Compare Theories: Michel Foucault on populations and Emile Durkheim on suicide and anomie

This paper seeks to compare two theories; one by Michel Foucault on populations and the other by Emile Durkheim on suicide and anomie. Foucault derives his ideologies regarding population from his main theory of biopower and argues that population census as a data resource in the 19 th century was used by most sociologists, policy-makers, and government officials as one of the many techniques of biopower (Dillon, 2014, 372). He further claims that population census was an instrument for not only monitoring but also controlling the practices of the bodies. The scholar contends that the emergence of the population as a political and economic issue was among the significant innovations in the techniques of power in the 18 th century. Fundamentally, he considers population as a problem in terms of wealth, labor capacity, growth, and the resources it requires. In this accord, Foucault asserts that the governments in the 18 th century did not consider these as people or subjects but as populations with particular variables such as birth rates, death rates, fertility, health-status, life expectancy, habitation, and diet patterns. Foucault identifies sex as the most important political and economic problem and necessitates the need to analyze marital age, birth rates, legitimate and illegitimate births, effects of unmarried life, the frequency of sexual relations, and the effects of contraceptive practices (Dillon, 2014, p372).

On the other hand, Emile Durkheim focused on suicide as one of the major social conditions causing the weakening of social integration. Durkheim performs an empirical study to examine how social regulation and integration differs by various independent variables in increasing the risk of suicide. As much as suicide is considered an individual act, it is, in fact, a social phenomenon (Dillon, 2014, p99). Durkheim asserts that regardless of suicide being a social problem, it is normal because every society has a certain degree of suicide tendency. According to Durkheim, the risk of suicide increases with individual’s detachment from social groups. He explains that social integration bonds an individual to social groups such as family or friends who have similar courses thus attaching the individual to life and prevents them from disposing of themselves willfully. Further, he argues that different contexts in different societies give different conditions for suicide (Dillon, 2014, p99). With regards to anomic suicide, Durkheim states that social upheavals produce anomic conditions in the society that interrupt with the individual’s bond to the society thereby resulting in anomic suicide. Factors such as economic transformation, terrorist activities, and social dislocation due to natural disasters bring about anomic conditions. Therefore, according to Durkheim, anomic suicide is as a result of social conditions when the scale is upset through the factors mentioned above.

Reference

Dillon, Michele. (2014). Introduction to Sociological Theory: Theorists, Concepts, and their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century. John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Web. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/SociologicalTheoryMicheleDillonUploadedByUniversityOfSargodha...TaimoorAli