Durkheim's collective consciousness
Explanation
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), French sociologist and one of the founders of the discipline, developed the concept of collective consciousness (conscience collective) in fundamental works such as The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). This concept was central to his effort to constitute sociology as an autonomous science, irreducible to individual psychology.
Collective consciousness is the set of beliefs, values, feelings and representations common to the members of a society, which has its own life, independent of particular individuals. It is not the sum of individual consciousnesses but a sui generis reality of higher level. Individuals internalise elements of it during socialisation; society imposes itself on them with coercive force (positive or negative). Norms, institutions, language, religions are manifestations of collective consciousness.
Durkheim distinguished between mechanical solidarity (proper to traditional simple societies, in which collective consciousness is intense, homogeneous, religious, encompassing almost everything; individuals are similar to each other and integrated by their similarity) and organic solidarity (proper to modern complex societies, in which collective consciousness is smaller and more abstract, individuals are differentiated by the division of labour, and integrated by their functional interdependence). This typology remains influential in sociology.
The study of religion led him to the famous thesis of The Elementary Forms: religion is society worshipping itself. The "sacred" is the way in which society presents itself as a higher, transcendent, venerable reality. Collective rituals intensify "collective effervescence", a state in which individuals experience the presence of the sacred (which is, in fact, the intensified presence of the group). God is the symbol of society.
The concept of anomie is another Durkheimian contribution: a situation in which collective consciousness weakens or becomes deregulated, leaving individuals without clear normative frameworks. Anomie generates psychic malaise, disorientation and, in extreme cases, suicide (as he studied in Suicide, 1897). Modern societies, with their rapid changes, are particularly vulnerable to anomic episodes.
For the theory of consciousness, Durkheim proposes a supra-individual level of collective consciousness that is irreducible to the individual brain but real and effective in its impact on individual minds. This proposal has been developed and nuanced by sociologists such as Maurice Halbwachs (collective memory), Marcel Mauss (Durkheim's nephew, author of the famous Essay on the Gift), Claude Lévi-Strauss (structuralism), Pierre Bourdieu (habitus). Today, with developments in social cognition, distributed cognition, social brains and the extended mind, the Durkheimian intuition that consciousness has real supra-individual dimensions finds echo in contemporary neuroscience and philosophy.
Strengths
- Robust and empirically productive sociological framework.
- Identifies the irreducible collective dimension.
- Basis for comparative ritual and religious research.
- Anticipates contemporary theories of distributed cognition.
Main critiques
- Risk of reifying society.
- Tension with methodological individualism.
- Limited empirical operationalization in many cases.
- Australian ethnography used today widely revised.