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After this admittedly incomplete investigation of the nature of the elementary social fact we should
ask what is the nature of the elementary social group, which is not at all the same thing. It is true that
every social act—speaking, professing a belief, working, obeying, dancing, singing—implies an
imitative relationship between men, some being models, the others copiers, or all copying an ancient
common model. In this sense there is a social bond between all those who speak the same language,
practice the same profession or religion, or do business together. But the group formed by each of
these bonds considered separately has only an incomplete and abstract reality. The concrete and
living group presupposes a superposition of several of these groups, a bundle of several of these
bonds, just as a rope is composed of many twisted and intertwined strings. And that is not all. In
addition, at least in the beginning, in order for the group to be alive and fruitful it is necessary to add
something else to these various sorts of imitation, and that something is the action of heredity, the real
or fictional bond of blood, which serves to tie all the rest together. Thus, just as we had to define the
social fact in essentially psychological terms, we are now forced to define the social group in terms
that are both psychological and physiological, and which expose its roots deep in the soul and in life.
Shall I say then that the elementary social group is the family? This would be most audacious: there
is nothing so outmoded, so highly despised by today’s sociologists as this simple solution. A few
years ago it was still used everywhere and looked upon as an obvious truth. When one of the most
industrious and devoted pioneers of documentary sociology, a man of the highest moral character,
possessing both love for and rare intelligence about inferior, savage, or half-civilized societies, when
Le Play dedicated his life to a detailed study of what I shall call social histology, or the cellular
tissue of peoples—the idea that if one cell were known, all the others would be as well—did he
hesitate one second in choosing the group which would be the subject of his investigation? No, it did
not occur to him to trace anything other than monographs of families. At present even his disciples
have some doubts on this count, and several of them are in the process of substituting for rather than
adding to the studies of the master with monographes of professions conceived on an entirely
different plan.
As for Mr. Durkheim, he completely rejects any mixing of a biological idea in the subtle sociology
he traces. For him, the elementary social group is not the family at all but the horde, brought together
any which way and staying together no one know why or how—the horde, and then the repetition of
hordes, the clan. To a lesser degree, the same prejudice against the family is found almost
everywhere, even among scholars who are generally to be commended for their insight and
moderation. According to Starke, cohabitation has played a far greater role in the formation of the
social bond than consanguinity. Along with the community formed by tatooing, the totem, or a name,
cohabitation supposedly provides the true origin of the clan and even furnishes the origin of
matriarchy, whose explanation had been sought to no avail by hypothesizing universal promiscuity in
the beginning of mankind. For Starke the clan is thus a sort of hereditary corporation into which one
enters less by consanguinity than by religious consecretion. The child is given—I was going to say at
baptism—the name of an animal or plant which from then on becomes his protector, his miraculous
and invisible doctor. “Mr. Morgan recounts,” says Starke, “that according to a fairly widespread
custom the mother enters her son into the clan she prefers by giving him a certain name; and indeed
each clan does possess a series of names which are its particular property; to receive such a name
therefore is to enter into the clan.” To understand this it must be recalled that, both among the
primitives and ourselves, the name given to a child is held to have a very real effect on his future.
Something of this ancient belief subsists in the Christian’s cult toward his patron saint.
Bees of the same hive, ants of the same anthill are all sisters. This is enough to say that it is