Émile Durkheim and the Collective Consciousness of Society: A Study in Criminology

ISBN-13: 9781783082285 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 276 str.

Kenneth Smith

Opis

Emile Durkheim and the Collective Consciousness of Society: A Study in Criminology challenges conventional thinking on the use of Durkheim s key concept of the collective consciousness of society, and represents the first ever book-length treatment of this underexplored topic. Operating from both a criminological and sociological perspective, Kenneth Smith argues that Durkheim s original concept must be sensitively revised and updated for its real relevance to come to the fore. This study puts forward three major adjustments to Durkheim s concept of the collective consciousness. It complicates the idea that the common and collective consciousness are interchangeable terms for the same phenomenon; it refutes the disciplinary function of society as part of the concept of the common or collective consciousness; and it reveals the illusiveness of the supposed universal set of equally held ideas in a society, underlining the importance of geographical and generational variation."