ABSTRACT
We think it a fertile idea that social life must be explained, not by the conception of it created by those who participate in it, but by profound causes which escape awareness; and we also think that these causes must principally be sought in the way in which associated individuals are grouped. It even seems to us that it is on this condition, and on this condition only, that history can become a science and that sociology can, consequently, exist. For, in order that collective representations be intelligible, they must arise from something and, since they cannot form a circle closed upon itself, the source from which they arise must be found outside themselves. Either the collective consciousness floats in a vacuum, a sort of unrepresentable absolute, or it is related to the rest of the world through the intermediary of a substratum on which it consequently depends. From another point of view, of what can this substratum be composed if not of the members of society as they are socially combined? We believe this proposition is self-evident. However, we see no reason to associate it, as the author does, with the socialist movement, of which it is totally independent. As for ourselves, we arrived at this proposition before we became acquainted with Marx, to whose influence we have in no way been subjected. This is because this conception is the logical extension of the entire historical and psychological movement of the last fifty years. For a long time past, historians have perceived that social evolution has causes with which the authors of historical events are unacquainted. It is under the influence of these ideas that they tend to deny or to restrict the role of great men and look to literary, legal, and other movements for the expression of a collective thought which no specific personality completely incarnates. At the same time and above all, individual psychology taught us that the individual’s consciousness very often merely reflects the underlying state of the organism and that the current of our representations is determined by causes of which the subject is unaware. It was then natural to extend this conception to
From: Emile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis, Edited and translated by Mark Traugott, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 127-130. Original publication in French as review of A.Labriola, Essais sur la conception matérialiste de l’histoire, Revue philosophique, 44 (1897), pp. 645-65.
