Durkheimian Criminology PDF

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DURKHEIMIAN CRIMINOLOGY....

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Criminology DURKHEIMIAN CRIMINOLOGY. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) is esteemed as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the discipline. Over the course of his writings he offered many highly original sociological insights into the phenomena of crime, law and punishment, and these subsequently exerted a great influence over the development of criminology. To better understand his contribution to the analysis of crime and deviance, we will begin by outlining both the wider social context in which Durkheim was writing, and some basic elements of his sociological perspective. The nineteenth century saw a period of rapid and turbulent change in France. The onset of modernisation brought with it a transition from a rural and agricultural society to one that was increasingly urban and industrial in character. The emergence of new class structures and divisions became manifest in bitter political conflicts, such as the 1848 Paris Commune, which saw the brutal suppression of socialist revolutionaries by the French authorities. The nation was further destabilised by its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, which served to exacerbate further the financial and social hardships of the working class,

such as the conscripted soldiers who returned to civilian life only to find unemployment and hardship. This potent cocktail of chaotic change and instability served to merely fuel the persecution of minority groups who were blamed by the nationalist and Catholic political right for France’s ills. This problem was exemplified in the Dreyfus Affair (1894), in which a Jewish army officer was unjustly put on trial for treason, a case of antiSemitism that became an international cause ce´le`bre. Durkheim, a secularist and socialist, and himself of Jewish origin, was galvanised by such events, and they clearly informed his sociological project. The basic questions he sought to address consequently related to the problems of social order and disorder – how do societies achieve stability and harmony? How do they maintain such stability in times of rapid change? What negative consequences flow from the disruptions that change brings? And how could the demands of order and solidarity be reconciled with a respect for individual freedoms and rights in a forward-looking and fair society? It is in the course of answering these questions that Durkheim developed his insights into crime, law and punishment. In his first major work, The Division of Labour in Society (1984), Durkheim argued that in order to maintain and reproduce themselves, all societies needed mechanisms that would create stability and maintain the social bond between their members. He went on to suggest that crucial for such stability was what he called the ‘collective consciousness’ of a society.

By this term he meant the totality of shared beliefs, values and norms of behaviour that cemented individuals’ commitment to the wider social group (solidarity) and which served to regulate their everyday conduct and exchanges with each other. He hypothesised that different social forms would have correspondingly different ways in which such regulation would take shape. He developed what is now a well-known and widely used distinction between what he called mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity was to be found in largely pre-modern and small-scale agricultural societies. In such societies, individuals were characterised by similarity – they all participated similarly in the system of production (tilling, planting, herding, and so on), and were part of largely self-sufficient small communities. Because of the close and immediate interdependence within such groups, beliefs emerged which stressed the importance of communal interests over and above those of individuals. Clearly defined norms of behaviour would be passed down across generations in the form of tradition, and clear moral directions would be prescribed by religion. Individuals would be closely regulated within the community, and deviations would be unwelcome and likely to incur severe sanctions. However, this balance was undermined by the transition to a mass, urban and industrial society. Individuals became increasingly to be characterised not by similarity but by difference, as each took on very specific roles within an increasingly differentiated division of labour. Intimacy and familiarity gave way to anonymity in the populous spaces of the city. In such a context, the old mechanisms of solidarity could no longer effectively perform the function of regulation, and consequently there emerged a problem of anomie or

normlessness. Lacking binding conventions and guidelines for behaviour, there was a greater likelihood that individuals would engage in deviant behaviour (as explored in Durkheim’s famous study of Suicide (1897, see Durkheim 1970)). However, Durkheim believed and hoped that eventually a new mode of social solidarity would emerge, one that corresponded to the values of individual rights and mutual tolerance. Until such time as this happened, society was vulnerable to an array of social problems associated with a deficit in moral regulation. While Durkheim himself did not mobilise anomie to explain rising crime, the concept has been appropriated and adapted by subsequent criminologists and sociologists for just this purpose. The most influ ential use of Durkheim’s concept is that developed by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton (1910–2003). In ‘Social Structure and Anomie’ (1938), Merton offered an original reinterpretation of the concept, and mobilised it to account for trends and patterns of crime in American society. For Durkheim, anomie comprised a deficit of moral regulation in the form of insufficiently strong and binding norms of behaviour. Merton, however, split the notion of normative regulation into two distinct parts. He proposed that all societies have, first, socially agreed norms that define the goals for which their members should properly strive. Thus in the United States of the 1930s, Merton pointed to the so-called ‘American Dream’ of wealth, material prosperity and status. Through this ‘dream’ American society defined its citizens’ aims and ambitions, and thereby directed their strivings in a socially sanctioned direction. Second, Merton argued that in addition to the socially approved goals, all societies would stipulate

approved and sanctioned means through which these goals could be legitimately achieved....