“Durkheim argued that society is more than the sum of individual acts. Discuss.” (2022)
Émile Durkheim built sociology on the claim that society is a reality sui generis, a reality of its own kind. Against Herbert Spencer‘s view of society as a web of contracts between individuals, he held that association produces properties that no individual possesses, and these must be studied by a separate science.
The argument
- Emergence through synthesis: as bronze has a hardness absent in copper and tin, and a living cell has properties absent in its molecules, the combination of individuals creates something new: norms, beliefs and institutions (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895).
- Collective conscience: the “totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average members of a society” forms a system “which has its own life” (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893). It survives the turnover of generations.
- Externality and constraint: language, law and money exist before us and resist us. Hence social facts must be explained by other social facts, never by individual psychology.
- Non-contractual element of contract: a contract binds only because society supplies the rules that make it valid. Individual exchange presupposes society.
- Empirical proof: in Suicide (1897), stable, group-specific rates showed that an intensely personal act follows collective patterns of integration and regulation.
- Individualism as a social product: even the autonomous individual is created by a society with an advanced division of labour, the “cult of the individual”.
Indian illustration
Caste endogamy persists although no single person designed it. In the Pew Research Center’s 2021 survey of about 30,000 Indians, 64% said stopping women of their community from marrying across caste lines was very important. The norm constrains private choice as an external, collective fact.
Counter-perspectives
- Gabriel Tarde: society is imitation between individuals; remove the individuals and nothing is left.
- Max Weber: sociology interprets the subjective meaning of social action. Collectivities such as the state are only the actions of individuals (methodological individualism).
- Interactionists: Herbert Blumer saw society as a process of people defining situations, not a fixed thing over them.
- Structure and agency: Anthony Giddens (The Constitution of Society, 1984) argued that structure both constrains and enables, and is reproduced in action (duality of structure). Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) described society as a human product that becomes objective and then shapes its makers.
Conclusion
Durkheim was right that social wholes have emergent, constraining properties, and critical realists such as Roy Bhaskar retain that point. His error was to reify society. The better position treats society as more than the sum of individual acts, but never apart from them.