EMILE DURKHEIM: DIVISION OF LABOR IN SOCIETY

Chapter 2 Mechanical Solidarity or Solidarity by Similarities

In this chapter, Durkheim argues that repressive law reflects a society characterized by mechanical solidarity. In mechanical society, solidarity results from similarities between people. People act and think alike with a collective or common conscience that allows social order to be maintained. Deviation from the norm in a mechanical society is considered a crime and it is subject to punishment. Penal rules express the basic conditions of collective life for each type of society (32). Crime disturbs those feelings that in any one type of society are to be found in every healthy conscious (34). In 'Lower forms' of society (those most simply organized) law is almost exclusively penal or repressive e.g. religious law. The unchangeable character of penal law demonstrates the strength of the resistance of collective sentiment to a given crime and the reverse is true. Panel rules are presented with clarity and precision while purely moral rules are fluid. According to Durkheim, collective conscience or common consciousness is the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society that forms a determinate system with a life of its own. Durkheim defines an act as criminal when it offends the well defined state of collective consciousness (39).

It is actually public opinion and opposition which constitutes the crime. An act offends the common consciousness not because it is criminal, but it is criminal because it offends that consciousness. A crime is a crime because we condemn it (40). All crimes floe directly or indirectly from the collective conscience (43). The role of an authority with power to govern is to ensure respect for collective practices and to defend the common consciousness from its 'enemies.' In lower societies, this authority is greatest where the seriousness of the crime weighs the heaviest. Here the collective consciousness posses the most power (43). Primitive people punish for the sake of punishing causing the offender to suffer solely for the sake of suffering. However, nowadays society punishes in order to instill fear in potential criminals (46). Yet, punishment has still remained an act of vengeance and expiation (atonement). What society avenges, and what the criminal must expiate, is the 'outrage to morality' (47). It is the attack upon society that is repressed by punishment.

Punishment is a 'reaction of passionate feeling, graduated in intensity, which society exerts through the mediation of an organized body over those of its members who have violated certain rules of conduct' (52). Punishing crime sustains the common consciousness. Two consciousnesses exist within humans: one which represents individual personalities and the other which represents the collectivity. The force which is shocked by crime is the result of the most vital social similarities and its effect is to maintain the social cohesion that arises from these similarities (61).

Punishment publicly demonstrates that the sentiments of the collectivity are still unchanged (despite the deviant ways) of the offender and thus the injury that the crime inflicted on society is made good. Therefore the criminal should suffer in proportion to his crime. In fact, the primary intent of punishment is to affect honest people (63). In this chapter, Durkheim shows that a social solidarity exists because a certain number of states of consciousness are common to all members of the same society. This is the solidarity which repressive law embodies.
On the other hand, in industrial society, division of labor is complex. People are allocated in society according to merit and rewarded accordingly. In order to maintain social order in industrial (organic society), moral regulations were required due to massive violation of human rights. Such societies use restitution laws to bring order in society. Durkheim believed that transition from mechanical or organic society brought social disorder, crisis and anomie.