20 - Individualism, Durkheim and the Dreyfus Affair

Summary

Why did Durkheim change his mind so fundamentally on the question of the spontaneous development of the collective consciousness of society? According to Robert Bellah (1973, xxvii), Durkheim was brimming with optimism when he wrote The Division of Labour; society was functional, and everything would work out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. This confidence extends to, and is repeated by him, in The Rules of Sociological Method, but seems to have deserted him by the time he came to write his lectures on socialism, professional ethics and moral education, and perhaps even by the time he wrote Suicide (in which almost any mention of the collective consciousness is conspicuously absent). A collective consciousness suitable for an industrial society is no longer something that will develop organically as a result of the division of labour in society – and which is indeed apparently identical with this: one and the same thing – but rather is something which must be consciously imposed on society as part of the education system and indoctrinated into school children while they are still young enough to be susceptible to this. As Durkheim says on this all-important point in Moral Education, in the passage which I have quoted as the epigraph to Part V of this book:

Society is not the work of the individuals that compose it at a given stage of history, nor is it a given place.