Late by 20 minutes lol
”Collective consciousness: ”There are in each of use twoo counsciousnesses: one which is common to our group in its entirety, which conequently, is not ourself, but society living and acting within us; the other, on the contrary, represents that in us which is personal and distinct, that which makes us an individual”
Social differentiation -
In modernity, individual consciousness becomes more or less liberated from collective consciousness. eg. In many premodern societies, everyone held the same beliefs (not really), and now that isn’t really the case. ie. A social differentiation of our counsciousnesses has taken place.
Collective representations
Durkheim conceives of social facts in terms of collective representations
- Collective representations = representations through which a group understands itself
They are the representations of a society: they are socially generated and shared
They are ’about’ society
eg. symbols, slogans and ideas.
It’s society which creates certain representations of itself.
These are very important for social cohesion, we all identify through these key symbols.
”The soldier who falls defending his flag, certainly does not believe he has sacrificed his life to a cloth. Such things happen because social thought, with its imperative authority, has a power that individual thought cannot possibly have. By acting on our minds, it can make us see things in the light that suits it; according to circumstances, it adds to or takes from the real.”
eg. Money: in a piece of paper, we have condensed the entirety of the societal force as a whole in capitalism. Money has a kind of holding effect, you cannot accept some other sort of money except the ones your nation accepts, you are constrained. Literally on the notes are symbols which represent our culture.
Durkheimian sociologists would be skeptical of so-called ”de-centralised” currency, because the whole idea of social cohesion is not apparent in their growth. Durkheimians want stability, and monetary systems like this won’t be a joining force of society.
Durkheimians will say that there is no money with inherent value. All money is a representation of a social event of exchange. There has to be a collectively shared belief that wherever I go, the money I have must be accepted.
Social facts have to be explained in terms of other social facts.
eg- Space: ”There are societies in Australia and North America in which space is conceived in the form of an immense circle, because the camp itself is circular” (elementary forms)
eg. Time: We can conceive of time only if we differentiate between moments. Now, what is the origin of that differentiation? Indispensable points, in referens to which all things are arranged temporally, are taken from social life. The division into days, weeks, months, years etc, corresponds to the recurrence of rites, festivals, and public ceremnies at regular intervals.”
Ie. some of the most universally applicable concepts can look completely different. How can we explain that in terms of social organisation? We conceive of space as a 3D box with no walls, something completely different. We explain this in terms of other social facts: eg. the Australians built their villages in a circular fashion, and thus they somehow extrapolate their village into space in general.
In terms of time, some societies conceive of it as a cycle, cut up in terms of yearly events like feasts and celebrations.
In primitive societies, we can find the essence of society. They give us a kind of mirror about what society was initially like. Durkheim himself only relied on other anthropologists data, ie. He didn’t go check himself.
This is a scandal for philosophy: if people do not have universal concepts, we can’t argue in ways similar to Kant at all. This is problematic, and is a reason why philosophers challenged sociology.
The incest taboo has to be explained in terms of social facts, specifically in terms of the religious taboo, through a totemtic belief – blood had a very special status and having sex and so on with your religious entity, the totem, and one way of doing that is through having sex with your close kin.
In sociology there is a distinction between Durkheim and Weber
Methodological individualism (Weber) vs. Methodological holism (Durkheim)
in holism, social facts must be explained according to other social facts, we stay on the level of the whole which is more than the sum of its parts.
Social facts cannot be completely understood through individual facts, in Durkheim.
(One could call marxism a methodological dialectic)
Adorno rejects both individualism and holism, and says that both of them are ideological representations of our current capitalist society. This society makes us think that we are free which is produced by capitalism, whilst at the same time it functions as a whole as something that radically constrains individuals. No one controls their own development, everything around people is constrained. Thus both Durkheim and Weber are both ideological representations of reactionary forces in society. Instead, we have to critique all kinds of representations in society.
”The Division of Labour” (1893)
A shared view of the 19:th century is that society developed from small scale societies into what we know today as the complicated vast society, and this happened through a process of differentiation. In the clan, people have more or less the same activites and believe just about the same things.
