When Émile Durkheim published Suicide in 1897, sociology as a discipline had a credibility problem. Critics argued that only individuals and their private psychology are truly real — that "society" was just a convenient word for a crowd of separate people, not a force with any causal power of its own. Durkheim picked, deliberately, the most private and individual act imaginable to test that claim: a person's decision to end their own life. If even that turned out to follow patterns no individual psychology could explain, the argument that only individuals are real would have to give ground.
A very private act, tracked at a population level
Durkheim wasn't interested in why any specific person took their own life — he set that question aside almost entirely. He gathered decades of European suicide statistics across countries, religions, marital statuses and seasons, and looked instead at why the rate varied so consistently between groups. Protestant regions had reliably higher suicide rates than Catholic ones. Married people had lower rates than single people. Rates fell during wartime and rose during both economic booms and economic depressions alike. None of that pattern can be explained by looking at any one troubled individual — it only shows up when you step back and look at the group.
Naming the different kinds of social pressure
Durkheim organised these patterns into named types, defined by a group's structure rather than any person's private state of mind. Egoistic suicide rises where social integration is weak — individuals left with too few binding ties to a group, which he used to help explain the Protestant–Catholic gap, attributing it partly to Catholicism's tighter communal structure against Protestantism's greater emphasis on individual conscience. Anomic suicide rises where social regulation breaks down — sudden disruption to the norms that usually govern expectations, which is why rates climbed during both booms and busts: either shock unsettles the rules people had been relying on. Altruistic suicide, at the opposite extreme, occurs where integration is so strong the individual is subsumed almost entirely into the group. In each case, the explanation lives in the shape of the group, not in the biography of the person.
What we're still unsure about
The core claim — that social structure shapes outcomes no individual-level explanation fully accounts for — is now broadly accepted well beyond this one study. What's held up less cleanly is Durkheim's specific evidence. Later scholars, most influentially Jack Douglas in the 1960s, argued that the official statistics Durkheim treated as objective data were themselves shaped by how coroners and officials in different countries and religious cultures chose to classify ambiguous deaths — meaning cultural bias may have been baked into the numbers before Durkheim ever analysed them. The dispute isn't over whether social factors matter. It's over whether Durkheim's particular statistics were clean enough to prove it the way he claimed.
This sits inside Structural Functionalism (Durkheim, Parsons), one of seven topics in Social Theory, one of four domains in Sociology, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.