63
Review
ArticleLearning
about Suicide: Who Would Bear the Whips and Scorns of Time?
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab006ra
MichaelErben
University of Southampton, UK, mde@soton.ac.uk
Émile Durkheim 2002
[1897]: Suicide: a study in sociology. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415278317
paper. 374 pp. £9.99 paper.
Address
for correspondence: Michael Erben, Centre for Biography and Education, Research
and Graduate School of Education, University of Southampton, Southampton,
Hampshire, SO17 1BJ, UK; Email: mde@soton.ac.uk
By way of a review of the
reissue of Durkheim's Suicide this article offers an evaluation of
Durkheim's monograph in the light of current thinking about suicide and the
recent and growing work in Durkheimian studies. The question of moral order
is also addressed and is related to social capital theory and the development
of communitarianism. The matter of increased and unpredicted suicide rates
among young men (especially in prison) in the UK is discussed and linked
to educational provision for disaffected pupils and to the development of
sustainable individual identity. It is posited that a conceptualization of
this problem through Durkheimian sociology can provide a better understanding
of the phenomenon than many existing approaches to the issue.
DURKHEIM
From Samson and Socrates to Ophelia and Anna Karenina; from Judas Iscariot
and Lucretia to Simone Weil and Sylvia Plath; from Captain Oates to Yukio
Mishima, and, more recently to Dr David Kell~ the roll of well known suicides
stays with us. The brave, the foolhardy, the misguided, the shameful, the
sad and weary, the deluded, the honest, the praiseworthy and the very good
all commit suicide. The list they form is composed of as many unrepeated,
unique narratives as there are persons upon it, but each special event has
as well the press of the social upon it. To commit suicide is to be resolutely
human, and, as such it is an important topic for
64
psychosocial
investigation: a self-willed self-destruction is not some- thing that can
be undone and it offers a commentary on a social con- text that is, in one
sense, irrefutable. Durkheim' s Suicide has recently appeared in the Routledge
Classics series. It is timely then to offer it some auto/biographically oriented
discussion and appraisal. Suicide's revolutionary character consists in taking
the most individual act and claiming it is not, after all, individual but
explicitly social. If Durkheim can show this to be true he has made the case
for the discipline of sociology tout court. In attempting to do this his critics
have argued that he has ridden positivistically roughshod over personal identity
and overly de- psychologized the social interactions within any given social
system. However, a fuller reading of Suicide reveals a conception of society
that is complex and intricate featuring extrinsic, instrumental, codes of
conduct but, also, divergent narrative identities. The proximity of Durkheimian
sociology to Freudian psychology is clear. Parsons refers to the connection
as: ... a massive phenomenon of the convergence of fundamental insights relating
to the internalisation of moral values. This convergence, from two quite distinct
and independent starting points, deserves to be ranked as one of the truly
fundamental landmarks of the development of modern social science. (1952:
19) Anthony Giddens writes of the current reissue of Suicide that it `remains,
although now more than a century old, the most significant work on suicide
ever produced' (2002: 382). This is not a surprising remark by Giddens; for
40 years (through the development of struc- turation theory to his recent
work on reflexive modernity) Suicide can be seen as one of the regulators
of his own development. In his ori- ginal first essay on suicide in 1964 he
begins a long-term concern to clarify and extend Durkheimian categories apposite
to the sociopathic difficulties of individuals who are unable to find a living
context for the realization of their needs. If Giddens' thinking on Durkheim
has developed critically but sympathetically, much of the debate over many
years has not. It has been conducted in unproductive terms, with too many
unrefined arguments being over-pressed and over-repeated. As such it is wel-
come that there is now something of renaissance in Durkheimian studies that
has chimed with a number of contemporary concerns re- lating to erosions of
social capital, civic disharmony and the ethics of ordinary social exchange.
The work of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies is particularly notable
here, as are important
65
single
works by, among others, Susan Stedman Jones (2001), Phillipe Besnard (1987)
and Shilling and Mellor (2001). Stedman Jones puts the case for a more expanded
appreciation of Suicide simply and pre- cisely; she argues that while Durkheim
observes that suicide varies between cultural, economic and religious environments,
this is far from saying that he was incognizant of the question of individual
motives: `the fact', she remarks, `that motives are not sufficient to bring
about suicide does not mean that they are not necessary factors' (2002: 156).
