3658925934

By joining our point of view, however, the learned logician creates an objection. This must be
read, and especially the reply. “But, someone will say, a phenomenon can be collective only if it is
common to all members of a society or at least to the majority of them, consequently, only if it is
general. Doubtless—but if it is general, it is because it is collective, that is, more or less
obligatory, and it is far from being collective because it is general. . . .” At first glance we do not
understand, but once we are acquainted with the author’s doctrine, its significance becomes clear: it
is not the greater or lesser degree of generalization or imitative propagation of a fact which
constitutes its more or less social character, but rather its greater or lesser degree of coerciveness,
and indeed, according to him (for so far we have revealed but half his thought), the definition of the
social fact is a double one. One of its characteristics, as we already know, is “a manner of thinking or
acting which is general within the extent of the group but exists independently of its individual
expressions.” But another and no less essential characteristic is its coerciveness. Quoting once again,
“the social fact can be recognized by the coercive power it exerts or is capable of exerting on
individuals.”
This last proposition is scarcely less surprising than the first. By this reasoning there would be
nothing more social than the relationship established between victor and vanquished in the capture of
a fortress or the reduction of a conquered nation to slavery, and nothing less social than the
spontaneous conversion of an entire people to a new religion or a new political faith preached by
enthusiastic apostles. To me the error here seems so palpable that we must wonder how it could arise
and take root in a mind of such intelligence. The author himself tells us how: it seemed to him that the
first of his two definitions entailed the second. Considering that the social fact is essentially exterior
to the individual, “it can enter the individual only by imposition.” I do not clearly see the rigor of this
deduction. Food as well is exterior to us before being absorbed. Is this to say that agglutination and
assimilation are constraints exercised by food on the cell that ingests it? That is not even true of the
fowl that we fatten up in our farmyards, which certainly prefer being stuffed to dying of hunger. This
is the same kind of example as the child who undergoes the harsh and restrictive form of education,
which Mr. Durkheim has wrongly generalized and which has helped give him the idea about
obligatory social constraint. The child, tossed into a social milieu, is nourished there by
intussusception, like a cell in the blood, a seed in humid soil. It is true that at school and at home he
is often chastised. But, first of all, the education that students receive from their teachers and parents
is not the only one they have; considerable account must be taken of another education, involuntary,
spontaneous and all the more effective because the students give in to one another and because, later
on, there will continue to be free interchange among them for the rest of their lives. Then, too, school
education itself is not always coercive; and finally, even when it is, when the child is put on bread
and water, locked up and beaten in order to constrain him to act according to the rules or habits of
society, is it certain, even in this case, that his initiation into social life is imposed on him by force?
No, because at heart this rebellious child who is being punished remains attached, despite himself, to
his family, sometimes to his teachers, to the society in which he was born, and he would be terrified
at the very idea of living outside of it. He is similar to the enlisted man who, though he joined
voluntarily, still behaves sometimes so as to bring himself before the police. The basis of it all is
human sociability, innate in the most insubordinate child. When by chance it is missing in a child, it is
useless to correct him, his education is impossible. The phenomena of being swept away in a crowd
are social facts, the author concedes; consequently he hastens to say that these great currents of
enthusiasm, of anger or hatred, which push a multitude to heroism or to murder, “have no particular
consciousness as their place of origin,” that they are facts exterior to all members of a crowd, and