Durkheim 'Social Facts'

Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’ MATI-ONG, Rico M. | III-10 BSE Social Science | AY. 2015 – 2016

Philippine Normal University Nurturing Innovative Teachers©

1

Social Facts

- Forces and structures that is external to, and coercive of, the individual.

- The social structures and cultural norms and values that are external to, and

coercive of, actors.

- The every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an

external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a

given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its

individual manifestations. (Durkheim, 1895/1982:13)

- Experienced as an external constraint rather than an internal drive; second, it is

general throughout the society and is not attached to any particular individual.

- Several examples of social facts, including legal rules, moral obligations, and

social conventions

SOURCE (Book): Sociological Theory ‘Eighth Edition’ (George Ritzer

University of Maryland, 2008)

- Commonly used to designate almost all the phenomena that occur within society,

however little social interest of some generality they present. Yet under this

heading there is, so to speak, no human occurrence that cannot be called social.

Every individual drinks, sleeps, eats, or employs his reason, and society has

every interest in seeing that these functions are regularly exercised.

SOURCE (Book): The Rules of Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim (Edited

with an Introduction by Steven Lukes Translated -by W. D. Halls, 1982)

- The subject matter of sociology. Social facts are “sui generis” (meaning of its

own kind; unique) and must be studied distinct from biological and psychological

phenomenon.

- Patterns of behavior that is capable of exercising some coercive power upon

individuals. They are guides and controls of conduct and are external to the

individual in the form of norms, mores, and folkways.

- Identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or is capable

of exerting upon individuals” (Durkheim 1895/1982, 56).

SOURCE (Powerpoint): EMILE DURKHEIM By F. Elwell Rogers State

University

- Things, that is, as realities external to the individual

- Studied from the outside, as external things, because it is in this guise that they

present themselves to us” (p. 286).



2

- Including crime, [it] “can only be labelled normal or abnormal in relation to a

given social species.”

- Social fact can exist except where there is a well defined social organisation.

- Any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual

an external constraint; which is general over the whole of a given society whilst

having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations.

- Can only be termed normal in a given species in relation to a particular phase,

likewise determinate, of its development. Consequently, to know whether the

term is merited for a social fact, it is not enough to observe the form in which it

occurs in the majority of societies which belong to a species: we must also be

careful to observe the societies at the corresponding phase of their evolution...

- Determined among antecedent social facts and not among the states of the

individual consciousness. Moreover, we can easily conceive that all that has been

stated above applies to the determination of the function as well as the cause of

a social fact. Its function can only be social, which means that it consists in the

production of socially useful effects. Undoubtedly it can and indeed does happen

that it has repercussions which also serve the individual. But this happy result is

not the immediate rationale for its existence. Thus we can complement the

preceding proposition by stating: The function of a social fact must always be

sought in the relationship that it bears to some social end....

SOURCE (Book): Emile Durkheim, SOCIOLOGIST OF MODERNITY (Edited by

Mustafa Emirbayer Series Editor Ira J. Cohen, 2003)

- Cannot explain of any complexity save on condition that one follows its entire

development throughout all social species (1895/1982b:157

SOURCE Book: Durkheim's Contribution to the Sociological Analysis of

History (Mustafa Emirbayer, 1996)

- Sui generis, and have an independent existence greater and are more objective

than what the individuals that compose society do or think: they and are more

objective than what the individuals that compose society do or think: they offer a

gestalt

- Studied as things and seen as realities external to the individual and independent

of the observer’s conceptual apparatus.

SOURCE (Article): —Emile Durkheim: Social Facts, Anomie, Consciousness

Collectives

- Must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual.

- Merely a generalized individual fact



3

SOURCE (Book): Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A study in sociology (Translated by

John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. Edited with an introduction by

George Simpso, 1951)

Material Social Facts

It is not true that society is made up only of individuals; it also includes material things,

which play an essential role in the common life. The social fact is sometimes so far

materialized as to become an element of the external world

- Such as styles of architecture, forms of technology, and legal codes, are the

easier to understand of the two because they are directly observable. Clearly,

such things as laws are external to individuals and coercive over them. More

importantly, these material social facts often express a far larger and more

powerful realm of moral forces that are at least equally external to individuals

and coercive over them. These are nonmaterial social facts.