Thus, some people begin differentiation of labor, eg sexual labor, religious labor etc.
This process of differentiation is a term through which we can understand how modern society has come about.
The division of labour is clearly the main driver of this kind of process.
There is still a debate about why there is an increasing division of processes in society.
The volume of society requires differentiation. The more people we are within a small space, the more we require people to take care of different tasks.
The more we are different, do we still form a unity?
Differentiation perhaps entails certain risks in society, it might disintegrate society through pure change.
Comte and Spencer: developed ideas like that social evolution is a process of progressive differentiation: Societies ’evolve’ from cultural and structural simplicity to differentation.
”We have to form a unity in society around the study of facts – establish concesensus through scientific activity”, according to Comte.
”There isn’t actually a problem, laissez-faire, let everybody free and the markets will just do everything for us”, Spencer.
Durkheim was not convinced by Spencer: he saw that there were disintegrative effects due to markets. This threatens to destroy society.
Spencerian politicans will lead to societal anomie. We will lose our sense of integration in society. Thus we are no longer part of the same moral unity.
Durkheim is keenly aware that there is something strange about modern society: we are increasingly individualist, but at the same time an increasing dependence of society. One of Durkeheims’ deeper insights.
”How does it come about that the individual, whilst becoming more autonomous, depends more closely on societ? How can he become at the same time more of an individual and yet more linked to society? For it is indisputable these two movemtns, however contradictory they appear to be, are carried out in tandem. Such is the nature of the problem. It has seemed that what resolved this apparent antinomy was the transformation of social solidarity that arises from the ever increasing division of labour”.
What is solidarity about? Solidarity is what makes into a unity, what holds us together.
Something very important happens in modern society: solidarity is created differently between modern and premodern societies. And it is related to the division of labour.
Spontaneously we might think that the divsion of labour might lead to disintegration. But Durkeheim through his study of the facts come to the conclusion that: rather than making society disintegrate, it generates new forms of solidarity. New forms of integration into the whole.
In the distinction between premodern and modern societies, there are two different kinds of solidarity. One is related to premodern and the other to modern societies.
Mechanical solidarity is the kind of solidarity at work in [all] premodern societies, which is based on likeness or similarity. If people have some kind of homogeneity, there will be a kind of solidarity. If our lives, looks and beliefs are the same we will share the same collective consciousness.
”Solidarity which comes from our likenes is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole sonscience and coincides in all points with it. But at that moment, our individuality is nil.”
We are entirely consumed by collective consciousness under mechanical solidarity.
Durkheim would say that the basic social fact that one must first analyse in a society is the degree of social differentiation. And on this basis, the collective conscience will emerge as something we can study.
Opposed to mechanical solidarity there is Organic solidarity.
Modern societies are differntiated like a big organic body. All the functions are interrelated and are necessary for the well-being of the whole. Something similar is at work in society. Organic solidarity are at work in societies were different people fulfill pecuilarily individual functions which others do not fulfill. To have a unique personality is a uniquely modern trait. Other societies have other concerns. The more society is differntiated, the smaller the role of collective consciousness. There are fewer beliefs that we all share. There is still collective consciousness but it is less important.
Division of labour is not a threat to solidarity, rather it just makes a new form of solidarity possible (we always strive to a different kind of solidarity no matter the society in a sense). Our functions are interrelated in such a way that we understand how everyone contributes to the whole, which in term generates a sense of solidarity.
”It is the division of labour that is increasingly fulfilling the role that once felt to the common consciousness. This is mainly what holds together social entities in the higher types of society.”
Modern vs premodern societies.
Henry Maine (1822-1888) from status to contract
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Law and society have developed from status (a position ascribed to an individual as a member of a social group) to contract (the result of individual will)
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) from militant to industrial society
Earlier societies got through war what the moderns get throguh trade
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936): grom Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft
Gemeinschaft: affective ties within a community
Gesellschaft: cold and egoistic relations within society based on intereset calculation.
This is a loss: ”The doom of culture”
Durkehim: From mechanical to organic solidarity
Against Tönnies: this is progress. ”Society becomes more effective in moving in concert, at the same time as each of its elements has more movements that are peculiarly its own.”
