ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim was born in Epinal, France, to a Jewish family with a long line of rabbis. This chapter deals with a discussion of Emile Durkheim’s most important sociological concepts. It focuses on some of the more significant and controversial ideas that have come to form the Durkheimian perspective of legal sociology. The chapter examines the correspondence that Durkheim sees existing between the types of social solidarity and the types of legal system and penal sanetions. For Durkheim, legal phenomena “were considered to be something rather like particular manifestations or types of moral and/or religious phenomena”. Durkheim contends that social facts are phenomena sui generis. The chapter shows that Durkheim’s sociology of law can be understood only when considered within the context of organic and mechanical solidarity and the division of labor. Basing his ideas on the Durkheimian tradition of understanding crime and ritual punishments in maintaining social solidarity, sociologist Albert Bergesen proposes a general explanation of political witch-hunts.