PDF SOURCE: Sociological Theory ‘Eighth Edition’ (George Ritzer University

of Maryland, 2008)

Non-material Social Facts

Durkheim differentiated between two types of social facts—material and nonmaterial.

Although he dealt with both in the course of his work, his main focus was on

nonmaterial social facts (for example, culture, social institutions) rather than material

social facts (for example, bureaucracy, law)

- Found in the minds of individuals… Individuals are still necessary as a kind of

substrate for the nonmaterial social facts, but the particular form and content will

be determined by the complex interactions and not by the individuals

- Now call norms and values, or more generally culture are good examples of what

Durkheim meant by nonmaterial social facts



Morality

- Morality can be empirically studied, is external to the individual, is coercive of the

individual, and is explained by other social facts

- Not something that one can philosophize about, but something that one has to

study as an empirical phenomenon.



4

- In understanding any particular institution, you have to first study how the

institution is constituted, how it came to assume its present form, what its place

is in the overall structure of society, how the various institutional obligations are

related to the social good, and so forth.

- Identified with society. Therefore, society could not be immoral, but it could

certainly lose its moral force if the collective interest of society became nothing

but the sum of self-interests



- It may in fact be asserted that there is not a single system which does not

represent it as the simple development of an initial idea which enshrines it

potentially in its entirety. Some believe that men possess this idea complete at

birth; on the pther hand, others believe that it has grown up at a varying rate in

the course of history. But for both empiricists and rationalists this is all that is

truly real about morality. As for detailed legal and moral rules, these would have,

in a manner of speaking, no existence per se, being merely applications of the

basic notion to the particular circumstances of living, and varying according to

different cases. Hence the subject matter of morality. cannot be this unreal

system of precepts, but the idea from which the precepts derive and which is

interpreted differently according to cases. Thus all the questions that ethics .

normally raises relate not to things but to ideas. We must know what

constitutes the ideas of law and morality and not what is the nature of

morality and law considered in their own right. Morlflists have not yet even

grasped the simple truth that, just as our representations of things perceived by

the senses spring from those things themselves and express them more or less

accurately, our representation of morality springs from observing the rules that

function before our very eyes and perceives them systematically. Consequently it

is these rules and not the cursory view we have of them which constitute the

subject matter of science, just as the subject matter of physics consists of actual

physical bodies and not the idea th�tordinary people have ofit. The outcome is

that the Rules for the Observation of Social Facts 67

- basis of morality is taken, to be what is only its superstructure, namely, the

way in which it extends itself to the individual consciousness and makes its

impact upon it.· Nor is it only for the more general problems of science that this

method is followed; it is not modified even for more specialised questions. From

the essential ideas that he studies at the outset the moralist passes on to the

examination of second-order ideas, such as family, country, responsibility, charity

and justice -but it is always to ideas that his thinking is applied.



5



- Each province, each territorial division, has its own special morality and

customs, a life peculiarly its own. Thus it exerts over individuals imbued with its

spirit an attraction that tends to keep them on the spot and, moreover, to repel

others. But within a single country such differences cannot be very numerous or

clear-cut. The segments are therefore more open to one another. Indeed, from

the Middle Ages onwards “after the formation of towns, foreign artisans

travelled as freely and as far and wide as did goods”. Segmentary

organisation had lost its contours.

- The symbolic process that ensued functioned to canalize this anxiety in certain

distinctive, more generalized, and more consensual direc- tions. The hearings

constituted a kind of civic ritual which revivified very general yet nonetheless

very crucial currents of critical universalism and rationality in the American

political culture. It recreated the sacred, generalized morality upon which

more mundane conceptions of office are based, and it did so by invoking the

mythical level of national understanding in a way that few other events

have in postwar history...

- It begins with two selections on occupational groups, one from Suicide, the

other from The Division of Labor (specifically, its Preface to the Second Edition),

which together formulate practical remedies or solutions to the maladies in

industrial capitalism that Durkheim had specified in his earlier analyses of the

modern economy. Durkheim’s solution to these economic problems is the

development of “corporative organizations” or “professional groups” that

mediate between the individual and larger economic institutions and that

provide an encompassing moral community for that individual, while also

being firmly grounded in the specific conditions of his or her economic

existence. The subsequent two selections (in particular, excerpts from “The

Conjugal Family”) reveal the close parallels between these envisioned

occupational groups and the “domestic morality” of the family – indeed, their

common origins – and the very similar ways in which Durkheim conceptualizes

them and understands their moral functions. A short selection by two later

authors, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, speaks of “mediating

structures” and argues for their supreme importance for a new public policy that

would seek “empowerment” and democracy

- . . . The maladjustment from which we suffer does not exist because the

objective causes of suffering have increased in number or intensity; it bears



6

witness not to greater economic poverty, but to an alarming poverty of

morality....

