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facts which constrain them all. Is it not evident here, however, that some are leaders and others
followers, and that if, despite their eagerness to anticipate suggestions, we can speak of constraint
with respect to followers, it is a contradiction in term to apply this expression to leaders?
But enough of the alleged coercive character of social facts. One more word about their supposed
character of being exterior and alien to individuals. This whole system rests on a misinterpretation.
To the extent that my language, my law, my work, my religion existed before me and exist outside me
—in at least a certain metaphorical sense of outside—and to the extent that the same can be said for
each member of a society taken individually, does it follow that a language, a religion, a law, an
industry, and so forth can be considered to exist independently of all the people who speak this
language, practice this religion, conform to this law, practice this industry? If it can be said that these
social things are independent of every one of the members in the sense that if one member disappears
the social things do not, is it not simply because without him their reality is their presence within the
consciousness or the memory of all the other members? I say within because they are interior and not
exterior to these members, and if they begin by being exterior to each new arrival who is not yet a
member of the association, as he becomes incorporated into the association, they actually enter into
him and finally become that which is most intimate and most dear to him, most his own. Social things,
which maintain and perpetuate themselves by the individual consciousnesses through which they
evolve, are like an ocean wave, which crosses innumerable molecules and seems to animate them
even while living from their force. One can say just as well (or not so well) of the wave that it is
exterior to the waters of the sea and that it imposes itself on them. But where is the physicist who
does not know what to think of such metaphors?
I am afraid that I shall be reproached for breaking down an open door by refuting a profound but
isolated thinker who tranquilly writes sentences such as this: “Individuals aside, only society
remains.” What can society be when all individuals are disregarded? For, no doubt about it, this is
precisely what the author means.
Still, far from excusing myself for the time devoted to this refutation, I must say that there are few
sociological truths as useful to examine as Mr. Durkheim’s errors, however evident they may be. And
he must be thanked for having expressed them so boldly and so clearly. They were in the air and
asked to be incarnated in a logical and vigorous mind; it was fortunate that it was his mind they
encountered. He pushed to the extreme all the scattered tendencies of an emancipated sociology, freed
not only from biology, as was necessary, but also from psychology, which is impossible, and
esconced in its invisible and imaginary domain in the clouds.
The source of this illusion merits examination, for it is very widespread among cultivated minds—
nothing more banal than the idea that a combination differs or can differ entirely from its elements and
that from the simple meeting of these elements can emerge an entirely new reality which has in no
way existed previously in another form. Chemistry and biology gave credence to this prejudice. One
can see the contrast between the properties of composite bodies and those of the simple bodies of
which they are composed. One can see a living being composed exclusively of chemical substances
which, before being assembled in an organism, had nothing biological about them. And most of all,
out of living cells that we assume to be unconscious, we see the self arise and we call it a miracle.
After this we ought not to judge it surprising a priori that the social meeting of different selves should
bring forth an us, which is supposedly something supra-psychological, or essentially
nonpsychological, and which exists independently of all individual consciousnesses.
But even if, all else granted, this does not suffer from difficulties a priori, observation
unfortunately is absolutely contrary to this hypothesis. We are singularly privileged in sociology to