Durkheim: Anomie, and Crime as Normal

The nineteenth century in France was an age of great turmoil generated by the wake of the Revolution of 1789 and by rapid industrialization. In terms of immediacy and massiveness of impact on human thought and values it is impossible to find revolutions of comparable magnitude anywhere in human history; the writings of the day were filled with a burning sense of society's sudden turn from a path it had followed for millennia, and a profound intuition of the disappearance of historic values along with age-old securities, age-old tyrannies and inequalities, and the coming of new powers, new insecurities and new tyrannies.

Sociology had been developed by Auguste Comte in the first half of the century largely in response to those two revolutions, as part of an effort to construct a rational society out of the ruins of the traditional one; sociologists saw themselves providing a rational, scientific analysis of monumental social change in order to mastermind the political course of social regeneration, which would consist primarily in the re-establishment of social solidarity.

Durkheim was born a year after Comte's death. He studied social science and its relation to ethics in Germany under the experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt; taught the first French university course in sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1887; received the first doctorate in sociology awarded by the University of Paris in 1892; and dominated French sociology until his death.

His position in criminology is the mirror of Lombroso's. Both theories were in part a reaction to the classical assumption that humans were free and rational in a contractual society; but where Lombroso focused on the determinants of human behaviour within the individual, Durkheim focused on society and its organization and development.

In the mechanical form, each social group is relatively isolated from all others and is basically self-sufficient; individuals live largely under identical circumstances, do identical work and hold identical values; there is little division of labour, with only a few persons having specialised functions; there is little need for individual talents, and the solidarity of the society is based on the uniformity of its members.

In the organic form, the different segments depend on each other in a highly organised division of labour; social solidarity is no longer based on the uniformity of individuals but on the diversity of the functions of the parts.

All societies are at some stage of progression between the two, and no society is totally one or the other: even the most primitive have some division of labour, and even the most advanced require some uniformity of their members.

Law plays an essential role in each, but in very different ways. In the mechanical society law functions to enforce the uniformity of members and is oriented towards repressing any deviation from the norms of the time. In the organic society law functions to regulate the interactions of the various parts and provides restitution in cases of wrongful transactions. Because law plays such different roles, crime appears in very different forms.

All the uniformity that exists in a society — the totality of social likenesses — Durkheim called the collective conscience. Since all societies demand at least some degree of uniformity, the collective conscience may be found in every culture; but in every society there is also diversity, for there cannot be a society in which individuals do not differ more or less from the collective type.

To the extent that a society is mechanical, its solidarity comes from the pressure for uniformity exerted against that diversity. In its strongest form the pressure consists of criminal sanctions; in weaker forms it consists in designating behaviours or beliefs as morally reprehensible or merely in bad taste. Durkheim's own illustration is worth reproducing: if I do not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress I do not conform to the customs observed in my country and my class, the ridicule I provoke and the social isolation in which I am kept produce, although in attenuated form, the same effects as a punishment in the strict sense of the word; the constraint is nonetheless efficacious for being indirect.

Society cannot be formed without our being required to make perpetual and costly sacrifices. Those sacrifices are the price of membership; fulfilling them gives members a sense of collective identity. But — and this is the mechanism — the demands are constructed so that it is inevitable that a certain number of people will not fulfil them, a number large enough to constitute an identifiable group but not so large as to include a substantial portion of the society. That enables the mass of people to feel a sense of moral superiority, identifying themselves as good and righteous against the morally inferior transgressors. It is that sense of superiority which Durkheim saw as the primary source of social solidarity. Criminals therefore play an important role in the maintenance of solidarity.

Punishment plays a role of its own. When the dictates of the collective conscience are violated, society responds with repressive sanctions not so much for retribution or deterrence but because without them those making the perpetual and costly sacrifices would become severely demoralised. When a person who has committed a serious crime is released with only a slap on the wrist, average law-abiding citizens may become terribly upset; they feel they are playing the game by the rules and everyone else should too. Punishment is necessary to maintain the allegiance of average citizens to the social structure, and beyond that it acts as a visible societal expression of the inferiority and blameworthiness of the criminal group.

Crime itself is normal because there is no clearly marked dividing line between behaviours considered criminal and those considered morally reprehensible or merely in bad taste. If there is a decrease in behaviours designated criminal, there may be a tendency to move behaviours previously designated morally reprehensible into the criminal category: if traditional burglary and robbery decrease, there may be an associated increase in the tendency to define forms of white-collar deception as crime.

