This prevailing viewpoint that crime was an inevitable by-product of society was – within the fixed historical context in which Durkheim and his contemporise were working – an important methodological connection to have made because the 1920s and 1930s (the era which formed the principles of the Chicago School of criminology) saw successive governments in Europe and North America instil draconian laws aimed at completely eradicating crime from society. We have, for instance, already noted how in the USA the Federal Government attempted to ban the sale of alcohol in a bid to reduce the social effects of crime, only resulting in the creation of professional gangsters and bootlegging in the most densely populated of American urban areas such as Chicago. Likewise in Europe, the fascist dictatorships which seized political power in Germany and Italy during the 1920s and 1930s can be seen to have been a reflection of mainstream’s society increasing preoccupation with crime and the over-riding desire to eradicate delinquency at any humanitarian and moral cost. Thus, we should make a point of underlining the extent to which Durkheim and the Chicago School represented a reaction against the “symbolic crusade to reassert traditional values” and, moreover, how these early criminological theorists served to create extremely fertile grounds for the exploration of new methods to combat escalating levels of crime in society by debunking such historical myths. This is an important point and one that ought to be borne in mind throughout the remainder of the discussion.
None of this, of course, is to state that we should take Durkheim’s quotation at face value. He did not mean that crime is “normal” or “necessary” in any positive kind of sense and he was not suggesting that broader societal problem with crime should in any way be downscaled in accordance with the libertarian view that crime was inevitable. Rather, the point he was making was that if crime did not exist it would mean that every human being is born equal, subject to equal opportunities and subject to the same whims of reason and fancy. This, to Durkheim, was an absurdity; hence, the absurd nature of his comments. Thus, rather than taking his words at face value we have to understand the sociological context in which he was writing which, as we have already seen, was characterised by an anachronistic crusade to rid society of crime in an epoch still reeling from the devastating socio-economic reside of the Wall Street Crash, the subsequent Great Depression and – at the time that the quotation was written – the onset of a second world war in the space of a generation.