biological sphere, but made no space for statistics: the physician and the histologist must understand the vital workings of an individual, who might be typical of the species, but whose functioning could not be summarized by an average. Yet by the end of the century there was a family of conceptions, in numerous fields, akin to Durkheim’s. Durkheim illustrates a phenomenon that I call the taming of chance. Note that Bichat and Laplace were equally frightened by chance!
Usually when collective tendencies or passions are spoken of, we tend to regard these expressions as mere metaphors and manners of speech with no real signification but a sort of average among a certain number of individual states. They are not considered as things, forces sui generis which dominate the consciousness of single individuals. None the less this is their nature, as is brilliantly shown by the statistics of suicide.1
The present paper is an extended version of my “Suicide au XIXe siècle”, pp. 168–186 of Anne Fagot (ed.) Médecine et probabilité (Paris: Institut de recherche universitaire d’histoire de la connaissance des idées et des mentalités, 1982), and was written in 1986. A number of themes are developed differently in my The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), which includes a long chapter on Durkheim, and also a study of the idea of normalcy along lines first proposed by Canguilhem, n. 2 infra.
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Notes
Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide: étude de sociologie (Paris: F. Alcan, 1897). J.A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (trans.) Suicide: A Study in Sociology ( Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951 ), p. 306.
Georges Canguilhem, Le Normale et la pathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). C.R. Fawcett (trans.), The Normal and the Pathological ( Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1978 ).
Emile Durkheim, “Suicide et natalité: étude de statistique morale”, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 1888, 13: 446–463.
Emile Durkheim, “La Sociologie en France au XIXe siècle”, a lecture of 1900; see p. 113 of E. Durkheim, La Science sociale et l’action ( Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970 ).
Joseph Lottin, Quetelet: statisticien et sociologue ( Louvain: Institut Superieur de Philosophie, 1912 ), pp. 356–367.
Pierre Guillaume Fréderic Le Play, Les Ouvriers Européens (Paris, Imprimerie Impériale: 1855). Les Ouvriers Européens: études sur les travaux, la vie domestique et la condition morale des populations ouvriers de l’Europe d’après les faits observés de 1827 à 1879,6 vols. (Tours: A. Marne et fils, 1879).
C. H., “Selbstmord in Preussen”, Zeitschrift des königlich preussischen statistischen Bureaus, 1871, 9: 1–76.
Hans Rost, Bibliographie des Selbstmords mit textlichen Einführungen zu jedem Kapitel (Augsburg: Literarische Institut von Haas Grabherr, 1927). Der Selbstmord als sozialstatistische Erscheinung (Köln: J.B. Bachem, 1905). Der Selbstmord in den deutschen Stadten ( Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1912 ).
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Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of Moral Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 ).
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See C.C. Heyde and E. Seneta, LJ. Bienaymé: Statistical Theory Anticipated ( New York: Springer, 1977 ).
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I. Hacking, “The Autonomy of Statistical Law”, pp. 3–20 in N. Rescher (et), Scientific Explanation and Understanding: Essays on Reasoning and Rationality in Science ( Latham, Mass.: University Press of America, 1983 ).
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Hacking, I. (1994). How Numerical Sociology Began by Counting Suicides: From Medical Pathology to Social Pathology. In: Cohen, I.B. (eds) The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 150. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3391-5_2
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