Having considered in some detail Durkheim's views on the subject of crime and punishment in Part III, I now want to return to a question which has been entirely neglected by contemporary criminology; namely, what Durkheim means by the quite extraordinary claim, in his famous and much-quoted definition of the concept of the common and collective consciousness in The Division of Labour, that this concept is not only made up of ‘the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society’ but also, bizarrely, that this set of beliefs somehow forms ‘a determinate system with a life of its own’ (1989, 39). What on earth can Durkheim have meant by this extraordinary claim?

In Part IV of this study I will investigate this claim thoroughly and, in effect, I will argue that contemporary criminology cannot have it both ways: it cannot simultaneously claim (a) that there is such a thing as the common and collective consciousness of society and (b) that this concept is of some importance to criminology today, without at the same time saying clearly (c) what Durkheim meant when he claims that the collective consciousness has a life of its own. Either criminology must explain the second part of this famous definition or it must abandon the first part and hence, along with this, the idea that Durkheim's concept of the common and collective consciousness of society is of any importance to contemporary criminology.