The Key Ingredient to a Healthy Society

Belonging and the four ingredients of community — from Emile Durkheim’s study of suicide.

Photo from canva.com; used with permission.

Summary:

What is the optimal function of society? Emile Durkheim provided a glimpse in his famous work on suicide in which he disclosed two primary factors of social dysfunction — individualism and autonomy. The remedy to this social problem is best understood with a technical definition of community.

Overview:

• Sociological perspectives on social dysfunction.
• Normal function of society versus individualism and autonomy.
• Durkheim’s discourse on suicide within capitalism and industrialism — modernism was achieved at the expense of collective belonging.
• The technical definition of community and its four necessary ingredients as a solution to modernism’s dis-ease.

Introduction

How do you determine if a social reality is positive or negative? Is it all relative — only being good or bad if it happens to agree with your preference at the moment? Or is there a means to objectively critique various societal effects?

It depends on who you ask.

Without getting into social ethics and the various philosophies of moral determination, there was a sociologist named Emile Durkheim who offered not only a concrete take on the subject but a practical explanation with a real-life example.

Emile Durkheim is often regarded as one of the founders of sociology and his most astounding contribution might just be the research he did on the sociology of suicide. For Durkheim, suicide was not just a psychological phenomenon, but an effect of social realities. Because humans exist socially and are developed in response to their social reality, suicide could be connected to a social cause, not just an individual one.

Suicide, therefore, became Durkheim’s primary example of social dysfunction and his results may help us take note of social dysfunction today and help us determine how we might deem certain social realities as negative.