Nearly every article published on suicide from sociology viewpoint will quote Durkheim, and some will start fitting types of suicides in this 21st century lifestyle into one of his four categories of suicide of "egoistic, altruism, anomic and fatalism".
What I can understand was Durkheim was using "chaotic" to describe the changes in the economic system then of division of labour due to industrial revolution in a longer term period observed from his studies (e.g. a few decades) and its impact on the people and society then, and not day to day life stresses? And not even stock markets fluctuations as he has given some examples of French earlier bourses crashes then in the 19th century. To him, these are short-term shock to the system, not underlying change in the society.
Now I am getting confused ...
Thus, with this changes in lifestyle from the 1700s to 1800s, it affects the size of families, gender roles, the churches, urbanisation, roles workers play, concept of ownership of land and property, concept of labour and wages, etc., thus affect a lot of issues on integration and moral regulation, as compared to more traditional larger agricultural based families ... things were chaotic then ...
That's what I thought he meant when I read his book on Suicide and Division of Labour? Or I am totally wrong?
And at the same time, it appeared that Protestants were more pro-business and industry while Catholics were more pro-religious life regardless of material or modern technology, or worldly things that are created by human - thus the different level of integration Durkheim claimed to observe ... or I am wrong again
Thus, the complication of just applying his model to today's environment ... as the underlying building blocks were different ... but yet simple ... and there is tendency of people who just take out bits and pieces of his integrated model and then try to apply to today's world - for e.g. a person who is not socially integrated committed suicide; social isolation, etc. NO again?
And against this background, Durkheim did not elaborate whether Industrial Revolution was good or bad, or on capitalism, burgeious against proletarian, class struggle, socialism, private ownership of land, productivity, etc., i.e. he didn't go into what we know as political science and macro economy disciplines of today. Other father of sociology dwell more into those issues, like Karl Marx and Weber, etc.
Against this backdrop, we ended up with so-called Western civilisation or modernisation ... and in the past 40 years, we moved into the information age, information revolution, globalisation, digital age, financial markets, etc ... the backdrop of his earlier analysis which he used to build his rather complete model of suicide then have changed tremendously ...
Hello Bob
According to me, when writing The Suicide, Durkheim had in mind the discipline that he wanted to ground (sociology). Since his implicit projet was essentially epistemological (i.e. defining radically new paradigms and methods for studying word phenomena), the suicide nomenclature that he built (which is also, by extension, a nomenclature for society structures), was conceptualized to be timeless. In this perspective, the conjectural changes that he described in the 19th century should be understood in their illustrative value, rather than an absolute correlate of suicide rates. This helps understanding why Durkheim's theories are still valuable to understand, on a macro-individual level, how societies' structure could be link to suicide epidemiology.
In my opinion, chaos should be considered a synonym for anomie. Both refer to weakening of social ties, loss of social regulation and thinning out of integration. But we could maybe introduce a nuance in that synonymy : while anomie may refers to long timescale structural changes (due, for eg. in our post-modern times, to loss of symbolic values, hyper-individualism, incessant incitation to consumption), chaos may be considered on a shorter situational time-scale (which explains why Durkheim associate this chaos theory to the 19th century economic crash).
In any case, anomie has recently been brought back in a very interesting way to account for the suicide contagion phenomenon (Hoffman and Bearman, 2015) ... a nice example of how Durkheim theories could be updated.
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