Brancaccio, Maria Teresa and Engstrom, Eric J. and Lederer, David
(2013)
The Politics of Suicide: Historical Perspectives on
Suicidology before Durkheim. An Introduction.
Journal of Social History, 46 (3).
pp. 607-619.
ISSN 1527-1897
Abstract
Historically, suicide is a Western neologism. Unknown to Greco-Roman civilization,
suicidium might as well have meant “swine-slaying” to a Latin speaker.1
The warrior culture of Germanic successor states glorified heroic self-sacrifice,
celebrated in medieval literature as chansons de geste. If St. Augustine condemned
Donatism for actively promoting martyrdom during the persecutions,
then in part for fear of its potential to rob the early Christian movement of
much-needed membership. Medieval Christians unanimously reviled the desperate
act of self-killing until Renaissance humanists and artists recalled the political
defiance of Cato, Seneca and, most especially, Lucretia, the original struggle
of republicanism with tyranny manifest in the dagger through her heart. With
their novel emphasis on the modification of human behavior, religious reformers
turned their attention to the human soul and the inner temptation to
self-murder.
It fell to the Enlightenment to turn the activity of self-killing into a subject
for scientific analysis: Suicide. Suicide became a moral affliction that was to be
attended to not just by the police, but also by physicians and, subsequently,
mental health care professionals. As representatives of the state, they produced
actionable bureaucratic data. In a scramble to establish its scientific credentials,
the emergent discipline of social physics (later to become sociology) latched on
to official reports as indicators of a modern social dilemma. Hence, suicidology
was born. With the expressed goals of measuring human behavior and tackling
practical social issues, the earliest practitioners of social physics identified and
prioritized suicide as a dramatic, but potentially soluble public health problem.
For social physicists, suicide manifested a moral malaise as sensational as perhaps
no other human behavior...
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Keywords: |
History of Suicide; moral statistics; Durkheim, Emile; Suicidology; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Arts & Humanities > History |
| Item ID: |
11486 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shs110 |
| Depositing User: |
David Lederer
|
| Date Deposited: |
29 Oct 2019 15:33 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Journal of Social History |
| Publisher: |
Oxford University Press |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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