Legislation of Morality
In The Division of Labor in Society ([1893] 1984), Emile Durkheim advanced the idea that the distinctive sociological feature of crime is society's reaction to it. Durkheim was writing at a time when Lombroso's view on the heritability of criminality dominated scientific and popular opinion. Science sought the etiology of crime in the biology of the criminal, in atavism—crime viewed as a reversion to primitive, ancestral characteristics. From this perspective, the harmfulness of criminality was taken for granted. Given his more comparative and anthropological outlook, Durkheim rejected the idea that crime was condemned by society because of its harmful consequences or because the deviant act was in itself evil. For Durkheim, many things that attracted the severest reprimands of society were objectively quite harmless, such as the neglect of the food taboos or the neglect of religious observance. In his view, the major issue was the integrative function of law, not the individual sources of deviance. Indeed, in Suicide ([1897] 1951) he characterized individual acts of despair as expressions of social structural pathologies. He also noted that the integrative function of law extracted far more from the condemnation of the lower class thief than from the middle-class embezzler—even though the latter's financial gain was greater and the social consequences of his acts much more adverse.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 4,585 words (approx. 15 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Legislation of Morality Access Pass.
