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their common trait is a bearing on general facts, on similar facts which repeat themselves or are
considered capable of indefinite repetition. In this they resemble all natural laws and differ from
historical narratives, which, whether the individual biography of a man or the collective biography of
a nation, group, or series of nations, always depend on what is singular, sui generis, and unique. In
vain is the subject of these histories composed of general facts; it is in the singularity of its
combination, never to be seen again, that history thinks of its subject. Quite to the contrary, when
something singular appears in the social sciences as well as in the natural sciences, it is considered to
result from the encounter of general facts, for example, similarities and repetitions.
The verbal roots, the inflexions, the grammatical forms, and the combination of these elements,
which preoccupy the linguists, are things that have been repeated millions of times by millions of
mouths with an exactness that is truly marvelous if we compare the perennial state of language with
the rapid flight, the continual changing of the generations that have spoken it; it is their very transience
that has maintained its permanence, their diversity that has sustained its identity. The myths, the rites,
the dogmas with which the science of religion is concerned are no less abundantly, no less regularly
repeated and transmitted across the ages and races. Jurisprudence deals with legal relationships
which are reproduced every day and which remain the same for centuries. It has been said that no two
trials are exactly alike; this is true but only in the way that no two families resemble each other, and it
in no way prevents the questions of law raised by a case or the legal relationships implied by it, when
taken one by one and separately, from being identical to the same type of questions or relationships
raised and implied in a host of other cases. Political economy deals with production and
consumption, that is, with acts that are continually repeated, often with time-honored fidelity. The
subject of aesthetics is the artist’s and the writer’s creative use of rhythms and procedures, of artistic
formulas, of strokes of the violin, or brush strokes—all of which have been repeated identically for
centuries.
Considered from this point of view, in this minute but essential detail, societies, no less than the
biological world or even the physical world, present precise repetitions, regular and identical series
of acts and facts. Consequently, for the same reason as with these last two aspects of reality, societies
lend themselves to numbering and measurement, and these enable general considerations to attain the
level of scientific laws. And let us point out that the advantage thus obtained of being able to treat
social as well as natural phenomena scientifically is not purchased at the cost of any confusion
between these two orders of facts, which continue to be divided by a very clear line of demarcation,
nor by the sacrifice of human personality to the exigencies of a completely naturalist conception of
societies. Seeing things from this angle we can leave aside the vexing question of free choice, since,
determinist or not, one cannot deny social man’s necessary conformity in each one of the elementary
acts of his behavior, no matter how original may be the combination of these acts. Nor can one deny
that at every moment he imitates his peers, contemporary or past, and one is forced to accept the
regular series, the regular radiation of successive examples which flow from this situation. Until now
—and not without reason—sociology has clashed with moral conscience, which repulsed the
despotism of its formulas and felt suffocated in the progression of uniformly linked and rigid phases
through which most sociologists have condemned human evolution to pass. But it is because these
philosophers did not perceive the elementary order, the basic repetitiveness of social facts, a
repetition considered essentially imitative, that they felt obliged to construct a complex and arbitrary
order, a supposed constraint on large, collective, vague, and confused phenomena to repeat
themselves identically according to a supremely regulated order but with no knowledge of why or by
whom. They had to imagine this, since it is not possible to create a science or formulate laws without