Conclusion to Part V

Summary

In Part V of this book we have examined in some detail the way in which Durkheim came to change his mind during the ten-year period between the publication of The Division of Labour in Society in 1893, while he was still a teacher in Bordeaux, and when he delivered his lectures on Moral Education at the Sorbonne in 1902-03. We have seen that while Durkheim never changed his mind on the question of the necessity of a collective consciousness of society of some kind he did change his mind frequently on what form this collective consciousness might take in an industrializing society, and especially on the question of how this consciousness should be instilled in the minds of the people. Here Durkheim made the bad mistake of confusing the functional importance of a sophisticated division of labour in society with people's awareness of this fact. In The Division of Labour there is no question about how the collective consciousness will develop; everything will happen by itself – organically in fact – in the best of all possible worlds. However, by the time he came to write his lectures on Moral Education, after the Dreyfus Affair, nothing could be less certain. This morality must be indoctrinated into children while they are still young enough to be influenced by their teachers. No longer could school children merely be shown how to behave with consideration towards one another but now they must also be shown how to behave well.