Durkheim identified four distinct environmental conditions that he believed to be responsible for various patterns of high suicide rates:  egoism, altruism, anomie, and fatalism. At this point, we shall focus only on the best known of these four causes of suicide, anomie.

Anomie refers to an environmental state where society fails to exercise adequate regulation or constraint over the goals and desires of its individual members (Durkheim, 1951: 241-276). It is important to note that Durkheim’s conceptualization of anomie is based on a general assumption about the psychological or biological nature of individual human beings. He wrote that the human “capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss” (1951: 247). From Durkheim’s viewpoint, individual happiness and well-being depend on the ability of society to impose external limits on the potentially limitless passions and appetites that characterize human nature in general. Under the condition of anomie, however, society is unable to exert its regulatory and disciplining influences. Human desires are left unchecked and unbounded—the individual “aspires to everything and is satisfied with nothing” (1951: 271). Out of disillusionment and despair with the pursuit of limitless goals, many individuals in the anomic society take their own lives. Therefore, high rates of anomic suicide are the product of the environmental condition of anomie.

Durkheim argued that the condition of anomie could explain at least three kinds of suicidal phenomena. First, in historical data on suicide rates in Europe, Durkheim found that sharp increases or decreases in the economic prosperity of a society were associated with increasing rates of suicide. Suicide rates were lowest during times of economic stability. Durkheim reasoned that economic crises disrupted society’s regulatory influence on the material desires of its members. Economic booms or depressions undercut the predictable material goals from which individuals would ordinarily derive satisfaction. Second, in addition to cases where anomie resulted from rapid economic change, Durkheim also presented evidence that “one sphere of social life—the sphere of trade and industry—is actually in a chronic state” of anomie (1951: 254, emphasis added). In commercial segments of society, where far-reaching economic goals are continually sought and “greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold” (1951: 256), a lack of regulation over material desires becomes a constant state of the social environment. Durkheim explained high rates of suicide among business people as a result of this chronic state of anomie. Finally, Durkheim analyzed how inadequate regulation of sexual desires could also produce high rates of anomic suicide among certain social groups. Single males, in particular, are in social circumstances where their unrestrained pursuit of physical pleasure is likely to lead to disillusionment and suicide. Marriage functions to regulate sexual desire, and husbands typically have lower rates of suicide than unmarried males. Thus, the concept of anomie is used by Durkheim to explain a variety of social facts. Variations in suicide rates across time, by occupation and by marital status, are all linked theoretically to this general environmental condition.

Durkheim’s work has been the subject of extensive discussion and criticism. Nonetheless, his study of suicide has endured as a classic example of the macro­normative approach to theory and research on deviance. We should note that Inkeles (1959) has questioned the sociological purity of Durkheim’s analysis by pointing out that psychological assumptions about the limitless nature of human desires can be found in Suicide. However, Durkheim generally treats psycho­biological qualities or potentials as constants rather than as variables in his analytical scheme: “human nature is substantially the same among all men, in its essential qualities” (1951: 247). Variations in suicide rates cannot be explained by psychological constants but only by variations in the social environment that “lies outside individuals” and exerts external influences upon them (1951: 324). Following the clear directions laid down by Durkheim, the anomie tradition has continued to focus its search for the causes of deviant behavior on large-scale variations in the environmental features of society.