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SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND
SOCIOLOGISM *1
1894
It is natural that a developing science lean on those already established, as for example sociology on
biology. It is also natural that a growing science seek to fly on its own wings and to establish its own
separate domain. Sociology has arrived at this point: it seeks to be established by itself and for itself.
This is a sort of egotism or scientific individualism—useful to some degree, like all animal or human
egotism, but beyond a certain point harmful to the individual himself. Biology and psychology have
also experienced this separatist tendency, which, when exaggerated, has led them to the old principles
of vitalism and a poorly conceived spitiualism.
Everyone is aware of the sterility of these pretensions, which refuse to recognize the solidarity of
the various sciences, hence the profound unity of universal reality. The same vain aspirations are to
be feared in sociology, and here and there I believe I can perceive symptoms of a similar error which
could be disastrous. Let us try to prevent such an aberration, searching out, with all desirable
precision but without pretending that it has absolute autonomy, the limits of the field that the science
dear to us is called upon to cultivate.
Like all scientific research, this investigation is twofold: the study of phenomena of beings, and in
order to pursue this, for each type of investigation the specification of the elementary phenomenon of
being whose repetition and combination enable us to formulate laws.
We ask, therefore: (1) What is or rather what are the elementary social facts, the elementary social
acts, and what is their distinctive character? (2) What is or what are social beings, that is—since
being here means group—elementary social groups?
I
The first question, which will be our first concern, has already been treated by me at such length that I
dislike returning to it, but the answer I gave has been misunderstood so often that I should be allowed
to say a word about it. What is the elementary fact of mechanics? Is it movement? No, no more than
the elementary social fact is consciousness. Consciousness is the postulate of sociology just as
movement is the postulate of mechanics. The elementary mechanical fact is the communication or
modification of a specific movement by the action of one molecule or mass on another; in particular,
the elementary fact of astronomy is the attraction exercised by a sphere and also the effect of such
repeated attractions—the elliptical movement of celestial bodies, which is itself repeated. Likewise
the elementary social fact is the communication or modification of a state of consciousness by the
action of one conscious being on another.
But what is the nature of this action? To be more precise, not everything done by members of
society is sociological. Many of their acts, I was going to say most of them, are purely physiological
or even purely psychological. Breathing, digesting, blinking one’s eyelids, mechanically moving one’s
legs about, absent-mindedly looking at a landscape, or giving an inarticulate cry—there are all acts
which are in no way social except when they result from a habit acquired in dealings with other men
and born of a wish or belief that those men communicated to us. But speaking to someone, praying to