The society of saints seals the argument. Imagine a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals: crimes properly so called would be unknown, but faults which appear venial to the layman would create the same scandal that the ordinary offence does in ordinary consciousnesses; if the society has the power to judge and punish, it will define those acts as criminal and treat them as such. To classify crime among the phenomena of normal sociology is not merely to say that it is inevitable although regrettable, due to the incorrigible wickedness of men; it is to affirm that it is a factor in public health, an integral part of all societies.

The pathological state would be a society with no crime. That would be a society whose collective conscience was so rigid that no one could oppose it — and social change is usually introduced by opposing the constraints of the collective conscience, so those who introduce it are frequently declared criminals. Socrates and Jesus were declared criminals, as were Mahatma Gandhi and George Washington; so were the union leaders of the 1920s and 1930s and the civil rights leaders of the 1960s. If the demands of the collective conscience had been so rigidly enforced that no crime could exist, those movements would have been impossible too. For progress, individual originality must be able to express itself; and in order that the originality of the idealist whose dreams transcend his century may find expression, it is necessary that the originality of the criminal, who is below the level of his time, shall also be possible. One does not occur without the other.

The consequence for policy is the sentence examiners look for: there is no occasion for self-congratulation when the crime rate drops noticeably below the average level, for we may be certain that this apparent progress is associated with some social disorder.

Anomie is defined in the dictionary as a condition of hopelessness caused by a breakdown of rules of conduct and loss of belief and sense of purpose in society or in an individual; in criminological usage it depicts a state of lawlessness or normlessness.

Durkheim first introduced the concept in The Division of Labour, arguing that the industrialization of French society had destroyed the traditional solidarity based on uniformity, but had been so rapid that society had not yet evolved sufficient mechanisms to regulate its transactions. Three symptoms proved it: periodic cycles of overproduction followed by economic slowdown, showing that relations between producers and consumers were ineffectively regulated; strikes and labour violence, showing that relations between workers and employers were unresolved; and the alienation of the individual worker, and the sense that the division of labour was turning people into mere cogs in the wheel, showing that the relation of the individual to work was inadequately defined.

He generalised the concept in Suicide, where he showed statistically that the suicide rate rises sharply both in periods of economic decline and in periods of economic growth. Decline is easily understood; the key question is growth.

The theory begins with a comparison of animal and human nature. In animals the physical body naturally limits appetites, so an animal with a full stomach and a safe warm place to sleep is satisfied. Humans have active imaginations that allow them to feel dissatisfied even when their physical needs are met, and satisfying some wants awakens new ones, so that the more one has, the more one wants: human appetites are naturally unlimited.

The only mechanism that can limit them is human society, which creates moral rules about what people in various social positions can reasonably expect to acquire. At every moment of history there is a dim perception in the moral consciousness of societies of the respective value of different social services, the relative reward due to each, and the consequent degree of comfort appropriate on average to workers in each occupation; under this pressure each in his sphere vaguely realises the extreme limit set to his ambitions and aspires to nothing beyond, so that an end and a goal are set to the passions.

Rapid change breaks those rules down. In economic disasters something like a declassification occurs which suddenly casts certain individuals into a lower state than their previous one; they must reduce their requirements, restrain their needs and learn greater self-control, and they are not adjusted to the condition forced on them. But the same happens where the crisis is an abrupt growth of power and wealth: the conditions of life change, the standard by which needs were regulated can no longer remain the same, the scale is upset, and a new scale cannot be improvised, so that until the social forces regain equilibrium their respective values are unknown and all regulation is lacking for a time.

Durkheim then made the surprising argument: anomie is worse in prosperity than in depression, since prosperity stimulates the appetites at the very moment when the restraints on them have broken down. With increased prosperity desires increase; at the very moment when traditional rules have lost their authority, the richer prize offered these appetites stimulates them and makes them more exigent and impatient of control, so that the state of deregulation is further heightened by passions being less disciplined precisely when they need more disciplining.

He argued that French society over the previous hundred years had deliberately destroyed the traditional sources of regulation: religion had almost completely lost its influence over both workers and employers; traditional occupational groups such as the guilds had been destroyed; and government adhered to a policy of laissez-faire. Freedom of appetites was the driving force behind the French industrial revolution, but it also created a chronic state of anomie.

