Preface to Part II

Summary

If there is one fact that history has irrefutably demonstrated it is that the morality of each people is directly related to the social structure of the people practicing it. The connection is so intimate that, given the general character of morality observed in a given society and barring abnormal and pathological cases, one can infer the nature of society, the elements of its structure and the way that it is organized [from the form moral institutions take]. Tell me the marriage patterns, the morals dominating family life, and I will tell you the principle characteristics of its organization.

(Durkheim 2002, 87; emphasis added)

If we now have a reasonably good idea of exactly what Durkheim understood by the concept of the common or collective consciousness of society – albeit a rather abstract and a highly theoretical one – we do not as yet have any idea at all of what form these many different collective consciousnesses might take in a still largely agricultural society like France at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Durkheim delivered his lectures on moral education, or in a post-industrial society like Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century. So far, if I can put it this way, Durkheim has done little more than provide us with a name for this very interesting concept, and given us a few clues to the nature and existence of this phenomenon – something of which we might otherwise have remained entirely ignorant of course – but, as Tim Newburn has observed (2007, 174), he has not as yet told us anything very much about what this phenomenon is really like or what form it might take. This is surprising since if any such thing as the, or a, collective consciousness of society actually did exist it is reasonable to expect that Durkheim – Durkheim of all people, as we might say – would have given us a detailed empirical account of what this phenomenon was actually like. After all, it is not only Durkheim's thesis that something such as the collective consciousness of society actually exists, but he in fact claims that no society, not even a very elementary one, can possibly exist without something of this kind (Durkheim 2002, 87–8), and clearly the obvious way for him to have made this point would be for him to have provided us with a detailed empirical case study of this phenomenon.