Further, she says (carrying echoes of a paper by Giddens from 1966) that while
acknowledging the importance of prevailing structures, values and norms Durkheim
saw them also as engaged with the most personal of circumstances and of relating
to individuals at unique and irreducible levels. This may in part be understood
through an appreciation of the seeming linguistic imprecision of the term
la conscience. As Lukes comments `sometimes what is perfectly intelligible
in French cannot be directly translated into seemingly equivalent English
... the French word conscience carries the mean- ings of the two English words
``conscience' ' and ``consciousness' ' ' (1973: 4). This terminology in fact
has advantages, for it unites the moral and cognitive aspects of human apprehension.
If this ad- vantage was once recognized among writers on Durkheim, it was
lost in much of the subsequent commentary. If we can comprehend la conscience
in extremis as erratic cognition and implosive moral sense, then the following
quotation from The division of labour carries great- er meaning than a first
reading might indicate: `every strong state of conscience is a source of life; it is a factor of our general vitality. Consequently everything which tends
to weaken it diminishes and depresses us' (1984 [1893]: 53). As Stedman Jones
observes, ... the concept of degrees of conscience is crucial here. Durkheim
argues that we have to recognise the profound depths of psychic life ... it
is in the psychic depths that dwell the passions, habits and tenden- cies
that make up the substrata of each conscience. (2001: 156) Yet beyond even
the unconscious can be conjectured a deeper realm, which only the true recipient
of the confession can hear; a confession unavailable for understanding by
its speaker and having a theological rather than sociological or psychoanalytic
referent. This is a voice that in Bakhtin's terms is not suited to and cannot
be repre- sented by any form `of biographical narration: my I-for-myself is
incapable of narrating anything' (1990: 152). In other words no one can have
the receptivity of God. Although these concerns seem dis- tant to Durkheim's
desire to be empirically scientific Edwin S.
66
Shneidman,
the leading USA psychologist of suicide and founder of the American Association
of Sucidology, says of Suicide that Durkheim, ... discusses and unfolds the
meaning of his original ideas ... [but] when you think he must have done ...
there are innings to go. He says it, he says it again, and then he turns it
another way and says it. Le Suicide is a Talmudic document. That in my opinion,
accounts for some of its mysterious, murky, open-ended, profound, and endlessly
fascinat- ing quality.... Le Suicide is a Mishnah. (2001: 35) A further rarely
stressed feature (though with honourable exceptions such as Huff, 1975) of
Suicide is Durkheim's employment of the deductive and imaginative method in
looking at contemporary indexes of suicide: Once the nature of the cause is
known we shall try to deduce the nature of the effects, since they will be
both qualified and classified by their attachment to their respective sources.
Of course, if this deduction were not at all guided by the facts, it might
be lost in purely imaginary con- structions. But with the aid of some data
on the morphology of sui- cides, it may be clearer. Alone, these data are
too incomplete and unsure to provide a principle of classification; but once
the outlines of this classification are found, the data may be used. They
will indicate what direction the deduction should take, by the examples they
offer, the deductively established species may be shown not to be imaginary.
