In The Rules of Sociological Method, published just two years after The Division of Labour, Durkheim makes his rare acknowledgement that he had changed his mind on the question of the function of crime in society (1964, 72n12). Since this is one of the very few admissions by Durkheim that he ever changed his mind on anything, and this on the subject of crime and punishment too, I think it is worth looking at what he has to say on this key point in some detail.

In The Rules Durkheim says that he originally thought of the criminal as ‘a totally unsociable being, a sort of parasitic element, a strange and unassimilable body, introduced into the midst of society’ (1964, 72), and when he says this he appears to have in mind what he said in The Division of Labour. By the time he came to write The Rules, he now argued that crime – and by extension the criminal – ‘plays a definite role in social life’ (72). The criminal is no longer to be viewed as wholly pathological (1989, 33) but now has a morphological function for society too: