Breaking down the question
This question captures the founding claim of Durkheim's sociology in a single sentence. To say society is more than the sum of individual acts is to assert that society is a reality sui generis — of its own kind — not reducible to the individuals who compose it. The command word Discuss invites you to explain this claim, ground it in Durkheim's concepts, and weigh its significance and its critics.
The examiner is testing whether you understand the anti-reductionist core of Durkheim's project. The word more is doing the heavy lifting: society emerges from the association of individuals yet acquires properties none of them possesses alone, much as a living cell has properties its constituent molecules lack.
At 10 marks, you should establish the claim through social facts and the collective consciousness, illustrate it, and note briefly the objection from methodological individualists.
How to approach it
Open by stating the thesis directly: for Durkheim society is an emergent reality, external to and greater than its individual members. Introduce the idea of the sui generis at once.
Then support it with his key concepts — social facts that are external and constraining, and the collective consciousness that exists over and above individual minds. Draw on his examples, such as the stability of suicide rates and the binding force of moral rules. Our Durkheim notes on social facts and method and the social fact concept entry develop these points.
Conclude by acknowledging the individualist critique — that only individuals ultimately act — while affirming why Durkheim's emergentism founded sociology as an autonomous science.
Model answer
At the heart of Emile Durkheim's sociology lies the claim that society is a reality sui generis — a reality of its own kind that emerges when individuals associate but cannot be reduced to them. Society, he insisted, is more than the sum of its members and their individual acts, just as the properties of water cannot be found in hydrogen and oxygen taken separately. This anti-reductionist thesis is the foundation of his case that sociology is an autonomous science with a subject matter of its own.
Durkheim built the argument on the concept of the social fact — any way of acting, thinking or feeling that is external to the individual and endowed with a coercive power over them. Language, law, religion, custom and moral rules exist before any particular person is born, persist after they die, and press upon them with a force felt most keenly when resisted. Because these facts exist outside individual consciousness and constrain it from without, they cannot be explained by individual psychology; they belong to the collective. The determining cause of a social fact, Durkheim held, must be sought among other social facts, not in states of individual mind.
The collective consciousness — the body of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society — is the clearest expression of this emergent reality. It is diffused across the whole society, endures across generations, and shapes individuals rather than being created by any of them. When people gather in what Durkheim called collective effervescence, as in religious ritual, they generate a shared energy and sense of the sacred that no isolated individual could produce, and that in turn binds the group.
His study of suicide supplies the empirical proof. Although each suicide seems a private act of despair, the suicide rate in a society is stable over time and varies systematically between groups, being higher among the unmarried, the isolated and those in times of upheaval. Such regularity cannot be explained by the diverse motives of individuals; it reflects social forces — the degrees of integration and regulation — that exist at the level of society itself. The rate is a property of the collectivity, not of any person within it.
The claim has attracted criticism. Methodological individualists, drawing on Weber, argue that ultimately only individuals think and act, and that talk of society acting risks reifying an abstraction. Yet Durkheim's point survives this objection: to say that society has emergent properties is not to deny that individuals are its substrate, but to insist that their association produces something new, with its own regularities, that demands sociological rather than psychological explanation.
In conclusion, Durkheim's thesis that society exceeds the sum of individual acts established the very possibility of sociology. By showing that social facts and the collective consciousness are external, constraining and general, he demonstrated that society is an emergent reality to be studied in its own right.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner expects candidates to recognise this as Durkheim's foundational, anti-reductionist claim, and to explain the word more rather than paraphrase the sentence. A weak answer describes social facts in isolation; a strong one uses them to demonstrate emergence — that association produces properties no individual possesses.
The best responses tie together social facts, the collective consciousness and the suicide rate as evidence of a sui generis reality, and then engage briefly with the individualist critique before defending Durkheim's emergentism. Showing that this claim founds sociology as an autonomous science signals the conceptual command the examiner rewards within the 10-mark limit.