Introduction to Part I

Summary

The totality of the beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness.

(Durkheim 1989, 38–9)

Durkheim‧s concept of the – or, as I will argue, a – ‘common or collective consciousness of society‘ is still widely taught on introductory courses on sociological theory alongside his much better known concept of ‘social facts‘ and his views on the subject of religion etc., but sociological interest in this concept today is nothing like as great as this concept receives in the field of criminology. Coming to the teaching of criminology in 2002 from a background of teaching sociology – including the sociology of crime – for 10 years before this, I was immediately struck by the fact that so many of my undergraduate criminology students were not only aware of this, as I still thought at that time, rather obscure and relatively unimportant concept, but actually made use of this in their writing and even referred to it by name in classroom discussions. What could possibly account for the striking difference between the interest in this concept in the context of criminology and the relative indifference, by contrast, to this concept among sociologists? A wholly unscientific study of the index at the back of thirty or so books on criminology that I had on my desk at that time revealed only one text (Matthews 1999) which did not mention this concept. Apart from Matthews, no criminologist it seemed could fail to say something about this concept in their writing or at very least appear to have a passing acquaintance with what the concept might actually mean. This raised the general question – the foundation of this present book – why this concept was quite so important to criminology or, to put this same question in a slightly different way, why this same concept was apparently quite so uninteresting to sociology.