Introduction to Part IV

Summary

The totality of 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; emphasis added)

In Part I of this book I pointed out that Durkheim‧s famous definition of the common or collective consciousness of society in The Division of Labour (which I have once again quoted in full above) actually contains two quite distinct claims, only one of which – the first part – has been commented on at all extensively within criminology, while the second part seems to have been entirely ignored. The first claim is that there is such a thing as a ‘totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average member of a society’ – and we have already discussed exactly what this claim means and what form such a collective consciousness might actually take in Part I and Part II of this book – while the second badly neglected claim is the quite bizarre and really extraordinary statement that this totality of beliefs and sentiments somehow forms what Durkheim here calls ‘a determinate system with a life of its own’. Having commented in passing on this second point in Part I of this book, I did not say anything more about this matter then because I argued that the question of what Durkheim might have meant by this extraordinary claim was simply too difficult for us to consider without looking at it in some detail later on. Now that we are coming towards the end of this book-length discussion of Durkheim's concepts of the collective and the common consciousness of society, and specifically how all of this relates to the subject of criminology, I want to return to the question of this very important part of Durkheim's famous definition to see if we can answer the question what Durkheim might have meant by the second part of his famous definition and what the implications of this are for his concept of the common and collective consciousness of society.