Ibsen''s Eschatology

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Emile Durkheim and Henrik Ibsen were both products of the intellectual milieu that saw the birth of sociology and the advent of an intellectual interest in the individual. Suicide, that most taboo of topics, was examined in the work of both thinkers, and both concluded independently that it was the gory symptom of societies that failed to balance the needs of the community and the individual. Durkheim's theories about the three social causes of suicide can be effectively applied to the suicides (both symbolic and literal) in Ibsen's prose corpus. The connection between the two iconic thinkers, separated in geographical distance but not in ideologies, reveals that the tides of European thought had become fundamentally concerned with exploring the balance between a person's fierce need for individuality, and a society's desperate need for internal cohesion.