- For a professional morality and code of law to become established within the

various professions in the economy, instead of the corporation remaining a

conglomerate body lacking unity, it must become, or rather become once more,

a well-defined, organised group – in short, a public institution....

- Just as the family had been the environment within which domestic morality and

law had been worked out, so the corporation was the natural environment within

which professional morality and law had to be elaborated



- The Division of Labor in Society (1893/1984a), to his last, the never-completed

outline (mentioned above) of an historical sociology of morality (1917/1979b). In

The Division of Labor, he set out to explain the emergence of modern society by

reference to a confluence of what he termed "morphological" factors. He

suggested that functional differentiation, specialization, and the evolution of

the division of labor were destroying more traditional forms of moral

integration and producing a new type of solidarity, one marked by

interdependence and a greater scope for individual initiative

SOURCE (Book): Durkheim's Contribution to the Sociological Analysis of


- Durkheim felt that ‘individualism’ was modern society’s morality, its secular

religion, with the schoolteacher taking the place of the priest.

SOURCE (Article): —Emile Durkheim Social Facts, Anomie, Consciousness

Collectives

Collective Conscience

- The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same

society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the

collective or common conscience. . . . It is, thus, an entirely different thing from

particular consciences, although it can be realized only through them.

(Durkheim, 1893/1964:79–80)

- Collective conscience refers to the general structure of shared understandings,

norms, and beliefs



7

- Durkheim employed this concept to argue that “primitive” societies had a

stronger collective conscience—that is, more shared understandings, norms, and

beliefs—than modern societies.



According to Durkheim, the desires and self-interests of human beings can only be held

in check by forces that originate outside of the individual. Durkheim characterizes this

external force as a collective conscience, a common social bond that is expressed by

the ideas, values, norms, beliefs, and ideologies of a culture.

“As there is nothing within an individual which constrains these appetites, they must

surely be contained by some force exterior to him, or else they would become

insatiable—that is morbid” (1928/1978, 213).

As the collective conscience originates with society, Durkheim elaborated the cause and

effects of weakening group ties (and thus a weakening of the collective conscience) on

the individual in his two works, The Division of Labor in Society (1893) and Suicide

(1897).

In The Division of Labor, Durkheim identifies two forms or types of solidarity, which are

based on different sources. Mechanical solidarity is “solidarity which comes from

likeness and is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our

whole conscience and coincides in all points with it.”

Collective Conscience: Mechanical

Mechanical solidarity occurs in early societies in which there is not much division of

labor. Such societies are relatively homogenous, men and women engage in similar

tasks and daily activities, people have similar experiences. In such societies the few

distinct institutions express similar values and norms and tend to reinforce one another.

The norms, values, and beliefs of the society (or the collective conscience) are so

homogenous and confront the individual with such overwhelming and consistent force,

that there is little opportunity in such societies for individuality or deviance from this

collective conscience.

According to Durkheim, traditional cultures experience a high level of social and moral

integration, there was little individuation, and most behaviors were governed by social

norms which were usually embodied in religion.

By engaging in the same activities and rituals, people in traditional societies shared

common moral values, which Durkheim called a collective conscience. In these



8

societies, people tend to regard themselves as members of a group; the collective

conscience embraces individual awareness, and there is little sense of personal options.

Collective Conscience: Organic

Organic solidarity develops as a by-product of the division of labor. As society becomes

more complex, individuals play more specialized roles and become ever more dissimilar

in their social experiences, material interests, values, and beliefs.

Individuals in such a sociocultural system have less in common; however, they must

become more dependent upon each other for their survival

The growth of individualism is an inevitable result of the increasing division of labor,

and this individualism can only develop at the expense of the common values, morality,

beliefs, and normative rules of society—the sentiments and beliefs that are held by all.

