Chapter1: Introduction: Sociological Theory

Material and Nonmaterial Social Facts

Durkheim differentiated between two broad types of social facts--material and nonmaterial. Material social facts, such as styles of architecture, forms of technology, and legal codes, are the easier to understand of the two because they are directly observable. Clearly, such things as laws are external to individuals and coercive over them. More importantly, these material social facts often express a far larger and more powerful realm of moral forces that are at least equally external to individuals and coercive over them. These are nonmaterial social facts.

The bulk of Durkheim's studies, and the heart of his sociology, lies in the study of nonmaterial social facts. Durkheim said: "Not all social consciousness achieves. externalization and materialization" (1897/1951:315). What sociologists now call norms and values, or more generally culture (Alexander, 1988a), are good examples of what Durkheim meant by nonmaterial social facts, But this idea creates a problem: How can nonmaterial social facts like norms and values be external to the actor? Where could they be found except in the minds of actors? And if they are in the minds of actors, are they not internal rather than external?

Durkeim recognized that nonmaterial social facts are, to a certain extent, found in the minds of individuals. However, it was his belief that when people begin to interact in complex ways, their interactions will "obey" laws all their own" (Durkheim, 1912/1965:471). Individuals are still necessary as a kind of substrate for the nonmaterial social facts, but the particular form and content will be determined by the complex interactions and not by the individuals. Hence, Durkheim could write in the same work first that "Social things are actualized only through men; they are the product of human activity" (1895/1982:17) and second that "Society is not a mere sum of individuals"(1895/1982:103). Despite the fact that society is made up only of human beings and contains no immaterial "spiritual" substance, it can be understood only through studying the interactions rather than the individuals. The interactions, even when nonmaterial, have their own levels of reality. This has been called "relational realism" (Alpert,1939).

Durkheim saw social facts along a continuum of materiality (Lukes, 1972:9-10). The sociologist usually begins a study by focusing on material social facts, which are empirically accessible, in order to understand nonmaterial social facts, which are the real focus of his work. The most material are such things as population size and density, channels of communication, and housing arrangements (Andrews, 1993). Durkheim called these facts morphological, and they figure most importantly in his first book, The Division of Labor in Society. At another level are structural components (a bureaucracy, for example), which are a mixture of morphological components (the density of people in a building and their lines of communication) and nonmaterial social facts (such as the bureaucratic norms).

Types of Nonmaterial Social Facts

Since nonmaterial social facts are so important to Durkheim, we will present a brief discussion of four different types--morality, collective conscience, collective representations, and social currents--before examining how Durkheim used these types in his studies.

Morality Durkheim was a sociologist of morality in the broadest sense of the word (Hall, 1987; Mestrovic, 1988). Studying him reminds us that a concern with morality was at the foundation of sociology as a discipline. Durkheim's view of morality had two aspects. First, Durkheim was convinced that morality is a social fact, in other words, that morality can be empirically studied, is external to the individual, is coercive of the individual, and is explained by other social facts. This means that morality is not something that one can philosophize about, but something that one has to study as an empirical phenomenon. This is particularly true because morality is intimately related to the.social structure. To understand the morality of any particular institution, you have to first study how the institution is constituted, how it came to assume its present form, what its place is in the overall structure of society, how the various institutional obligations are related to the social good, and so forth.

Second, Durkheim was a sociologist of morality because his studies were driven by his concern about the moral "health" of modern society. Much of Durkheim's sociology can be seen as a by-product of his concern with moral issues. Indeed, one of Durkheim's associates wrote in a review of his life's work that "one will fail to understand his works if one does not take account of the fact that morality was their center and object" (Davy, trans, in Hall, 1987:5).

This second point needs more explanation if we are to understand Durkheim's perspective. It was not that Durkheim thought that society had become, or was in danger of becoming, immoral. That was simply impossible because morality was, for Durkheim (1925/1961:59), identified with society. Therefore, society could not be immoral, but it could certainly lose its moral force if the collective interest of society became nothing but the sum of self-interests. Only to the extent that morality was a social fact could it impose an obligation on individuals that superseded their self-interest. Consequently, Durkheim believed that society needs a strong common morality. What the morality should be was of less interest to him.

