Durkheim's most important idea, the kernel of everything that he wants us to understand, is that social facts, the phenomena that we observe and try to explain when we study human collectives, can and should never be reduced to the level of the individual human beings that belong to such a collective. If you do that, if you reduce a social effect to an individual effect, you make an inexcusable scientific error. Social facts can only be explained with reference to antecedent social facts. The Sociologist should always remain on the level of social reality and should resist the sweet seduction of reductionism. This is a difficult argument that Durkheim sometimes put into words that gave ammunition to his critics. He loved to use, for example, a sentence that he borrowed from one of the philosophy professors of his student days. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. That expression made it a bit too easy for his opponents to ask how a group of people can be anything else than just the individual people composing the group. If we ascribe to that group a little something extra, they said, then we mystify reality, we fall victim to what Auguste Comte called metaphysical thinking. That is what the critics said. But that is not at all what Durkheim intended to convey to his readers. The point that he wants to make is that when human beings are woven together in larger social entities, those collectives possess peculiar characteristics that cannot be found in the individuals that constitute them. The social group may have a certain density. We may discern a certain degree of regulation, a certain amount of cohesion. We may even it's quantify it's birth rate, or it's suicide rate. And all those characteristics are attributes of the entire social formation, they cannot be found in the individual members. They rise up, they emerge from the structure as a whole. Durkheim even wrote about what he called the conscience collective. You can translate that as collective consciousness, but you can also translate it as collective conscience. In his later books this concept became more and more important. It replaced, in a way, organic solidarity as the most important source of social cohesion. Now, Durkheim had to confront the professors of mass psychology who believed that sociology was a superfluous science because they already studied the things that sociologists said that they were going to study. When the psychologist of individual human beings really understands what goes on in the brains of one single man or woman, they said, then it is not so difficult to understand what happens when 1,000 of those people form a group. And here Durkheim disagreed completely. When human beings get together in larger social entities, he says, this process of association creates entirely new phenomena that cannot be found in the elements that compose it. The social facts that emerge from the association of individual human beings belong to a class all of their own. Or, to use the latent expression that Durkheim often employed, they are phenomena sui generis. And no, there is nothing mystical or metaphysical about that. He tries to make his point here with a comparison, a comparison taken from the world of biology. We all believe, he says, that a living cell consists of nothing but molecules. And if those molecules are ordered in a certain way, then we may see, at the level of the living cell as a whole, a completely new phenomenon surprisingly springing forth from the associated parts, that wonderful thing that we call life. Of course, it is impossible to say that life can be found in this one, or in that one, of the assembled molecules. It is their very peculiar association that creates something new. A phenomenon that is studied in a science that stands apart from the science is that like, physics or chemistry, study molecules and, of course, that is the science is life, the science of biology. And just in the same way, the association of human beings creates new phenomena, social facts that should be studied, not by the sciences of individuals, such as psychology, but by the science that is dedicated to the study of social facts and nothing but social facts, the science of sociology. You can find this argument in a small book that Durkheim published in 1895, [FOREIGN], The Rules of Sociological Method. Not quite a methodology book in the restricted sense of the word, but a book about the philosophical and the epistemological foundations of sociology, of the social sciences in general. In that book he says that social facts are characterized, in the first place, by being outside of each and every individual, they are external to the individual, and that they are characterized, in the second place, by the fact that they exert a certain pressure on every individual. They are coercive. We experience them as a power forcing us to think and feel and act in certain ways. And that is an important point with far reaching consequences, as we shall see when we discuss his sociology of religion. But the heart of the matter is that social facts are phenomena sui generis, that they should never be explained by reducing them to the level of individual human beings. They exist in a world all of their own.