Against Spences and Tönnies: division of labour is not based on self-intereseted individuals, ”co-operation has its intrinsic morality”.
We nevertheless need a kind of bond of solidarity and the market is not enough. There has to be a sense of being part of the same whole.
Durkheim does not believe these sociologists are not based on social facts, and are only really speculating.
The difference between the two solidarities come to expression through law, and thus is made analysable.
In mechanical we have repressive law, whilst in organic we have restitutive law.
Modern societies make individual freedom possible, but individual freedom is still a collective value, there is still collective consciousness. There is something which we all believe in. ”We all believe that we all believe that we share the idea that freedom is important”, but it is the kind of conscious that might undermine itself. The more we go our own way, the more we might undermine what we share.
Christoper Lasch, a Durkheimian sociologist (kinda), showed that only going towards individualism is self-undermining.
Durkehim was thinking about new institutions that could create a new sense of community.
Durkeheim gives the corporation as something that can bind society together, and bind people together in a sense of solidarity. Corporations solve the possiblity of anomies. (How Idrk tbh)
Durkheim was anxious about polarisation and class struggle, eg. the famous Dreyfus affair, one of the first major events of antisemitism. Ie. He was against both the left and the right and thought that if we instill in students the sense of belonging in a society, they will not be polarised.
Durkheim claims that there are societies that are more simple, were social phenomena can be more directly observed and where more simple forms of religion come about.
”Totemism” the simplest form of religion, found at the beginning of evolution.
Totem: object with a sacred meaning
His assumption was that primitive societies were a kind of lense through which we could see ourselves as we were before.
Marx considred religion as an ideology, enlightenment said that religion is wrong and that science is true.
Durkehim doesn’t care if religious beliefs are true or false, but only something to be studied as social facts.
Why in Australia do they have these animistic beliefs, and why is it impossible for modern people to believe in that type of religion. In a modern society you cannot believe that certain natural objects are totems or that divine forces are at play in the objects.
The only type of belief that is possible in a modern society is that in a transcendent God, something entirely inconceivable in most parts of the world.
Thus, we have to sociologically explain this phenomena.
In Marxism, when you have a society where everything becomes an economic force, we disenchant nature and make it into something which cannot be divine.
What kind of social fact is religion?
It expresses something about our society.
We see this most clearly in primitive societies; what does the totem stand for?; the totem is something that imposes itself on individuals and has a kind of force; they are a symbol that has a kind of moral force that individuals have a duty to respect; the totem is also immortal, they stand in contrast to us.
What has a certain power over us like this? Society.
What we celebrate when we celebrate totems, is actually the celebration of society as such. Our togetherness, the fact that we can come together. It is through religion that the fact that we come together can be expressed.
”I see in divinity only society transfigured and expressed symbolically”
Religious beliefs are collective representations that have power over individuals.
Society is always a kind of religious entity said oppositively.
Religion should be broadly conceived, it is everything that is part of the celebration of our togetherness, our social cohesion.
Religion comes from the latin Religiare, to connect. So etymologically we have that idea too in religion. Thus there is something religious to everything we do in society.
What is important about religion is that there is a distinction between the sacred and the profane. Somethings you cannot touch or have to respects properly, and other things you are not supposed to touch for fear of damaging you morally.
Durkheim has 3 perspectives of religion:
- Causal explanation of religion
Collective effervesence: getting carried away when being together with a group of others.
eg. Crowd psychology; Durkheim follows this in a sense.
Marcel Maus studied the inuits who have a very weird life rhythm. In the summer they disperse, and in the winter they come back and meet each other for all kinds of celebrations throughout the entirety of that season. There is a kind of wildness, a lot of effervescense, to their rituals. In religious riturals people are carried away by their very intense togetherness. If I have an intense belief in a totem and do so whilst alone, I will not experience effervescense, it needs to be an intense interaction between more people.
”It is out of the effervescence that the religious idea seems to be born”
”Sacred beings ’attain their greatest intensity at the moment when the men are assembled together’”.