With the loosening of these common rules and values we also lose our sense of

community, or identity with the group. The social bond is thereby weakened and social

values and beliefs no longer provide us with coherent or insistent moral guidance.

And this loosening lends itself to anomie. Again, according to Durkheim, if an individual

lacks any sense of social restraint her self-interest will be unleashed, she will seek to

satisfy her own appetites with little thought on the possible effect her action will have

on others.

Instead of asking “is this moral?” or “does my family approve?” the individual is more

likely to ask “does this action meet my needs?” The individual is left to find her own

way in the world—a world in which personal options for behavior have multiplied as

strong and insistent norms and moral guidelines have weakened.

It is religion is one of the main forces that make up the collective conscience; religion

which allows the individual to transcend self and act for the social good. But traditional

religion was weakening under the onslaught of the division of labor; what could replace

religion as the common bond?

SOURCE (Presentation): EMILE DURKHEIM By F. Elwell Rogers State

University

Collective Representations

- Examples of collective representations are religious symbols, myths, and popular

legends. All of these are ways in which society reflects on itself (Durkheim,

1895/1982:40)



9

- Collective representations also cannot be reduced to individuals because they

emerge out of social interactions, but they can be studied more directly than

collective conscience because they are more likely to be connected to material

symbols such as flags, icons, and pictures or connected to practices such as

rituals. Therefore, the sociologist can begin to study how certain collective

representations fit well together, or have an affinity, and others do not. As an

example, we can look at a sociological study that shows how representations of

Abraham Lincoln have changed in response to other social facts.



- Yet from the first publication of The Rules onwards, the focus of Durkheim's

attention shifted, as the texts published here demon strate, to what we might

call the cultural or ideational dimension of social reality, and what Durkheim

himself called 'collective representations'. He wrote to his future collaborator

BougIe in 1895 that sociology was a distinct kind of pyschology, and society a

distinctive 'psychological individuality';28 and in 1901 he wrote in reply to hi old

enemy Tarde that 'social life is, a system of representation aI,ld mental states'

which are 'sui generis, different in nature from those which constitute the mental

life of the ,individual, and subject to their own laws which individual psychol ogy

could not foresee',29 In 1908 he wrote, rejecting the charge of materialism, that

in 'social life, everything consists of representations, ideas and sentiments' and

that 'all sociology is a psychology but a psychology sui generis', collective

representations express is the way in which the group thinks of itself in its

relationships with the objects which affect it. Now the group is constituted

differently from the individual and the things which affect it are of another kind.

Representations which express neither the same subjects nor the same objects·

cannot depend upon the same causes. In order to understand the way in which

society conceives of itself and the world that surrounds it, it is the nature of

society and not that of individuals which must be considered. The symbols in

which it thinks of itself alter according to what it is. If, for example, it conceives

of itself as deriving from an eponymous animal, it is because it forms one of

those special grups known as clans. Where the animal is replaced by a human

ancestor, but one that is also mythical, it is because the clan has changed its

nature. If, above local or family divinities, it imagines others on whom it fancies

it is dependent, it is because the local and family groups of which it is made up

tend to concentrate and



10

- Preface to the Second Edition 41 unite together, and the degree of unity

presented by a pantheon of gods corresponds to the degree of unity reached at

the same time in society.

- Collective representations to become intelligible, they must truly spring from

something



- Durkheim further explores how systems of symbolic classification – down to the

most basic categories of knowledge themselves – have a social origin and are

produced through social interaction. And in an excerpt from “Individual and

Collective Representations,” he discusses how such cultural formations, once

produced, gain a certain autonomy relative to the social substratum, the social

structure, out of which they emerged. The selections that follow – by Marc Bloch,

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Kai Erikson, and Michel Foucault – further

develop Durkheim’s ideas regard- ing symbolic classification and symbolic

boundaries. Together, they indicate one major line of inquiry that leads straight

from Durkheim’s religious sociology into contemporary studies in cultural

analysis, studies that shed light upon the cultural sociology of traditional and

modern societies alike.

- Collective representations are exterior to individual minds, it means that they do

not derive from them as such but from the association of minds, which is a very

different thing.