• The facts were against him. Crime in France was not rising at the time: Lodhi and Tilly conclude that between 1831 and 1931 the incidence of theft and robbery declined, citing a massive decline in serious property crime, while violent crime remained approximately stable with some tendency to decline. Durkheim formulated the theory in a study of suicide rates and simply presumed that crime was also increasing, presenting no data to support the conclusion.
• He could have known better. McDonald argues that statistics showing decreases were available to Durkheim and to other prominent criminologists of the time who also presumed crime was rising, but none took notice: Marxists of that time were no more willing to admit that social and economic conditions were improving than Durkheimians that industrialization and urbanization did not inevitably lead to higher crime.
• Punishment did not behave as predicted. Spitzer found that more developed societies were characterised by severe punishments and simple societies by lenient ones — the opposite of Durkheim's prediction. Rural areas in Western societies before modernization were characterised by fairly high levels of violence and by considerable tolerance for it; only after modernization, with populations concentrated in anonymous cities, did societies begin to punish violence consistently and severely. Durkheim may have generalised from the fact that European punishments were becoming less severe through Beccaria's reforms; but the extremely harsh punishments that preceded those reforms were associated with absolute monarchies, not with simple, undeveloped societies.
• The modern finding is the reverse of his. Economic development is associated with increases in property crime but with decreases in violent crime. Neuman and Berger reviewed seventeen cross-national studies and concluded that urbanism and industrialization are both associated with increased property crime, that neither is associated with increased violent crime, and that there is no support for the argument that the increases in property crime were caused by a change from traditional to modern values.
• Bennett's test. If crime is caused by rapid social change, then the rate of increase in crime should be proportional to the rate of growth; both theft and homicide should increase during rapid growth; and the level of development should not affect crime rates absent rapid change. Using data from fifty-two nations from 1960 to 1984, Bennett showed that the rate of growth does not significantly affect either homicide or theft, and that the level of development independently affects theft but not homicide. He concluded that the findings refute the Durkheimian hypotheses.
• Erikson and Chambliss on stability. Erikson's study of the Puritan colony in seventeenth-century Massachusetts found a relatively constant level of punishment across the century despite three crime waves attributed to Antinomians, Quakers and witches, concluding that when a community calibrates its control machinery to handle a certain volume of deviant behaviour it tends to adjust its legal definitions so that this volume is realised. Chambliss objected that his conclusion is hardly supported by the data: each crime wave occurred when the power and authority of the ruling groups was threatened, so deviance was indeed created for its consequences, but the consequences aided those in power rather than establishing moral boundaries.
• Was it even a theory of crime? The two arguments — crime as normal and anomie — belong to different halves of Durkheim's scheme, one to mechanical and the other to organic society, and it takes care to hold them together.

Durkheim's primary impact is that he focused attention on the role social forces play in determining human conduct at a time when the dominant thinking held either that people were free in choosing courses of action or that behaviour was determined by inner forces of biology and psychology. That focus is now the dominant view; it was considered quite radical at the time.

There is also considerable evidence that basic patterns of crime in the modern world can only be explained by a theory that treats modernization as a fundamental factor: Shelley found that the same changes in crime patterns that occurred first in Western Europe reoccurred in Eastern European socialist nations and in the emerging nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America as they modernised.

And the core argument may yet be rescued. Durkheim's basic claim was that modernization is linked to crime through the breakdown of social norms and rules — that is, he associated crime with the absence of social controls. It may be that the argument is correct but that Durkheim was wrong to assume that pre-modern societies had strong social control and little crime: it now seems likely they had little social control and a great deal of violent crime, and the long-term decline in violent crime may then be explained by the continuously increasing level of social controls that accompanies modernization.

- Separate the two claims. Crime as normal belongs to mechanical society; anomie is a pathological state of organic society. Answers that run them together lose marks. - Give the society of saints and the originality argument. They are the two passages that show you have read the theory rather than a summary of it. - Give the criticism from the statistics. The single strongest examinable point against Durkheim is that he inferred crime from suicide, and that the crime statistics available to him pointed the other way. - Trace the descendants. In the 1920s a group of Chicago sociologists used his theories as the basis for research linking juvenile delinquency to rapid social change in urban areas. In 1938 Merton revised the conception of anomie and applied it to American society, producing the strain theories. In 1969 Travis Hirschi returned to Durkheim's original conception and used it as the basis of his control theory of delinquency. And Durkheim's view of crime as normal is the basis for social reaction views of the law-enactment process. </content>