Durkheim's great concern with morality was related to his curious definition of freedom. In Durkheim's view, people were in danger of a "pathological" loosening of moral bonds. These moral bonds were important to Durkheim, for without them the individual would be enslaved by ever-expanding and insatiable passions. People would be impelled by their passions into a mad search for gratification, but each new gratification would lead only to more and more needs. According to Durkheim, the one thing that every human will always want is "more." And, of course, that is the one thing we ultimately cannot have. If society does not limit us, we will become slaves to the pursuit of more. Consequently, Durkheim held the seemingly paradoxical view that the individual needs morality and external control in order to be free. This view of the insatiable desire at the core of every human is central to his sociology.

Collective Conscience Durkheim attempted to deal with his interest in common morality in various ways and with different concepts. In his early efforts to deal with this issue. Durkheim developed the idea of the collective conscience. In French, the word conscience means both "consciousness" and "moral conscience." Durkheim characterized the collective conscience in the following way:

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the collective or common conscience It is, thus, an entirely different thing from particular consciences, although it can be realized only through them.

(Durkheim, 1893/1964:79-80)

Several points are worth underscoring in this definition. First, it is clear that Durkheim thought of the collective conscience as occurring throughout a given society when he wrote of the "totality" of people's beliefs and sentiments. Second, Durkheim clearly conceived of the collective conscience as being independent and capable of determining other social facts. It is not just a reflection of a material base as Marx sometimes suggested. Finally, although be held such views of the collective conscience, Durkheim also wrote of its being "realized" through individual consciousness.

Collective conscience refers to the general structure of shared understandings, norms, and beliefs. It is therefore an all-embracing and amorphous concept. As we will see below, Durkheim employed this concept to argue that "primitive" societies had a stronger collective conscience--that is, more shared understandings, norms, and beliefs—than modem societies.

Collective Representations Because collective conscience is such a broad and amorphous idea, it is impossible to study directly, but must be approached through related material social facts. (Below, for example, we will look at Durkheim's use of the legal system to say something about the collective conscience.) Durkheim's dissatisfaction with this limitation led him to use the collective conscience less in his later work in favor of the much more specific concept of collective representations (Nemedi, 1995;Schmans, 1994). The French word representation literally means "idea." Durkheim used the term to refer to both a collective concept and a social "force." Examples of collective representations are religious symbols, myths, and popular legends. All of these are ways in which society reflects on itself (Durkheim, 1895/1982:40). They represent collective beliefs, norms, and values, and they motivate us to conform to these collective claims.

Collective representations also cannot be reduced to individuals, because they emerge out of social interactions, but they can be studied more directly because they are more liable to be connected to material symbols such as flags, icons, and pictures or connected to practices such as rituals. Therefore, the sociologist can begin to study how certain collective representations fit well together, or have an affinity, and others do not. As an example, we can look at a recent sociological study that shows how representations of Abraham Lincoln have changed in response to other social facts.

Between the turn of the century and 1945, Lincoln, like other heroic presidents, was idealized. Prints showed him holding Theodore Roosevelt's hand and pointing him in the right direction, or hovering in ethereal splendor behind Woodrow Wilson as he contemplated matters of war and peace, or placing his reassuring hand on Franklin Roosevelt's shoulder. Cartoons showed admirers looking up to his statue or portrait. Neoclassical statues depicted him larger than life; state portraits enveloped him in the majesty of presidential power; "grand style" history painting showed him altering the fate of the nation. By the 1960s, however, traditional pictures had disappeared and been replaced by a new kind of representation on billboards, posters, cartoons, and magazine covers. Here Lincoln is shown wearing a party hat and blowing a whistle to mark a bank's anniversary; there he is playing a saxophone to announce a rock concert; elsewhere he is depicted arm in arm with a seductive Marilyn Monroe, or sitting upon his Lincoln Memorial chair of state grasping a can of beer, or wearing sunglasses and looking "cool," or exchanging Valentine cards with George Washington to signify that Valentine's Day had displaced their own traditional birthday celebrations. Post-1960s commemorative iconography articulates the diminishing of Lincoln's dignity.

