International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 77

International Journal on Criminology
punishment that causes crime, but it is through punishment that crime, in its external
aspects, is revealed to us. And it is therefore punishment that must be our
starting point if we wish to understand crime.” 4 Why? Durkheim adopts the perspective
of “the science of morals and rights,” which seeks to study “the moral
and juridical facts ... consist[ing] of rules of conduct that have received sanction.” 5
Thus the—universal—presence of sanction indicates that the violation of such a
precept has been judged in such a way because it was a moral precept, i.e., a “rule
of conduct” whose violation necessitates sanction. Put differently, the moral fact
is a sanctioned rule of conduct; expressed in stricter terms, the sanction and the
moral fact are in fact one:
To decide whether a precept is a moral one or not we must investigate
whether it presents the external mark of morality. This mark
consists of a widespread, repressive sanction, that is to say a condemnation
by public opinion which consists of avenging any violation
of the precept. Whenever we are confronted with a fact that
presents this characteristic we have no right to deny its moral character,
for this is proof that it is of the same nature as other moral
facts. Not only are rules of this kind encountered in more primitive
forms of society, but in them they are more numerous than among
civilised peoples. A large number of acts which today are left to the
discretion of individuals were then imposed compulsorily. 6
The morality Durkheim speaks of here does indeed have the function of
being a “rule of conduct that [has] received sanction.” 7 Furthermore, it is applied
“today,” Durkheim says, with still less social control since a “large number of acts”
are “today left to the discretion of individuals,” whereas they were once “imposed
compulsorily.” What is the reason for such a diminishment of social control, and,
moreover, at the end of the nineteenth century? The reason, as Patrick Pharo announces,
also referring to Moral Education, 8 is that in Durkheim’s view “morality, ...
at a certain level of understanding by the subject, could also be the object of a desire
on his part, on the basis of his own moral autonomy.” 9 It is not therefore a matter of
This means that, in its etymological sense, the word crime does not directly designate an action, an
act, or a particular behavior, but rather the act of judging a behavior in the framework of an institutional
process of a legal type.” Alvaro P. Pires, “La criminologie d’hier et d’aujourd’hui,” in Histoire
des savoirs sur le crime et la peine. Tome I. Des savoirs diffus à la notion de criminel-né, ed. Christian
Debuyst, Françoise Digneffe, Jean-Michel Labadie, and Alvaro P. Pires (Montreal: Les Presses de
l’Université de Montréal/Brussels: De Boeck University, 1995).
4 Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press, 1982), 80.
5 Émile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1958), 1.
6 Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, 79-80.
7 Durkheim, Professional Ethics, 1.
8 Émile Durkheim, Moral Education (New York: The Free Press, 1973).
9 Patrick Pharo, Morale et sociologie, 97.
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