Although Marx helped exert quite a significant influence on many criminological ideologies and thoughts, he nevertheless did not think much about crime and why it is committed. However, compared to Marx, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) had extensive knowledge to share when it came to crime. Durkheim's ideas on crime are said to have had a considerable impact on the Chicago School of Criminology as well as Robert King Merton (1910–2003), an American sociologist from Philadelphia. Durkheim's fixation was on how the social aspects of phenomena could be understood. Merton shared Durkheim's functionalist concerns about society, particularly that social stability rests on a strong consensus of values. This essay seeks to describe Merton's theory of anomie, to explain how Durkheim influenced Merton's ideas, to analyze the limitations, to compare the Chicago School of Criminology and also to compare Durkheim's concepts of crime and of Merton. Durkheim, with his ideologies and thoughts, had a compelling influence on topics such as social change and suicide. He had his own variation of the anomie theory which later proved to be the inspiration for Merton's work on his own anomie theory. Durkheim is the founding father of academic sociology in France. Durkheim believed that crime itself was an action that offended collective feelings or sentiments. He argued that crime is best understood as a violation of a moral code; he called this the society's conscience collection. Durkheim had a lot to explain about social change. He argued that crime and punishment have the capacity to provide us with much-needed insight into how society functions. In The Division of Labor in Society which was first published......middle of the article......changed the functional integration of society. For Durkheim, anomie was deviant behavior resulting from unlimited apserations. On the other hand, Merton argued that unlimited aspirations initially led to deviant behavior. This was true when examining Meron's American Dream theory, which argued that cultural goals outweighed institutional means to achieve the American Dream. While Durkheim's and Merton's perspectives on anomie offer knowable insights and concepts about deviant behavior, one emphasizing human capabilities and the other social, neither offer no concrete explanation of crime and deviance. This essay successfully explained how Durkehim influenced Merton's ideas and also compared their two concepts on crime. The Chicago School of Criminology was explained primarily to show an understanding of the sociological explanation of crime and deviance..