ABSTRACT
In 1957 Robert K . Merton credited Emile Durkheim with having discovered sociology's first and thus far its only scientific "Law." This law reads: "everywhere without exception, Protestants show far more suicides than the followers of other confessions" (Durkheim 1897:154), but it is usually cast in terms of a comparison between Protestants and Catholics (Pope and Danigelis 1981). In Chapter 2, we found that American data for 1971 did not support this sweeping claim. Reviewing the literature, we find only one modern study supporting Durkheim (Breault 1986), and this turned out to be in error (Girard 1988). But even as a law about his own time, Durkheims statement is suspect: Whitney Pope (1976) revealed that Durkheim was, at best, very careless about data.
