War and crime as a source of moral renewal and unity - republican heritage and its transformation into a work of Emile Durkheim
War and crime as a source of moral renewal and unity - republican heritage and its transformation into a work of Emile Durkheim

Summary/Abstract: In this paper we wish to demonstrate how Durkheim integrates in his work the views of the classics of political thought on war as a means of moral regeneration of society. Taking into account the understanding of the consequences of war in republics – in Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau – we will try to offer a new way of looking at Durkheim’s sociological theory. Although he was not a supporter of war as a means of (moral) integration, Durkheim noted its positive effect on moral cohesion in the example of the study of suicide. The central hypothesis of our work relates to the functional equivalence of the republican understanding of the consequences of war and Durkheim’s theory of the origin and role of crime. Unlike his predecessors and contemporaries (Comte, Saint-Simon, and Spencer), Durkheim never completely abandoned the idea of conflict (crime) as an integrating factor within a society. The main difference between Durkheim and the abovementioned classics of philosophy and republican thought concerns the framework of conflict. While within the republican legacy it appears as conflict with an external enemy (war), in Durkheim it predominantly appears in the form of internal conflict.

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