From Restitutive Law to Repressive Law Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society re-visited
When Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society first appeared in English translation in 1933, it was greeted by a terse and scathing critique by Ellsworth Faris, who suggested that there was no empirical foundation to Durkheim's thesis, and that subsequent anthropological research—in the forty years since the publication of the book in French—had rendered the work redundant. In particular, Faris called attention to the fact that in primitive societies—in stark contradistinction to Durkheim's basic theme—there was much division of labor and very little repressive law.