LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Emile Durkheim: Society
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Durkheim insisted that not only was society a holistic entity, it was an organism. His references seem extensive (Durkheim 1974b: 198 ; Durkheim 1982: 129 & 243 ; Durkheim 1973b: 60 ; Durkheim 1981: 66). At other points he referred to society as a moral being (Durkheim & Wilson 1981: 1063 ; Durkheim 1974a: 51-2). Sometimes he labeled society a collective being (Durkheim 1974a: 52). Not only was society an organism for Durkheim, he went as far as to describe it as possessing a collective personality (Durkheim 1974a: 51).
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Durkheim believed that crime was not only normal in any society, but was ... functional. It was normal because no society existed in which some level of crime was not evident, and functional as it served to reinforce social norms, provide the raw material for social change and provide a kind of "safety valve" for social discontent, wherein people can simply disobey the law, rather than seeking to change it.
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The mature Durkheim realized that only if all members of a society were anchored to common sets of symbolic representations, to common assumptions about the world around them, could moral unity be assured. Without them, Durkheim argued, any society, whether primitive or modern, was bound to degenerate and decay.
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Durkheim offered a more genuine, at and the same time less ethnocentric account [than Kant's]. He offered an explanation which ... allowed for cultural diversity, for the fact that, although all men do indeed live under the domination of compulsive concepts, the nature of those compulsions varies a great deal from one society and period to another.
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