(2002: 99) Following Huff's indebtedness to Peirce' s philosophy of logic
we can better refer to Durkheim's somewhat unrefined use of `deduction' in
the above quotation as `abduction' (Peirce, 1931). By abduction Peirce means
a form of high guessing, a way of proceeding scientifi- cally by observation
and grounded imagination. Peirce' s theory of abduction rests on an evolutionary
philosophy of mental events. He regards the development of cognition per se
as (1) coextensive with developing classificatory powers, (2) an ability to
codify, com- plex and not always complete data relating to time, space, force,
etc., and (3), crucially, being able to arrange them in terms of plaus- ible
explanations. Peirce relates this guessing ability to what he regards as the
primary abduction underlying all research, in which: ... the human mind is
akin to truth in the sense that in a finite number of guesses it will light
upon the correct hypothesis; that the facts in hand will admit of rationalisation
. . . [abduction requires that an
67
hypothesis]
must consist of experiential consequences with only so much logical cement
as is needed to render them rational. We should favour theories that ... appeal
to our sense of plausibility; we should prefer theories which do not propose
inexplicable discontinuities. (Peirce in Hookway, 1985: 22~26) The skills
of abduction while universal are not experienced equally even if, in general,
the insight they provide is `strong enough not to be overwhelmingly more often
wrong than right' (1985: 2226). Peirce regards the abductive skills of the
most significant researchers as being provided by a particular confluence
of intellectual need, mental acuity and social circumstance (Peirce, 1958
but see also Banville, 1976). This position has application to Durkheim's
formulations in Suicide: his own personal circumstances and his defeasible
methods of social scientific discovery provide a set of propositions that
are open to critique, even possible abandonment, but certainly to revision
and elaboration. It would be unreasonable to suppose that the infor- mation
revealed from his accumulating data would not sharpen any natural anxiety
he might hold about the self-destructive qualities of modernity and its consequences
for lives. His categorization of sui- cide and synthesis of empirical findings
have often been found to be an impressive early study of the employment of
theory and statisti- cal information; but more important than this is a need
to highlight his acute summary of his time~ through his observations, historical
sense, moral fears and abductive method. These Peircian protocols for discovery
have recognizable and important parallels with Diltheyian as well as more
recent hermeneutical approaches and so, interestingly, can be seen as linking
traditional sociology to auto/ biographical method. While there have been
significant advances in the study of suicide since Durkheim, not only in sociology
(e.g., Lester, 2000) but also through important contributions from history,
psychology and neuro- biology (e.g., respectively Maris et al., 2000; Minois,
1999; Shneidman, 1996; Stoff and Mann, 1997), it is clear that much re- search
has had little remedial effect. While is often held that suicide is `a multidimensional
malaise in needful individuals' who choose it as an effective solution to
their problems this methodological obser- vation has been little honoured.
However, it is more than ever true that the issue of suicide does require
a multidisciplinary approach and not, as at present, ever increasing pieces
of abstracted empiri- cism. As Lester has noted (2000) of the many books and
articles on suicide over recent years, none predicted the rise in young male
suicide during the past 10 years in the UK. The general assumption
68
from
the 1950s was that following general trends this category of sui- cide, with
all others, would decline. Although the perceptive should have been alerted
by the implications for suicide of the work in the 1960s on social capital
the link was not made (Coleman, 1990; Putnam, 2000). These concerns were in
fact only taken up in a general way a generation later when the issue re-emerged
in terms of communitar- ianism and its attendant debates (e.g., Bourdieu,
1980; Etzioni, 2001; Habermas, 1990; Sandel, 1998; Taylor, 1989; Walzer, 1990).
Within this form of community analysis the unpredicted rise of suicide among
young males over the last 15 years would, in part, be seen as reflective of
a longer-term decline in resources of social capital. SUICIDE IN PRISON Some
5000 people commit suicide in England annually. While there has been a continuing
falling trend in the incidence of suicide among women and older men the figure
for young men has shown a marked increase. The majority of suicides now occur
among young adult males, and in men under 35 suicide is the most common cause
of death (HMCIP, 1999; ONS, 2000; Towl et al., 2000). The rate of sui- cide
in prison among young men is even larger than would be expected from a correlation
with the general rise in the prison pop- ulation. A significant proportion
of young male suicides in prison are amongst those with convictions for violence.
