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Punishment and Social Organization: A Study of Durkheim's Theory of Penal Evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Steven Spitzer
Steven Spitzer*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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For Émile Durkheim, crime and punishment were integral features of organized social life. He considered the study of crime and punishment essential to the sociological enterprise precisely because these “social facts” revealed the inner workings of society and the mechanism through which societies change. In The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim argues (1938:70) that “crime is … necessary, it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life,” and that “it is no longer possible … to dispute the fact that law and morality vary from one social type to the next, nor that they change within the same type if the conditions of life are modified.” Because he viewed law as a reflection of basic social arrangements, Durkheim grounded his theory of social change in an analysis of comparative legal types. He assumed (1933:68) that “since law reproduces the principal forms of social solidarity, we have only to classify the different types of law to find therefrom the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it.” In his central theoretical work, The Division of Labor in Society (1933), Durkheim linked the changing nature of legal controls (repressive to restitutive) to transformations in the nature of social solidarity (mechanical to organic).

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , Summer 1975 , pp. 613 - 637
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Andrew Scull and Jan Smith for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also indebted to Cecile Sue Coren and Edna Erez for their assistance in collecting and analyzing the data.

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