Research On Durkheim’s Thought Of Functions Of Crime

émile Durkheim is one of the greatest sociologist in19th century, as well as a greatcriminologist. In the eyes of Durkheim, crime is not a morbid social phenomenon aseveryone says. This is because he observes crime from macro-perspective, notmicro-perspective as other scholars do. And he finds that criminal phenomenon as awhole possesses all features of social fact, so he concludes that crime is a social fact.Though this conclusion is based on his sociological theory, it is still essential incriminology. As Durkheim treats criminal phenomenon as a natural, he studies thefunctions of crime. And he thinks that crime has four functions, they are forming socialintegration, influencing social morality, evolving law and promoting social progress,reduce social tensions. Durkheim’s theory is irreplaceable in the history of criminology isnot because of its details but its empirical methodology of holism.For a long time, no matter in the natural science or social science academic field,people were used to consider in a way of reduction. That is what we called reductionismas well as individualism. Under the conduction of this methodology, scholars wereaccustomed to neglect the rule isolation of macrocosm and microcosmos, tried to explainthe entirety with part. As in criminology, they’d like to expound the reason of crimephenomenon with features of single crimes. Whereas, as a classic sentence in marxistphilosophy tells,’ Quantitative change causes qualitative change’. The object inmacro-level which accumulates from the micro-level thing is very different from microone. Thus, Durkheim’s theory pulls us out of the puzzle of reductionism. He alwaysinsisted on holism when doing criminal research, as he did in sociology study. And thatmakes him to find reasons of criminal phenomenon in macro-level but micro one. So itcontributes to know crime comprehensively if we develop the functional view. Though,we must keep it in mind that Durkheim’s theory is not perfect, there are defects. And thatis one of the reasons why we should carry forward his function theory.