- The object that serves as a prop for the idea does not amount to much as

compared to the ideal superstructure under which it disappears, and,

furthermore, it has nothing to do with that superstructure. From all that has

been said, we see what the pseudo-delirium met with at the basis of so many

collective representations consists of: It is only a form of this fundamental

idealism. So it is not properly called a delusion. The ideas thus objectified are

well founded – not, to be sure, in the nature of the tangible things onto which

they are grafted but in the nature of society. We can understand now how it

happens that the totemic principle and, more generally, how any religious force

comes to be external to the things in which it resides: because the idea of it is

not at all constructed from the impressions the thing makes directly on our

senses and minds. Religious force is none other than the feeling that the

collectivity inspires in its members, but projected outside the minds that

experience them, and objectified. To become objectified, it fixes on a thing that

thereby becomes sacred; any object can play this role.



11

- There is nothing so obscure and so indefinite as these collective representations

that are spread throughout all societies – myths, religious or moral legends, and

so on....We do not know whence they come nor whither they are tending; we

have never had them under examination. The representations that derive from

the State are always more conscious of themselves, of their causes and their

aims.



- "While collective representations (which Durkheim later [calls] 'ideals' and which

we might call 'values') . . . arise from and reflect the 'social substratum' (the

morphological variables), they are, once in existence, 'partially autonomous

realities' which independently influence subsequent social development" (Bellah,

1959:457). Having "crys- tallized" from patterns of social interaction in the

morphological substruc- ture of society, these cognitive and moral categories

then take on a life of their own, and potentially react back upon the social

structure. "Durkheim, in the concept of collective representations, [makes] the

fundamental dis- covery of culture as an element ... analytically independent of

social system" (Bellah, 1959:457). We can see the dynamic interplay of culture

and social structure precisely in the rise of Humanist educational ideals-in that

combination of socioeconomic, political, and ideational developments that helped

to bring about a new pedagogical vision during the French Renaissance.

SOURCE (Book): Durkheim's Contribution to the Sociological Analysis of


- Durkheim's work was a systematic study of collective representations.

‘Conscience collectives’, are the way in which the group conceives itself in its

relations with the objects that affect it—for Durkheim an act is criminal when it

offends strong and defined states of the collective conscience

SOURCE (Article): —Emile Durkheim Social Facts, Anomie, Consciousness

Collectives

Social Currents

- Social currents are less concrete than other social facts, they are nevertheless

social facts because they cannot be reduced to the individual. We are swept

along by such social currents, and this has a coercive power over us even if we

become aware of it only when we struggle against the common feelings.



12

- Social currents can be viewed as sets of meanings that are shared by the

members of a collectively.

- Social currents can only be explained intersubjectively, that is, in terms of the

interactions between individuals. They exist at the level of interactions, not at the

level of individuals. These collective “moods,” or social currents, vary from one

collectivity to another, with the result that there is variation in the rate of certain

behaviors, including, as we will see below, something as seemingly individualistic

as suicide.



- In The Rules, Durkheim proposed a way of classifying social facts along a

continuum from maximal to minimal crystallisation or 'institutionalisation'.A t one

end are 'morphological' facts, constituting 'the substratum of collective life' ,

consisting in the number and nature of the elementary parts which constitute

society, the way in which they are articulated, the degree of coalescence they

have attained, the distribution of population over the earth's surface, the "extent

and nature of the network of communications, the design'of dwellings, etc. 22

- Then there are institutionalised norms, which may be more or less formal - 'legal

and moral rules, religious dogmas, financial sys tems, etc.', which have as their

substratum 'political society in its entirety, or one of the partial groups that it

includes'. Occupying the rest of the continuum are social 'currents', which may

be relatively stable 'movements of opinion' or, at the extreme, 'transitory

outbreaks' such as occur when 'in a public . gathering .. .g reat waves of

enthusiasm, indignation and pity' are generated.23



- There exist too at all times social currents wholly unconnected with the State,

that draw the collectively in this or that direction. Frequently it is a case of the

State coming under their pressure, rather than itself giving the impulse to them.

In this way a whole psychic life is diffused throughout the society. But it is a

different one that has a fixed existence in the organ of government. It is here

that this other psychic life develops and when in time it begins to have its effect

on the rest of the society, it is only in a minor way and by repercussions.



Date post:	15-Jan-2017
Category:	Education
Upload:	rhicx-soon-kyu
View:	2,390 times
Download:	0 times

Durkheim 'Social Facts'

Education