Durkheim 'Social Facts'

Social Facts, its branches and its underlying concepts of morality, collective conscience, collective representations and social currents.

1. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
MATI-ONG, Rico M. | III-10 BSE Social Science | AY. 2015 – 2016
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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. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
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- 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. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
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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
SOURCE (Book): Sociological Theory ‘Eighth Edition’ (George Ritzer
University of Maryland, 2008)
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. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
MATI-ONG, Rico M. | III-10 BSE Social Science | AY. 2015 – 2016
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- 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
SOURCE (Book): Sociological Theory ‘Eighth Edition’ (George Ritzer
University of Maryland, 2008)
- 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. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
MATI-ONG, Rico M. | III-10 BSE Social Science | AY. 2015 – 2016
Philippine Normal University Nurturing Innovative Teachers
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SOURCE (Book): The Rules of Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim (Edited
with an Introduction by Steven Lukes Translated -by W. D. Halls, 1982)
- 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, gen- eralized morality upon which
more mundane conceptions of office are based, and it did so by invoking the
mythical level of national under- standing in a way that few other events
have in postwar history...

- It begins with two selections on occupa- tional 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. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
MATI-ONG, Rico M. | III-10 BSE Social Science | AY. 2015 – 2016
Philippine Normal University Nurturing Innovative Teachers
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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
SOURCE (Book): Emile Durkheim, SOCIOLOGIST OF MODERNITY (Edited by
Mustafa Emirbayer Series Editor Ira J. Cohen, 2003)
- 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
History (Mustafa Emirbayer, 1996)
- 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

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- 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.
SOURCE (Book): Sociological Theory ‘Eighth Edition’ (George Ritzer
University of Maryland, 2008)
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. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
MATI-ONG, Rico M. | III-10 BSE Social Science | AY. 2015 – 2016
Philippine Normal University Nurturing Innovative Teachers
©
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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)

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- 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.
SOURCE (Book): Sociological Theory ‘Eighth Edition’ (George Ritzer
University of Maryland, 2008)
- 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. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
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- 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
SOURCE (Book): The Rules of Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim (Edited
with an Introduction by Steven Lukes Translated -by W. D. Halls, 1982)
- 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 soci- ology 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. Emile Durkheim ‘Social Facts’
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- 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.
SOURCE (Book): Emile Durkheim, SOCIOLOGIST OF MODERNITY (Edited by
Mustafa Emirbayer Series Editor Ira J. Cohen, 2003)
- "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 sys- tem" (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
History (Mustafa Emirbayer, 1996)
- 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.

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- 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.
SOURCE (Book): Sociological Theory ‘Eighth Edition’ (George Ritzer
University of Maryland, 2008)
- 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
SOURCE (Book): The Rules of Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim (Edited
with an Introduction by Steven Lukes Translated -by W. D. Halls, 1982)
- 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.
SOURCE (Book): Emile Durkheim, SOCIOLOGIST OF MODERNITY (Edited by
Mustafa Emirbayer Series Editor Ira J. Cohen, 2003)