In 1998 21% of the prison population was composed of those convicted of violence
against the perso~ 34% of this group committed suicide. In 2000 Her Majesty's
Chief Inspector of Prisons referred to suicide in prison as `everyone's concern',
by which he meant a problem that remained unsolved by the existing strategies
of the Home Office or by its com- missioned research (HMCIP, 1999). Rather,
the implicit call was for a public recognition that the wider society had
become increasingly insecure at moral and behavioural levels. There is a good
deal of informatio historical, social scientific and philosophica~ that contemporary,
advanced societies (especially the USA and the UK) are experiencing some sort
of decline in social harmony. There is now a widespread apprehension about
alterations in the moral climate most notably connected with a decline in
civility, a growth in violence, an increase in no-go areas and an expanded
underclass. This returns us to the issue of social capital. The concept as
developed by Coleman and Putman refers to: ... social networks and the norms
of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In this sense social
capital is closely related to
69
what
some have called civic virtue. The difference is that that social capital
calls attention to the fact that that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded
in dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous
but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital. (Putnam,
2000: 19) Because of its conceptual link to mores, reciprocity and trust and
because of its distrust of over-bureaucratized state power the social capital
thesis is one that posits neither, a priori, an ethics of Rawlsian distributive
justice, nor a Nozickian ethics of individual rights (Nozick, 1974; Rawls,
1987). This overall thesis is gaining some appeal among a wide spectrum of
social analysts, from those pursu- ing auto/biographical research (e.g., Sixsmith
and Boneham, 2002) to those working at explicitly general level (Beck, 1997).
The revivifica- tion of the social capital theory in its political incarnation
as com- munitarianism has been a reaction to traditionally couched liberal
and left social analyses to take account of what may be called the problem
of moral order. A feature of this political analysis has hinged upon an espousal
of limits to liberal individualism for any successful encounter with civic
life. However, this conservative theme has been leavened by a social- istic
recommendation that the organization of social relations move in a robustly
egalitarian direction (Beiner, 2001/2). From its view- point of egalitarianism
and conservatism, communitarianism sees a decomposing of the moral order resulting
from both (a) the effects of a unique, global form of late capitalism, and
from (b) an observ- able decline in everyday, practical forms of social harmony.
A part resolution to this problem may be sought in a switching from an ethics
in which rules of conduct are based upon law-like provisos towards the ethics
based upon dispositions. In other words upon a move from contract to virtue
ethics, which rely not on types of formal obligation, but on a mastery of
the self (Aristotle, 1962; MacIntyre, 1985). Such a proposition is, of course,
itself a reflection of a state of affair it is a noticing of something by
its absence, and it takes on propositional form in explicitly recognizing
an alteration in the everyday and in the wider economic formation. It may
be that the in- cidence of young male suicides in prison is related to these
social changes. It will not be the case that all suicides in this group are
victims of a novel form of cultural immiseration, but it is legitimate to
propose that a significant number will be, and that, further, will increasingly
be members of an underclass (Dalrymple, 2001; Field,
70
1989; Halsey, 1995; Murray and Phillips, 2000). The young men in this group are
poorly educated and are a risk to their own well-being (HMCIP, 1999). This
brings us back to Durkheim and the generally informative power of the atypical
cas~ in this discussion, specifi- cally, to his formulations of anomic and
fatalistic suicide. Anomic suicide is a suicide not borne of profound sadness
or dis- appointment at the world. The latter, although extremely unfortu-
nate, are also recognizably, given a situation, legitimate and rational. Anomie
is a lack of moral and social relatedness. Anomic states, in Dewey's words,
`preclude the placing of the objects of desire into a perspective of relative
values' (1960 [1908]: 168).1 Anomie has a pres- ence in modern societies and
has become, using Parsons' phrase, `one of the small number of truly central
concepts of social science' (1968: 316). In his discussion of anomie Durkheim
argues that no living being can be happy or even exist unless their needs
are sufficiently proportioned to their desires; `in other words', he says,
`if [their] needs require more than can be guaranteed they will be under contin-
ual friction and can only function painfully' (2002: 207). Our capacity for
feeling and our emotional requirements, without some degree of interiorized
regulation, can be inexhaustible and insatiable and there- fore destructive
of reflective function. While it is not the argument here that all suicides
among young males in prison are anomic there are reasons to suppose that a
significant proportion are of this kind. Further, beyond the poor interiorization
of integrating norms characteristic of anomie this particular group can exhibit
a suscepti- bility to respond negatively to what its members may regard as
per- sonal and unacceptable formal regulation. This latter form of reaction
when extreme is symptomatic of what Durkheim terms fatal- istic suicide. Here
the suicidal reaction is to what is regarded as `oppressive discipline ...
