Collective Conscience

Collective conscience is a concept developed by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). Durkheim sees the collective conscience as a key nonmaterial social fact. All social facts, material and nonmaterial, are best understood as external to and coercive of individual, psychological facts. While material social facts have a real, material existence (e.g., a bureaucracy or law), nonmaterial social facts exist within the realm of ideas, the most important of which are often referred to by contemporary sociologists as “norms” and “values” (see Alexander 1988). All nonmaterial social facts, including the collective conscience, are difficult to study because they are intangible and exist within the realm of ideas.

The collective conscience is “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society” (Durkheim [1893] 1964). As a nonmaterial social fact, the collective conscience is external to and coercive over individuals. However, the collective conscience can be “realized” only through individual consciousness. Hence, the collective conscience of a given society occurs as an external force throughout the entire societal system regardless of race, class, geographic location, economic standing, and so on, but is made manifest only through its realization in the consciousness of the individual.

In his later works, Durkheim progressively replaced the broad concept of the collective conscience with his far more specific idea of collective representations. Collective representations are not found throughout the entirety of a given society, but are instead realized through more specific components of the society, such as religious institutions, the state, and minority groups. They are, in effect, more detailed and specific collective representations.

Durkheim used the collective conscience to develop his arguments on the change of society from mechanical to organic solidarity (arguing that the collective conscience was declining in strength with the decline of the former and the rise of the latter) as an independent variable in his classic study of suicide (for example, a weakened collective conscience is associated with an increased rate of anomic suicide) and in an effort to explain the source of religion in society (for example, the collective conscience manifests [Page 116]itself in the totems of primitive societies). In all of these cases, however, the source of the collective conscience itself is the same: society. The collective conscience is created or radically changed during times of collective effervescence, those outstanding historical moments when a given collective achieves a heightened level of exaltation.

When the collective conscience of a society is weakened (as Durkheim argued was occurring with the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity), the collective moral constraints on individuals are also weakened, and their passions are allowed to run more freely as a result of the lower level of external restraint. This leaves individuals without a clear sense of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate behavior and threatens them with a sense of anomie. Anomie is thus seen as a social pathology resulting from a decline in the collective conscience and is “curable” only by strengthening the collective conscience or finding other ways of strengthening the common social morality as well as society more generally.

...