Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
Emile DurkheimRead
The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The beliefs and feelings shared by a society create a unique system that influences its members' behaviors and thoughts.
Emile Durkheim's quote highlights the concept of collective consciousness, which refers to the set of shared beliefs, values, and sentiments that shape a society's behavior and identity. This collective mentality not only exists among individuals but also possesses a distinct life and power of its own, guiding the social norms and actions of its members in profound ways.
Themes
Collective ConsciousnessBeliefsSocietyShared ValuesNorms
In practice
Example use cases
In a sociological lecture discussing the impact of culture on individual behavior.
More from Emile Durkheim
All quotes →Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
Emile DurkheimRead
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
Emile DurkheimRead
A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.
Emile DurkheimRead
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
Emile DurkheimRead
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.
Emile DurkheimRead
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