1. What are social facts?
Can’t be everything that is generally present throughout society because
then there’d be no special object for sociological study – we’d study the same
as everyone else.
2. There IS a separate category of phenomena that can be
distinguished from those studied by other sciences
Examples
acting like a brother, husband, citizen
fulfilling contracts
using currency
Characteristics
external to the individual
ready-made at birth
function independently of my own use of them
(e.g., I can’t change language)
coercive power
sanctions/punishment
ridicule
isolation
force/resistance
3. “it consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external
to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they
control him” (44a.6)
NOT biological.
Representations & actions.
4. What is the society of the social? Whole thing, groups, religious
denominations. Almost anything one can
be a member of or be “one of.”
This idea will probably
bother hardcore individualists but it is generally accepted that “most of our
ideas and tendencies” come from without (44b.3).
5. Another type of social fact : social currents
Not so much associated
with social organization but still “objective,” “external,” and “coercive.”
Group and crowd
phenomena.
different experience from
if we did it ourselves
feels funny afterwards –
was that ours?
and this stuff is just
like when we get together to “do” public opinion, politics, art, literature
6. Socialization
“all education is a
continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing, feeling, and acting
which he could not have arrived at spontaneously” (45a.6)
“the very pressure of the
social milieu which tends to fashion him in its own image” (45b4)
7. Universality is not the criteria. But collective aspects are.
Crystalization – The Continuum of Social Facts
8. Some social facts get crystallized out in the form of aphorisms,
moral rules, laws, etc. (cf. to “social constructions” “institutions”).
9. Other social facts don’t quite have this concreteness but
methodogical tricks can help us to separate them out. D calls these “social currents” and lists the
collective sentiments that are behind things like changes in a marriage or
suicide rate. Using statistics we can
ascertain that there must be something “out there” behind the numbers.
10. Can we say that things are only social if they are general
(nearly universal)? Well, sort of
(46b.5). But these things are general
because they are collective not vice versa.
11. “but it is general because it is collective (that is, more or
less obligatory), and certainly not collective because general” (46b5)
12. The stuff we learn from socialization has a special authority
because it is collective and ancient.
13. “If all hearts beat in unison…because an identical force propels
them…Each is carried along by all” (46b9).
So, in sum
14. social fact is external to individual and has coercive power
that can be seen via sanctions and resistance
15. there are also others defined by wide diffusion and whose
“existence is independent of the individual forms it assumes in its diffusion”
(47a3) (Generality + Externality)
16. Another category is “ways of existing” – where the roads go, the
channels of communication, the ways people build houses, the fashions that are
available. But he says, these really are
just ways of acting.
17. Social facts are distributed along a continuum ranging from
extremely concrete structures to amorphous public opinion (47b8).
Conclusion
“A social fact is every way of
acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external
constraint; or again, every way of
acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time
existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations”
(What is a Social Fact?, 48a.3).
Read more about Emile Durkheim.