Suicide (Durkheim book)

Suicide: A Study in Sociology (French: Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie) is an 1897 book written by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. It was the second methodological study of a social fact in the context of society (it was preceded by a sociological study by a Czech author, later the president of Czechoslovakia: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Der Selbstmord als soziale Massenerscheinung der Gegenwart, 1881, Czech 1904). It is ostensibly a case study of suicide, a publication unique for its time that provided an example of what the sociological monograph should look like.

According to Durkheim,

the term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.