SOC 201 Chapter 11: Chapter 11.7
Document Summary
The collective conscience, in other words, was made up of the values, beliefs, norms, and goals shared by people in a particular society. The collective conscience was a kind of social oil that made things work smoothly. As we also discussed in chapter 1, in the late nineteenth century, many people believed that society was in chaos and about to fall apart. For centuries society had seemed to be in a holding pattern, and social change, when it did occur, came slowly almost unnoticed. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, social change became a fact of life. That sounds reasonable to us, because we live in a society in which change is a part of life. But a couple of hundred years ago, change was new and seemed to be undermining the very nature of what held society together. To durkheim, one of the symptoms of this society falling apart syndrome was the high rate of suicide.
