16 - Social Facts as Living Things

Summary

Social facts – or social phenomena as I think we might now say – are things whose very existence is knowable only statistically, specifically in terms of their rate. Their true – real or objective – form is revealed to us by the rate at which these things appear, if not to our senses exactly, then to an intuition that we have that such things might actually exist underlying, and perhaps even contrary to, the external appearance of things. So far, so Durkheim then, but what now about the additional idea that social facts are actually living things in their own right and, what is more it seems, things that live in another realm – a new social dimension of reality as Durkheim describes this – to the one that we ourselves occupy as individual human beings? What are we to make of this extraordinary claim? Not only are social facts that class of phenomena which, as we have seen, are knowable to us only statistically, but it may well be the case that they do not in fact ‘live’ in the same three/four-dimensional world (i.e., space-time) that we occupy but inhabit a different spatial dimension to ourselves altogether: a new social reality in fact.

Surprisingly enough the argument that social facts might in some meaningful way be said to be living things is more easily dealt with than the idea that such things occupy a new and as yet undiscovered dimension that is somehow different from that occupied by three/four-dimensional objects.