If we now know something about the nature of the common and collective consciousness of society, what exactly this concept means and the form that the collective consciousness might take in a late-industrial society like Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century – the subject matter of Parts I and II of this book – and if we also know something more about Durkheim's views on the question of crime and punishment generally and also what he meant when he claimed that the common and/or collective consciousness of society had ‘a life of its own’ – the subject matter of Parts III and IV of this study – then we still need to say something more about the many and various problems we have encountered with Durkheim's initial discussion of the concept of the collective consciousness of society, in particular in The Division of Labour. In Part V of this book, I want to focus on one question in particular to which I will argue all of these other problems are related: the vexed issue of why Durkheim changed his mind, sometime after writing The Rules of Sociological Method and sometime before he wrote Suicide, concerning the possibility that modern industrial societies would develop a new collective consciousness for themselves, or ‘organically’ as I think we might well describe this process. Later on he seems to have taken a much more pessimistic view, as expressed in his lectures on Moral Education for example, that it had somehow become necessary to artificially create or construct a new collective consciousness suitable for France at the beginning of the twentieth century and consciously and deliberately instil this in society via the education system (2002, 277). Unless this was done, the later Durkheim thought, the collective consciousness, left to itself, might well developed an aberrant and immoral form.

Not everyone agrees that there was such a significant break in Durkheim's thinking. Bryan Turner for example has argued, ‘In the light of Durkheim's concern in the period 1912 to 1917 with patriotism, war and religion, the continuities between his work at Bordeaux in the 1890s and later at the Sorbonne are more impressive and obvious than the alleged discontinuities’ (1992, xxxviii).