and physical or moral despotism ... against which there is no appeal' (2002:
239). The young males under concern here have had a looseness of social connectedness
and impulsivity towards gratification. In prison no psychological make-up
could be worse, for there is now a regime, rule governed and harsh, in which
persistent impulsive, anti-social behaviour is not tolerate~ a suicide proneness,
which is at one and the same time anomic and fatalistic, is present. In Robert
MacIver's words a person under such a condition `lives on the thin line of
sensation between no future and no past' (1950: 59).2 The issue here has to
be the creation of a social capital that can bring potential victims of such
suicide into not an unproblematic world, but one where problems can be confronted
in terms of a nar- rative reality and where a life (either their own or that
of others) is
71
not
regarded as dispensable. This, within social capital, is a question of education.
Current educational provision in young offender insti- tutions is regarded,
even by the Home Office itself, as entirely inad- equate (Gillborne and Mirza,
2000; HO, 2002). Prior to detentional education the school system itself is
not providing the necessary, unsentimental and rigorous education needed by
the group from which the suicide victims that have been discussed will preponder-
antly arise. This is a group for whom the annual media fretting over A-level
scores and university places is a sick irrelevancy. The real matter of education
should be the acquisition of formal skills and the establishment of a capacity
to understand and appreci- ate communal purposiveness both at an abstract
and (above all else) at a personal level. This last can only be approached
by an under- standing of the narratives of others. As Hayden White has observed:
To raise the question of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nat-
ure of culture and possibly even the nature of humanity itself.... Far from
being one code among many that a culture may utilise for endow- ing experience
with meaning, narrative is a metacode, a human univer- sal on the basis of
which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted.
(1987: 168) The basic version of the self-in-society is an implicit recognition
by the self of the lives of others, or rather of the narratives or stories
of others. These are learned in myriad ways. However, for some young people
the opportunity to learn them is ruptured by a retrograde psy- chosocial environment.
These unscripted and excluded persons are in some ways the educational system's
most important charge be- cause it is their disaffection that may have most
consequence for the social fabric. Such children and young people are often
from hos- tile contexts and are often themselves difficult, violent and un-
pleasant; they are increasingly likely to be suicidal, depressed and to move
from truanting to unemployment; they are often in subcul- tures of delinquency
and crime (MacIntyre, 1985; Parker, 2001). How programmes would be developed
for the learning of the importance of lives is clearly a detailed matter (both
in terms of the maturity and competence of teachers and the development of
syllabi). However, there would have to be a dual hinge to any curricular pro-
vision: first, that the teaching be essentially a form of social work where
marked rejection and insults directed at teachers become a coped-with and
routinized matter; and secondly, that the content of classes be biographic
and storied, where narratives are chosen solely by their potential for communicative
action. These stories or life
72
accounts
can be small or fragmentary and need to be particular. In this way individuals
are not required initially to see themselves in ways that are contradistinctive
to their ordinary, localized selves. This kind of entry into the curriculum
of narrative avoids any description of its recipients as automatically deficient
(Dickinson and Erben, 1995). Pedagogic strategies would be required for this
group that would need to prioritize the development of narrative identity
before any concern with the national curriculum. In this approach pupils prepare
and share life histories that become pathways through which they can counter
an unreflective disposition. This is a distinctive ap- proach to learning
that has something in common with therapeutic methods developed in health-care
settings, amongst gerontologists and in some specialized prison initiatives
(e.g., respectively, Asser, 2003; Brody, 2003; Kenyon and Randall, 1997).
