The social phenomenon

The social phenomenon

Paul Fauconnet et Marcel Mauss

Translated by Bayron Pascal

The social phenomenon

A first fact is that there are societies, i.e. aggregates of human beings. Among these aggregates, some are durable, like the nations, ephemeral as the crowds, some are very large as the large churches; The other very small as the family when it is reduced to the marital couple. However, whatever the size and form of these groups and those that could be enumerated class, tribe, occupational group, caste, commune, they all present this character they are formed by a plurality of individual consciences, acting and Reacting to one another. It is in the presence of these actions and reactions, of these interactions that one recognizes societies. The question is whether, among the facts in these groups, there are those that manifest the nature of the group as a group, and not just the nature of the individuals who make up them, the general attributes of mankind. Are there any that are what they are because the group is what it is? On this condition, and on this condition only, there will be a sociology proper; For there will then be a life of society, distinct from that which the individuals lead or rather distinct from the one they would lead if they lived isolated.

But there are indeed phenomena that present these characters, only you have to know how to discover them. Indeed, everything that happens in a social group is not a manifestation of the life of the group as such, and therefore is not social, any more than anything that happens in an organism is strictly biological. Not only the accidental and local disturbances determined by cosmic causes, but also regular, regularly repeated events, which are of interest to all members of the group without exception, may not have the character of Social facts. For example, all individuals, with the exception of patients, perform their organic functions under substantially identical conditions; The same is the psychological functions: the phenomena of sensation, representation, reaction or inhibition are the same among all members of the group, they are subjected to the same laws as the research psychology. But no one thinks about putting them in the category of social events despite their generality. It is that they do not hold in any way the nature of the grouping, but derive from the organic and psychic nature of the individual. So are they the same, regardless of which group the Indi Vidu belongs to. If an isolated human was, conceivably, one could say that they would be what they are even outside of any society. If, therefore, the facts in which the societies are the theatre differed from each other only by their degree of generality, there would be none that could be regarded as proper manifestations of social life, and which could, therefore, be the subject of the Sociology.

And yet the existence of such phenomena is so obvious that it was reported by observers who did not consider the constitution of a sociology. It has often been noted that a crowd, an assembly did not feel, think and do not behave as isolated individuals would have done; That the most diverse groups, a family, a corporation, a nation had a "spirit ", a character, habits as individuals have theirs. In all cases therefore it is perfectly clear that the group, a crowd in society, really has a clean nature, that it determines in individuals certain ways of feeling, thinking and acting, and that these individuals would have neither the same tendencies, nor the Same habits, nor the same prejudices, if they had lived in other human groups. But this conclusion can be generalized. Between the ideas that would have, the actions of an isolated individual and the collective manifestations, there is such a chasm that the latter must be brought to a new nature, to sui generis forces: otherwise, they would remain incomprehensible.

Are, for example, manifestations of the economic life of modern Western societies: industrial production of commodities, extreme Labour Division, international exchange, Capital Association, currency, credit; Annuity, interest, wages, etc.: Let us think of the considerable number of notions, institutions, habits that the simplest acts of a trader or a worker seeking to earn a living entail; It is clear that neither of them creates the forms that their activity necessarily takes: neither do they invent credit, interest, wages, exchange or currency.

All that can be attributed to each of them is a general tendency, to obtain the food necessary to protect against the bad weather, or even if the or wants, the taste of, the business, the gain, etc. Even feelings that seem spontaneous, like the love of work, of savings, of luxury, are in reality the product of social culture since they are lacking in some peoples and vary infinitely, within a society granny, according to the Layers of the population. But on their own, these needs would determine, in order to satisfy themselves, a small number of very simple acts which contrast in the most accused way with the very complex forms in which the economic man now flows his conduct, and it is not Only the complexity of these forms which testifies to their extra-individual origin, but still and above all the way in which they are imposed on the individual. The latter is more or less obliged to comply with it. Sometimes it is the very law that compels it, or the custom as imperative as the law. It was in this way that in the past the industrialist was obliged to manufacture products of determined quality and measure, that now still it is subject to all kinds of regulations, that no one can refuse to receive in payment the legal currency for its legal value. Sometimes it is the force of things against which the individual comes to break if he tries to rebel against them: thus the trader who wants to renounce the credit, the producer who would like to consume his own products, in a word the worker who Would like to recreate the rules of his economic activity alone, would be condemned to an inevitable ruin.