If we now have a reasonably good idea of exactly what Durkheim understood by the concept of the common or collective consciousness of society – albeit a rather abstract and a highly theoretical one – we do not as yet have any idea at all of what form these many different collective consciousnesses might take in a still largely agricultural society like France at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Durkheim delivered his lectures on moral education, or in a post-industrial society like Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century. So far, if I can put it this way, Durkheim has done little more than provide us with a name for this very interesting concept, and given us a few clues to the nature and existence of this phenomenon – something of which we might otherwise have remained entirely ignorant of course – but, as Tim Newburn has observed (2007, 174), he has not as yet told us anything very much about what this phenomenon is really like or what form it might take. This is surprising since if any such thing as the, or a, collective consciousness of society actually did exist it is reasonable to expect that Durkheim – Durkheim of all people, as we might say – would have given us a detailed empirical account of what this phenomenon was actually like. After all, it is not only Durkheim's thesis that something such as the collective consciousness of society actually exists, but he in fact claims that no society, not even a very elementary one, can possibly exist without something of this kind (Durkheim 2002, 87–8), and clearly the obvious way for him to have made this point would be for him to have provided us with a detailed empirical case study of this phenomenon.