Every individual must satisfy a certain number of needs which have their marked recurrences. A peaceful and honest society will be one in which the great majority of the persons who compose it have, in measure, the means of satisfying these needs. “Regular habits of consumption and production form the first condition for good moral health whether individual or collective, just as regular digestion is the foundation of good physical health. Those who are irregular become easily the ‘déclassés.’ Nothing is more contagious than disorder.”[15]
Hence, then, comes the importance for criminality of social crises, since during these production and consumption are deranged.
According to Professor Tarde, the social contradictions, which are the chronic crises of societies, can be the sole causes of criminality. If a society succeeds in avoiding every internal contradiction there can hardly be any further question of crime.
Our opinions can always harmonize with those of the people around us, while we are foreign to them in desire and feeling. “The criminal is he who, undergoing conformity to the ideas of the community in which he lives, yet escapes from conforming to the feelings and acts of the community. He acts contrary to his own principles, which are those of society.” “It is, then, not to a social crisis that we must mount, but to a psychological crisis that we must descend, to explain crime.”[16]
Social crises are of two kinds: politico-religious, and economic. In opposition to divers statisticians, who are of the opinion that the former class cause a diminution in criminality, the author thinks that this diminution is only apparent, and that in reality the number [[159]]of crimes increases at these times; which is shown, for example, for France by the addition of cases not prosecuted to those prosecuted.
As to the effect of economic crises, statisticians, Professor Tarde claims, have not yet examined it. It seems to him that there is no parallelism between economic crises and criminality.
The struggle of classes, which springs up and grows during the periods of crisis, is a great danger to public morals, since it gives rise to a class spirit, and consequently increases the contempt for the rights of individuals of another class. However, the class struggle does not increase the number of individual crimes, but only the number of collective crimes.
To sum up, Professor Tarde is of the opinion, then, that social crises in general, and economic crises in particular, are not the only source nor a continual source of crime. The question of what is the cause of economic crises remains unexplained. To solve this we must call in all political economy. The causes of these economic crises are in brief: first, unlimited competition; second, unforeseen disasters. “We may add that these acute conflicts lead to suicide more than to crime; they are a factor of crime much less important than the sullen conflicts, the low but continuous fevers of troubled epochs in quest of a stable state. And these are then less the conflicts of production with itself, or of production with consumption, than the conflicts of consumption with itself, i.e. the conflicts of needs that have grown but cannot be satisfied at the time, within the limits of the always insufficient wages or profits, a fertile source of criminal suggestions. When labor no longer suffices to satisfy the legitimate needs in accordance with the prevailing standards, the desire of gain without labor invades the heart and becomes general. The only remedy for this danger would be the advancement of manufacturing and its reorganization upon a vaster and better conceived plan than the present one, if, at the same time that any industrial progress gave more wealth for less labor, it did not give rise to still more new wants. The individual organization of wants, their hierarchization, by virtue of a certain unanimity of fundamental principles, must precede the social organization of labor, if we wish this latter really to make for peace and morals.”[17]
—Professor Tarde’s report is characterized by many very true observations (as, for example, that every economic phase has its own form of criminality; that sudden transitions from wealth to poverty, and [[160]]vice versa, are morally more dangerous than slow changes; etc., etc.), but at the same time is still more marked by a certain elasticity and lack of close reasoning. Hence it is almost impossible to frame a criticism of the report that will follow it step by step.