The latin term millennium and its Greek equivalent chilias literally mean a period of a thousand years. According to the millenarian tradition, which is based on Jewish apocalyptic literature and on the Revelations to St. John, Christ will reappear in the guise of a warrior, vanquish the devil and hold him prisoner. He will then build the Kingdom of God and reign in person for a thousand years. Those saints who remained steadfast and gave their life for their faith shall be raised from the dead and serve as his royal priesthood. At the end of this period Satan will be let loose again for a short while and will be finally destroyed. The victory will be followed by the general resurrection of the dead, the last judgement and final redemption (1).

Les sociologues mettent-ils toujours un sens sous le mot structure lorsqu'ils parlent de « structure sociale » (1) ? Il faut pourtant se demander si et dans quelle mesure les parties constitutives d'une société stratifiée, classes ou groupes de statut, forment une structure, c'est-à-dire, pour s'en tenir provisoirement à une définition minimale, si et dans quelle mesure elles entretiennent des relations autres que de simple juxtaposition et, en conséquence, manifestent des propriétés qui résultent de leur appartenance à la totalité ou, plus précisément, de leur position dans le système complet des relations qui commande le sens de chaque relation particulière.

It is generally held that traditional Indian society was based on the regime of caste and was to that extent a peculiarly closed system. Much of the contemporary discussion of Indian society, including the analysis of social change, uses the caste system as the basic frame of reference (1). I shall try to argue that this is inadequate and that, in order to gain a realistic picture of what is happening in India today, other factors such as class and power have to be considered as independent variables.

The history of ideas demonstrates conclusively that certain ideas can become so pervasive and central to the thought of a culture that over many centuries the members of that culture unquestioningly apply these ideas in many different ways to new fields of experience (1). Such ideas are what we shall call metaphysical ideas. Such metaphysical ideas normally form the ground for common-sense discourse. The history of ideas has shown that they also form the ground for, and frequently constitute much of the substance of, serious intellectual works. Though science in the western world was born and developed partly as an explicit revolution against all such unexamined, “unempirical” ideas, recent work in the history of science has led to the conclusion that scientific thought is largely the result of and partly constitued by just such metaphysical ideas (2). Moreover, more recent work in the history of science has led to the conclusion that once scientific ideas have been accepted by the members of a scientific discipline, these ideas in turn come to form the unexamined ground and substance of the normal scientific works within that discipline. Though these ideas thus have far more in common with common-sense and humanistic discourse than most scientists would ever care to admit, there are some important differences which are taken into consideration by giving the established, unexamined ideas of sciences a different name—that of paradigmatic ideas (3).

Objective investigation into suicide as a social and psychological phenomenon dates back to the opening of the nineteenth century (1). Few other areas of human behaviour, in fact, can have attracted the same measure of continuous interest on the part of students in several disciplines. H. Rost's Bibliographie des Selbstmords, published in 1927, lists well over 3,000 items (2). Today the total must be something over 5,000 (3). The reader surveying this voluminous literature, however, is impressed by several notable lacunae: 1) most of this literature is descriptive rather than explanatory; the great bulk of it consists of surveys of the distribution of suicide, or of clinical descriptions of individual cases (4); 2) there is a marked degree of disciplinary “compartmentalisation”. It has been evident for many years that both sociology and psychology have complementary contributions to make to the explanation of suicide (5); but theory and research into suicide in these two disciplines has tended to proceed separately with little more than a token acknowledgement of the potential relevance of one to the other (6). The object of this paper is to establish a schematic typology upon which a bridge between sociological and psychological theory might be built.