Defining Deviancy Down

In the Winter 1993 issue of the American Scholar (Vol. 62 No.1), Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan made his own signal contribution to sociology in commenting upon the theories of one its founders. The following is excerpted from Moynihan's article:

In one of the founding texts of Sociology, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim set it down that "crime is normal." "It is completely impossible for any society entirely free of it to exist." By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. ...

The matter was pretty much left at that until seventy years later when, in 1965, Kai T. Erikson published Wayward Puritans, a study of crime rates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The plan behind the book, as Erikson put it, was to test [Durkheim's] notion that the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time. The notion proved out very well indeed. Despite occasional crime waves, as when itinerant Quakers refused to take off their hats in the presence of magistrates, the amount of deviance in this corner of seventeenth-century New England fitted nicely with the supply of stocks and whipping posts. ...

Social scientists are said to be on the lookout for poor fellows getting a bum rap. But here is a theory that clearly implies that there are circumstances in which society will choose not to notice behavior that would otherwise be controlled, or disapproved, or even punished.

It appears to me that this is in fact what we in the United States have been doing of late. I proffer the thesis that, over the past generation ... the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community "can afford to recognize" and that, accordingly, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the "normal" level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard. This redefining has evoked fierce resistance from defenders of "old" standards, and accounts for much of the present "cultural war" such as proclaimed by many at the 1992 Republican National Convention.

(Reprinted with the permission of the American Scholar and Sen. Moynihan.)