(Schwartz, 1998:73)

Abraham Lincoln functions in American society as a collective representation in that his various representations allow a people to think about themselves as Americans—as either American patriots or American consumers. His image is also a force that motivates us to perform a patriotic duty or to buy a greeting card. A study of this representation allows us to better understand changes in American society.

Social Currents Most of the examples of social facts that Durkeim refers to are associated with social organizations. However, he made it clear that there are social facts "which do not present themselves in this already crystallized form" (1895/1982:52). Durkheim called these social currents. He gave as examples "the great waves of enthusiasm, indignation, and pity" that are produced in public gatherings (Durkheim, 1895/1982:52-53). Although social currents are less concrete than other social facts, they are nevertheless social facts because they cannot be reduced to the individual. We are swept along by such social currents, and this has a coercive power over us even if we become aware of it only when we struggle against the common feelings.

It is possible for these nonmaterial and ephemeral social facts to affect even the strongest institutions. Ramet (1991), for example, reports that the social currents that are potentially created among a crowd at a rock concert were looked at as a threat by Eastern European communist governments and, indeed, contributed to their downfall. Rock concerts were places for the emergence and dissemination of "cultural standards, fashions, and behavioral syndromes independent of party control" (Ramet, 1991:216). In particular, members of the audience were apt to see an expression of their alienation in the concert. Their own feelings were thereby affirmed, strengthened, and given new social and political meanings. In other words, political leaders were afraid of rock concerts because of the potential for the depressing individual feelings of alienation to be transformed into the motivating social fact of alienation. This provides another example of how social facts are related to but different from individual feelings and intentions.

A Group Mind? Given the emphasis on norms, values, and culture in contemporary. sociology, we have little difficulty accepting Durkheim's interest in nonmaterial social facts. However, the concept of social currents does cause us a few problems. Particularly troublesome is the idea of a set of independent social currents "coursing" through the social world as if they were somehow suspended in a social void. This problem has led many to criticize Durkheim for having a group-mind orientation (Pope, 1976:192-194). Those who accuse Durkheim of having such a perspective argue that he accorded nonmaterial social facts an autonomous existence, separate from actors. But cultural phenomena cannot float by themselves in a social void, and Durkheim was well aware of this.

But how are we to conceive of this social consciousness? Is it a simple and transcendent being, soaring above society?... It is certain that experience shows us nothing of the sort. The collective mind [l'esprit collectif] is only a composite of individual minds. But the latter are not mechanically juxtaposed and closed off from one another. They are in perpetual interaction through the exchange of symbols; they interpenetrate one another. They group themselves according to their natural affinities; they coordinate and systematize themselves. In this way is formed an entirely new psychological being, one without equal in the world. The consciousness with which it is endowed is infinitely more intense and more vast than those which resonate within it. For it is "a consciousness of consciousnesses"[une conscience de consciences]. Within it, we find condensed at once all the vitality of the present and of the past.

(Durkheim, 1885/1978:103)

Social currents can be viewed as sets of meanings that are shared by the members of a collectivity. As such, they cannot be explained in terms of the mind of any given individual. Individuals certainly contribute to social currents, but by becoming social something new develops through their interactions. They can only be explained intersubjectively, that is, in terms of the interactions between individuals. They exist at the level of interactions, not at the level of individuals. These collective "moods," or social currents, vary from one collectivity to another, with the result that there is variation in the rate of certain behaviors, including, as we will see below, something as seemingly individualistic as suicide.

In fact, there are very strong similarities between Durkheim's theory of social facts and current theories about the relation between the brain and the mind (Sawyer, 2002).Both theories use the idea that complex, constantly changing systems will begin to display new properties that "cannot be predicted from a full and complete description of the component units of the system" (Sawyer, 2002:228). Even though modern philosophy assumes that the mind is nothing but brain functions, the argument is that the complexity of the interconnections in the brain creates a new level of reality, the mind, that is not explainable in terms of individual neurons. This was precisely Durkheim's argument: that the complexity and intensity of interactions between individuals cause a new level of reality to emerge that cannot be explained in terms of the individuals. Hence, it could be argued that Durkheim had a very modem conception of nonmaterial social facts that encompasses norms, values, culture, and a variety of shared socialpsychological phenomena (Emirbayer, 1996).

