Emile Durkheim’s theory of the relationship between societal development and homicide has received significant attention in the empirical literature of criminology, yet has been oversimplified by this literature and appears to be poorly understood. The purpose of this article is to clarify the core arguments of his theory, note its complexity and highlight the extent to which Durkheim’s ideas on this subject have been misrepresented in empirical literature. In view of what Durkheim explicitly states about societal development and homicide, it is apparent that his theory has not been carefully tested. Distortions of his work have resulted both from the fragmented nature of his theoretical presentation and, perhaps more importantly, from the failure of contemporary researchers to read his work thoroughly.
In contemporary criminology, the proposal of a relationship between anomie and crime typically is traced to the work of Émile Durkheim. Yet, despite the prominence of anomie theory in this field, Durkheim's theory of anomie and crime has not been carefully explicated and elaborated. Durkheim did not provide an extensive discussion of how anomie affects crime rates, and he certainly did not present anomie as the only cause of crime. Nonetheless, a careful examination of his rather elusive concept of anomie, together with a few small inferences, yields a relatively coherent theory of crime that differs from the popular interpretations of his work. The analysis begins with an inquiry into five different conceptions of anomie that can be abstracted from Durkheim's writings. This is followed by an examination of what he implied regarding anomie as a cause of property crime, violent crime, and ''juvenile crime.'' The final section explores the effects of anomie on criminal law-that is, on decisions to define and treat various actions as criminal. Unlike most contemporary anomie theories, Durkheim's theory, as elaborated in this article, integrates a theory of crime causation with an account of criminal law.With the publication of Robert Merton's ''Social Structure and Anomie'' in 1938, discourse on the relationship between anomie and crime began its move to the front stage of criminology. 1 Of course, Merton was not the first theorist to suggest a relationship between these two phenomena; he simply reconfigured and extended a line of reasoning that had existed for several decades. More than 40 years earlier, É mile Durkheim, in a fragmented and often implicit manner, proposed a connection between anomie and crime. Yet, even though anomie became one of the core concepts of twentieth-century criminology, a thorough examination of Durkheim's theory of anomie and crime is not available in the literature of criminology and still warrants attention. Many criminologists and sociologists have presented analyses that touch on this matter, but they do not
Emile Durkheim usually neglected gender differences in his discussions of law crime, but he did provide a few noteworthy comments on the relationship betw icide. He argued that women commit more intentional homicides than is commo and he offered a partial explanation of why women, nonetheless, tend to comm than men. In this article, I examine Durkheim's comments on the gender/hom and explore the 'conservatism ' of his viewpoint on gender. While some of his com controversial and empirically questionable, they are significant in that they prov into early criminological thought on gender and crime. They also help clarify th of Durkheim's overall criminological perspective. Among other things, they ind bles of gender and opportunity have a noteworthy place within his perspective, ance he attributes to anomie as a causal factor has been exaggerated by criminology.
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