It is an approach that needs to be driven by a necessary creation of social
capital, in which the problematic young person from a dysfunctional context
receives the attention, discipline and time that is currently available to
the secure and domestically cherished. CONCLUSION The ideas here put forward
on education are themselves cast in Durkheimian terms and offer some implicit
link between his own work on education (1938) and that on suicide. The battle
between the com- bine harvester of historical necessity and the free-running,
jinking hare of self-determination is a conflict unjoined by Durkheim. Durkheim'
s criticisms of psychological and philosophical explanation do not indi- cate
that he was unaware of the emergent selves of specific and parti- cular lives
and their need to redescribe roles and to reflect upon the constitutive features
of their being. If Durkheim did not supply the fin- esse of Dilthey to the
question of the psychosocial historical mind (2002) he was not unaware of
the individual's potential for interior tur- moil, whether as a consequence
of orphaned traditions loosed of their origins or of impersonal forces released
in the quick-fire, unseeable (and frequently ruinous) operations of financial
markets. The genesis of Durkheim's conservatism and advocacy of socialistic,
civil organi- zation lies in the results for individuals of the capitalism
of late nine- teenth-century Paris (Ferguson, 1998; O'Brien, 1971). If Durkheim
operates with schemas, classifications, tables and typologies, then so do
most of us. Sometimes his use of these instru- ments is found wanting and
is insufficiently refined and sometimes they are used to call down arguments
that they cannot support. However, in the main the manner in which fear, unemployment,
73
gender
division, rebellion and duty are shown to generate themselves is nowhere better
realized than in Le Suicide. Durkheim notices that as we move to the edges
of the society we discover that those different places are remarkably close
to the centre: that the sociopathological is frequently the pushed rationality
of the centr playing itself out in disharmony for the community and suicide
for the individual. In what does the unity of a single life consist? The answer
is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life (MacIntyre,
1985). It does not matter how contradictory or aporetic the life is, it is
still the life. There is no recourse beyond the narrative, and because death
must end a particular narrative it can only be from the ubiquity of death
that we understand and appreciate the nature of life and the story it can
tell. As Walter Benjamin puts it, `death is the sanction of everything the
story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death' (1970: 94).
At the present time Durkheim's Suicide remains the surest work on the important
and doleful topic of its title. Acknowledgements Alan Yelling and Kate Greaves
of Poole Probation Service, Dorset; Jenifer Nicholson of West Sussex Adult
Education Services; Valerie Guilbert of Guernsey Centre for Special Needs; Caroline Knowles and Terry Martin of the University of Southampton; Hilary
Dickinson of the Open University; and Mike Hardey of the Univer- sity of Newcastle.
NOTES
1 A link between the thought
of Dewey and Durkheim has not been often proposed but in a number of directions
they have similar concerns. Dewey was the subject of Durkheim' s final lecture,
in which he expressed the view that the American philosopher and educationalist
was the most significant contemporary thinker, and Mauss records that Dewey
in many ways represented Durkheim' s ideal (Martin, 2002: 369).
2 It can be noted that
although Freud approached the issue from a point quite other than Durkheim'
s, he too outlines an aetiology of suicide emphasizing general psychic patterns,
sociohistorical conditions and overwhelming affect (Littman, 1967).
REFERENCES
Aristotle 1962: Nicomachean ethics. New York: Bobbs-Merrill .
Asser, J.
2003: Working with prisoners in a transitional space . Psychodynamic Practice 8, 7-19.
74
Bakhtin, M.
1990: Art and answerability, Holquist, M. and Liapunov, L.,
editors, Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press.
Banville, J.
1976: Doctor copernicus. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Beck, U.
1997: The reinvention of politics. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Beiner, R.
2001/2: The way we live. Responsive Community 11, 32-40.
Benjamin, W. 1970: Illuminations. London: Cape.
Besnard, P.
1987: L'Anomie. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Bourdieu, P.
1980: Le capital social. Actes de la
Recherche en Science Sociales 3, 2-3.
Brody, H.
2003: Status and sickness. New York : Oxford University Press.
Coleman, J.S.
1990: Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Dalrymple, T.
2001: Life at the bottom. Chicago,
IL: Dee.
Department of Health [DOH] 2002: National suicide prevention strategy for England. London : Department of Health.
Dewey, J.
1960 [1908]: Theory of the moral life. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Dickinson, H.
and Erben, M.
1995: Bernstein and Ricoeur. In Atkinson, P., Davies, B., Delamont, S., editors, Discourse and reproduction . Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 253- 68.
Dilthey, W.
2002 [1927]: The formation of the historical world in
the human sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Durkheim, É. 1938:
L'Evolution pedagogique en France. Paris:
Alcan.
——— 1984 [1893]: Division of labour in society. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
——— 2002 [1897]: Suicide: a study in sociology. London: Routledge.
Etzioni, A.