THE DIVISION OF LABOR IN SOCIETY

The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim, 1893/1964) has been called sociology's first classic (Tiryakian, 1994). In this work, Durkheim traced the development of the modern relation between individuals and society. In particular, Durkheim wanted to use his new science of sociology to examine what many at the time had come to see as the modern crisis of morality. The preface to the first edition begins, "This book is above all an attempt to treat the facts of moral life according to the methods of the positive sciences."

In France in Durkheim's day, there was a widespread feeling of moral crisis. The French Revolution had ushered in a focus on the tights of the individual that often expressed itself as an attack on traditional authority and religious beliefs. This trend continued even after the fall of the revolutionary government. By the mid-nineteenth century many people felt that social order was threatened because people thought only about themselves and not about society. In the less than 100 years between the French Revolution and Dnrkheim's maturity, France went through three monarchies, two empires, and three republics. These regimes produced fourteen constitutions. The feeling of moral crisis was brought to a head by Prussia's crushing defeat of France in 1870, which included the annexation of Durkheim's birthplace by Prussia. This was followed by the short-lived and violent revolution known as the Paris Commune.Both the defeat and the subsequent revolt were blamed on the problem of rampant individualism.

August Comte argued that much of this could be traced to the increasing division of labor. In simpler societies, people do basically the same thing, such as farming, and they hare common experiences and consequently have common values. In modern society, veryone has a different job. When different people are assigned various specialized tasks, they no longer share common experiences. This undermines the shared moral beliefs that are necessary for a society. Consequently, people will not sacrifice in times of social need. Comte proposed that sociology create a new pseudo-religion that would reinstate social cohesion. To a large degree, The Division of Labor in Society can be seen as a refutation of Comte's analysis (Gouldner, 1962). Durkheim argues that the division of labor does not represent the disappearance of social morality so much as a new kind of social morality.

The thesis of The Division of Labor in Society is that modern society is not held together by the similarities between people who do basically similar things. Instead, it is the division of labor itself that pulls people together by forcing them to be dependent on each other. It may seem that the division of labor is an economic necessity that corrodes the feeling of solidarity, but Durkheim (1893/1964:17) argued that "'the economic services that it can render are insignificant compared with the moral effect that it produces and its true function is to create between two or more people a feeling of solidarity."

Mechanical and Organic Solidarity

The change in the division of labor has had enormous implications for the structure of society. Durkheim was most interested in the changed way in which social solidarity is produced, in other words, the changed way in which society is held together and how its members see themselves as part of a whole. To capture this difference, Durkheim referred to two types of solidarity--mechanical and organic. A society characterized by mechanical solidarity is unified because all people are generalists. The bond among people is that they are all engaged in similar activities and have similar responsibilities. In contrast, a society characterized by organic solidarity is held together by the differences among people, by the fact that all have different tasks and responsibilities.

Because people in modern society perform a relatively narrow range of tasks, they need many other people in order to survive. The primitive family headed by father-hunter and mother-food gatherer is practically self-sufficient, but the modern family needs the grocer, baker, butcher, auto mechanic, teacher, police officer, and so forth.These people, in turn, need the kinds of services that others provide in order to live in the modem world. Modern society, in Durkheim's view, is thus held together by the specialization of people and their need for the services of many others. This specialization includes not only that of individuals but also of groups, structures, and institutions.

Durkheim argued that primitive societies have a stronger collective conscience, that is, more shared understandings, norms, and beliefs. The increasing division of labor has caused a diminution of the collective conscience. The collective conscience is of much less significance in a society with organic solidarity than it is in a society with mechanical solidarity. People in modem society are more likely to be held together by the division of labor and the resulting need for the functions performed by others than they are by a shared and powerful collective conscience. Nevertheless, even organic societies have a collective consciousness, albeit in a weaker form that allows for more individual differences.

Anthony Giddens (1972) points out that the collective conscience in the two types of society can be differentiated on four dimensions-volume, intensity, rigidity, and content. Volume refers to the number of people enveloped by the collective conscience; intensity, to how deeply the individuals feel about it; rigidity, to how clearly it is defined; and content, to the form that the collective conscience takes in the two types of society (see Table 6.1 ).

TABLE 6.1