o shared norms and values, but in a society with weak bonds among the members, people are more likely to deviate” (Robertson 197). In other words, the more people are integrated into the community, the less likely are they to deviate from its norms because they are more vested in the community and wish to follow its generally agreed upon guidelines for behavior.
These two modern theories of deviance based on Durkheim’s theory of anomie and study of suicide, helps us more fully understand his position outlined in The Normal and the Pathological. If society is undergoing a period of rapidly changing social norms with a great degree of diversity, as America is at present, then a higher level of deviance can be expected. Likewise, if many individuals in a society exist on the fringes of society and are marginalized, their lower degree of integration into the broader community (one that sets the guidelines of behavior or social norms) should make us expect a higher level of deviance. Thus, we can readily understand Durkheim’s contention that crime (deviant behavior that breaks legal social norms) is a normal and common aspect of any collective society—a theory he underscores in The Normal and the Pathological:
There is, then, no phenomenon that presents more indisputably all the symptoms of normality, since it appears closely connected with the conditions of all collective life. To make of crime a form of social morbidity would be to admit that morbidity is not something accidental, but, on the contrary, that in certain cases it grows out of the fundamental constitution of the living organism; it would result in wiping out all distinct
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