In Defense of Collective Consciousness

Within the repertoire of concepts that Emile Durkheim has forged to introduce sociology, none has attracted as much criticism or provoked more controversy as “collective consciousness”. This key concept has been accused of being at the same time absurd, inadequate, and dangerous. Having clarified to what extent the issue at stake concerns the social philosophy underlying sociology, the article reconstructs Durkheim’s perspective, in order to assess his central thesis: that there is no collective or social life without a collective or social consciousness. First, it clarifies the meaning of the “collective”, by analyzing the criteria of “constraint”: it thus brings out Durkheim’s reference to those obligations that give access to an irreducible collective being. Second, it elucidates the nature of “collective representations”, by examining Durkheim’s criticism of “consciousness”: it thus explains how the “representations” making up the collective are embedded into the dispositional “unconscious” of acting subjects. Finally, it analyzes the nature of “reflexive consciousness”, by reference to those practical situations that trigger a dynamic process allowing the members of a group to make collective representations explicit. The paper concludes by reassessing Durkheim’s argument: the concept of collective consciousness has a definite sociological meaning insofar as it allows us to grasp those crucial effervescent social phenomena that produce a conscious collective being, made of subjects able to say “we” in knowledge of the cause.