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The article discusses the methodological and philosophical developments in the field of sociology that resulted from the discipline's study of suicide or self-destruction. The article describes the rise of Rationalism, empiricism, and positivism in relation to the sociological study of the rise of suicide in the modern world, exploring how the irrationality of suicide affected sociologists who believed in the progressive and positivist power of the social sciences. Subjects under discussion include the sociologist Emile Durkheim, the physician Henry Morselli and his book "Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics," and the concept of anomie.

The article discusses the influence of 19th century German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies on Western European positivism. The articles describes how Tönnies reinterpreted the sociological tradition of philosophers such as August Comte, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill, consequentially producing an original creative synthesis in the field of positivism and sociology. Subjects under discussion include the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the economic aspects of Tönnies' philosophy, and the disciplines of rationalism and historicism.

The article presents the author's reflection on the challenges to a unified sociological theory presented by the singularity of sociological developments in each particular country and context. The author discusses the contextual aspects of sociological developments and describes some of the particularities of sociological theorizing in the United States compared to that in Germany. He comments on how such particularities create intercultural obstacles to the creation of a unified international body of sociological theory.

After the end of World War II in West Germany, action and interaction theories and phenomenological sociology occupied only fringe positions. At the end of the 1960s, criticism of the prevalent neopositivistic research methodology, systems theory, and the rapidly spreading critical theory increased. This, coupled with the positive reception given symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology from the United States, caused interaction theories to flourish. Today they are among the four or five main schools of thought in West German sociology. In methodological work, the "interpretative" or "communicative" social research of the time developed the narrative interview and life history method. Group discussion and participant observation were also used for interactionist social research. A survey of the subjects interactionists have covered in their research shows how widely interaction theory has been applied. The main themes of current interaction theory are: (1) conceptualizing the difference between unpremeditated behavior and meaningful action, (2) formulating a theory that covers both "structure" and "action," and (3) developing an interactionist macro theory. The future of interaction theory is analyzed and assessed optimistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]