In Part III of this study we have looked at Durkheim's writing on the subject of crime and punishment in great detail, paying particular attention to what he has to say on the subject of crime in the first part of this section and what he has to say on the subject of punishment more particularly in the second half. The result of this detailed study has been to show that Durkheim frequently changed his mind on this question, usually without any acknowledgment of this fact, so much so that I think it might even be fair to say that he does not have a consistent or a coherent view on this question at all. In particular we have encountered a severe problem in Durkheim's early sociology with the concept of causation that he employs – that all things of the same type or kind must be explained in terms of the same causes – and related to this, with his essentialism – the attempt to explain very different social situations in terms of their alleged essence rather than in all of their subtlety and complexity. The result of this, as we have seen, has been far too close an identification between the actually quite separate concepts of crime and punishment.