Before his ideas about the nature o

Before his ideas about the nature of change in penalties were challenged, however, sociologists had pointed out the deficiencies in his ideas of social evolution. He describes two kinds of society, with two legal forms, but reveals nothing of the stages between those societies. Durkheim does not posit any kind of dynamic theory of social development which explains the transition from one form of society to another. This is, of course, most apparent in his discussion of absolutism, which seems to float free of any historical or material forces (Spitzer 1975; Garland 1983; 1990a; Lukes and Scull 1984; Cavadino and Dignan 1992). Although it is true that Durkheim lacks a dynamic theory of change, It is well to remember that such a dynamic theory of a progression from one state to another, powered by some discoverable effective cause, is a version of social theory elabor¬ated in Hegelian concepts of history, and associated in particular with Marxist dialectical sociology. Another historical tradition, exemplified recently and influentially by Foucault, does not analyse the process of tran¬sition, but looks at discrete societies and describes their differences, as though in a series of snapshots (see chapter 8). Durkheim's writing reads as though he were influenced both by the evolutionary theorists of his time (Spencer and Darwin) and by this predominantly Gallic view of history as a series of discontinuities, and his resultant work is a somewhat uneasy compromise between the two.