In preindustrial Europe, the Catholic Church had the monopoly of truth – it was the only powerful source of truth and therefore its claims went unchallenged. It believed in what Weber calls the Enchanted Garden, where everything that happens in the world is the result of God's will and action. This monopoly, argues Durkheim, helped establish an absolute moral and ethical* law based on divine command, and people were effectively socialised into shared norms and values, a dominant culture. He calls this social solidarity, where we can function finely in community because we all hold the same values. This was reflected on the form of punishment: retribution was the norm, because, when there was an offence, the entire community was offended, which led to public hysteria and corporal punishment as a sort of vengeance. Parsons argues that the orientation of people was communal, meaning that they put the needs of the group before their own. From this, we get phenomena such as punishing a relative for staining the name of the family. In this extended rural family*, they had ascribed status, meaning that the position in which you were born (e.g. primogeniture, or first born male descendent) was the position in which you most likely would die. Their rural lifestyle meant also that they were a unit of production which cultivated its own nutrients and grew its own animals for food and clothing etc. Parsons also notes that in preindustrial society people had immediate gratification, that they preferred to obtain now a minor good than work for a future greater good, diffuseness, that relations were wide and multi-teleological (with many purposes), and particularism, were each individual was judged by people not on a standardised criteria but on personal whim – for example, you would employ someone in your farm only because they or someone in their family are your friend.
* Ethics vs Morality: morality refers simply to the distinction between good and evil, while ethics is about how we should live our lives. Thus, the Catholic Church, having monopoly over the view of morality, was able to impose an absolutist ethical doctrine.
*Extended family: a family unit with three generations. Children + Parents + Grandparents
Nevertheless, Weber argues that with the Protestant Revolution in the 1500s starts the process of rationalisation. Calvinism, a branch of Protestantism, introduced this-worldly asceticism and the idea that God favours the hardworking. The former doctrine argues that one should not seek luxuries and rather live a life of modesty and contemplation, and thus people, who wanted to be saved after their death, began businesses like sales of crops but did not invest their gainings on luxuries, reinventing them on their business. Thus, they grew richer and richer, and this, eventually, led to industrialisation. In this process large cities gain power because work becomes centred in factories. Parsons, in his theory of the functional fit, argues that it is this that gave origin to the nuclear family (two parents and their children). In rural communities families were extended, but when they had to move to cities grandparents had to be left behind because the voyage had to be done by foot and their health wasn't sufficient for such endeavour.
Now, in large cities under these circumstances, people became isolated because they encountered new communities and in any case they were made to inhabit small apartments in buildings. Thus, he argues, the communal orientation begins to fade and give place to self-orientation or individualism, meaning they have more freedom of choice. In factories workers were alienated from their work, that whatever they produced they didn't own or have any rights upon, and rather had to buy it if they wanted it. Thus the family ceases to be a unit of production and becomes a unit of consumption, beneficial for the capitalist dynamic. Moreover, relations cease to be diffuse to become specific, meaning that each relation has a single purpose, for example boss – employee, shopkeeper – customer. Isolation from the community also results in the abandoning of particularism to adopt universalism, in which people are treated (at least in theory) according to standardised criteria. In this way, any person has the same chances of being employed by any employer who only judges them for their ability, and not their family. Both in the family and in the workplace, social mobility, the ability to climb up the social hierarchy, increases, so that status ceases to be ascribed and become achieved. In this way, people get used to working toward goals, and immediate gratification becomes deterred gratification. Additionally, the family looses most of its functions: rural extended families were responsible for nurture, education, health, employment etc, but, through the process of structural differentiation, where the emerging institutions (schools, hospitals, etc) absorbe these functions.
Durkheim notes that since so many cultures are mixed in one place, social solidarity is weakened, leading to a state of anomie in which moral standards are unclear. He blames this on the breakdown of the family and on the excess of hope: propaganda aiming to attract workers form rural areas exaggerated social mobility, and thus people arrived in cities with much too high and unrealistic expectations. Furthermore, multiculturalism removed the Church's monopoly of truth, because many cultures and worldviews met. Thus, the ethical and moral code imposed by the Church also loses credibility and is abandoned by many – atheism begins to grow in society. With no shared God that dictates to all members of society how to behave, argues Durkheim, people fail to be socialised so rigidly into social solidarity. All these factors lead to anomie. This had effects on the type of punishment: when there is an offence, there no longer is public hysteria, and thus retribution no longer works; moreover, the effect on which retribution bases its functioning for deterring re-offending, namely shame, also looses power, because due to higher geographical mobility the offender can simply move some place else where s/he is not known; rather, the punishment now practiced is restitution, where efforts are made to reintegrate the offender into society so s/he can make a living within the law.
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