Emile Durkheim: "Law Is Always Intimately Connected To Social Norms And A Society’s Moral Understanding..."

Aditi Singh, BA LLB, Master's student at King's College London

“Law is always intimately connected to social norms and a society’s moral understanding...” (Deflam 2008)

Emile Durkheim is a French Sociologist and a functionalist, well known for his work on the topic ‘suicide’. However, he is not exclusive to the area of suicide, he had ample experience and expertise in other areas of sociological interest and one such prominent field is crime and punishment. (Allen 2017) According to Durkheim, society should be analysed and further described in terms of functions. Society is a system of interrelated parts where no one part can function without the other. These parts make up the whole of society. If one part changes, it has an impact on society in large. For example, the state provides public education for children. The citizens of the country pay taxes, which the state further uses for public education. The children who learn from public education go on becoming the law-abiding citizens, who again pay taxes to support the state. He elucidates on the notion of Evolutionism as where the society changes slowly, and the process of change includes self-correction to problems and strains in the social world. Durkheim posited an evolutionary view of the collective conscience. He believed that simpler societies based on kinship and community ties and a basic division of labour based on age and sex were strongly integrated, thus the collective conscience was an unquestioned and overwhelming part of individual consciousness. (Hinkle 1976)

He argued that crime and punishment were integral features of organized social life. Crime and punishment defines morality in the society. He viewed sociology as an empirical approach of social facts, which can be characterised as methods for being in social orders that are coercive over the people. He considered the study of crime and punishment important to understand sociology because these "social facts" revealed the inner workings of society and the mechanism through which societies change. (Durkheim 2014) He defines law as “the most important observable manifestation of the collective consciousness and its transformation.”