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Dictionary definition: suicide
- Article from:
- A Dictionary of Sociology
- Author:
Copyright© A Dictionary of Sociology 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998. (Hide copyright information)
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suicide
Commonly defined as the intentional killing of oneself. Émile
Durkheim
, in his classic study
Suicide
(1897), defined it as ‘every case of death which results directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act, accomplished by the victim himself which he knows must produce this result’. Controversially he did not require that the death must be intentional, arguing that intentions are hard to identify. Consequently he extended the definition, including for example heroic military deaths, where there is no chance of survival but no specific intention to kill oneself.
Durkheim chose to study suicide because it seemed to illustrate perfectly the necessity for and ...