2001: The monochrome society. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, N.
1998: The world' s banker. London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Field, F.
1989: Losing out: the emergence of Britain' sunderclass . Oxford: Blackwell.
Giddens, A.
1966: A typology of suicide. Archives
of European Sociology 7, 276- 95.
——— 2002: In Durkheim,
É. Suicide: a study in sociology . London: Routledge, 3.
Gillborne, D.
and Mirza, H.
2000: Educational inequality. London : Ofsted.
Habermas, J.
1990: Moral consciousness and communicative action.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Halsey, A.H.
1995: Family and community socialism. London : Institute for Public Policy Research.
Her Majesty' s Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales
[HMCIP] 1999: Suicide is everyone' s concern . London: Home Office.
Home Office [HO] 2002: A second
chance: a review of education for juveniles managed by HM Prison Service.
London: Home Office.
Hookway, C.
1985: Peirce. London:
Routledge.
Huff, T.E.
1975: Discovery and explanation in sociology: Durkheim
on suicide . Philosophy of the Social Sciences 5, 241-57.
Kenyon, G.
and Randall, R.
1997: Restoring our lives. Westport,
CT: Praeger.
75
Lester, D.
2000: Why people kill themselves, fourth edition.
Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
Littman, R.E.
1967: Sigmund Freud on suicide. In Shneidman, E.S. editor, Essays in self-destruction . New York: Science House, 324-44.
Lukes, S.
1973: Émile Durkheim. London:
Allen Lane.
MacIntyre, A.
1985: After virtue, second edition. London : Duckworth.
MacIver, R.
1950: The ramparts we guard. New York : Macmillan.
Maris, R.W., Berman, A.L.
and Morton, M.S.
2000: Comprehensive textbook on suicidology.
London: Guildford Press.
Martin, J.
2002: The education of John Dewey. New York : Columbia University Press.
Minois, G.
1999: History of suicide. Baltimore , MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Murray, C.
and Phillips, M.
2000: Underclass + 10: British underclass 1990- 2000 . London: Civitas.
Nozick, R.
1974: Anarchy, state and utopia. Oxford: Blackwell.
O'Brien, D.P., editor, 1971: The correspondence of Lord Overstone. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Office for National Statistics [ONS] 2002:
Social trends 32. London: The Stationery Office.
Parker, H.
2001: UK drugs unlimited. Basingstoke : Palgrave.
Parsons, T.
1952: The superego in the theory of social system.
Psychiatry 15, 15-25.
——— 1968: Durkheim, Émile. In Sills,
D.L., editor, International encyclopedia of the social sciences , Volume 4. New York:
Macmillan and The Free Press, 311- 20.
Peirce, C.S.
(1931- 58) Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce , 8 Volumes. Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press.
Putnam, R.
2000: Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American
community . New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Rawls, J.
1987: Liberty, equality & the law. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Rickman, H.P.
1988: Dilthey today. New York:
Greenwood Press.
Sandel, M.J.
1998: Liberalism and the limits of justice, second
edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Shilling, C.
and Mellor, P.
2001: The sociological ambition. London: Sage.
Sneidman, E.S.
1996: The suicidal mind. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
——— 2001: Comprehending suicide. Washington,
DC: American Psychological Society.
Sixsmith, J.
and Boneham, J.
2002: Exploring social capital in narrative accounts
of life transitions. Auto/Biography 10, 123-30.
Stedman Jones, S.
2001: Durkheim reconsidered. Cambridge : Polity Press.
Stoff, D.M. and Mann,
J.J., editors, 1997: The neurobiology of suicide . New York: NY Academy of Sciences .
Taylor, C.
1989: Sources for the self. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Towl, G., Snow, L. and McHugh, M., editors,
2000: Suicide in prisons. Leicester : British Psychological Society.
Walzer, M.
1990: The communitarian critique of liberalism.
Political Theory 18, 6-23.
76
White, H.
1987: The content of the form. Baltimore , MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR MICHAEL ERBEN is Director of the Centre for Biography and Education
at the University of Southampton. He is a founder member of the British Sociological
Association Study Group on Auto/Biography. His current work is in the field
of suicide, prison lives and social capital.