Durkheimian Theory of Violence Epidemiology

Durkheim's theoretical and methodological approach to collective violence becomes more relevant as violence rises globally. The scope, depth, and sophistication of his approach provides the basis of a framework for integrating criminological theory and research in the middle-range, and focused on community or interpersonal patterns of violence. His combination of macro social conditions, with epidemiological, correlation, historical, and qualitative analysis, and with at least an implicit logic of emergent patterns of violence as an expression of transitional threshold states of society, offer a unique conception of the larger society as exerting a determinant tendency toward collective violence with community and interpersonal problems as contingent conditions increasing vulnerability to the general tendency. A “worst-case” violence syndrome is suggested as an example of Durkheim's multidimensional approach and as a hypothetical model of collective violence in the 20 th century United States and likely in the near future.