If we want to say something not just about the nature of the collective consciousness of society – the subject matter of Part I of this book – but also about the form that the collective consciousness takes, then we must look at the form that it takes in a particular society, there being, as Durkheim says, no universal or trans-historical answer to this question. The society that I have therefore chosen to look at in detail in Part II of this book is Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Why choose to look at Britain today rather than France at the time that Durkheim was writing? This is partly a matter of convenience of course since this is the society in which I happen to live and the one with which I am therefore most familiar. But it is also because it seems more interesting to say what the collective consciousness of a late-industrial society like Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century might look like, rather than say what the collective consciousness of France was like at the beginning of the twentieth century (a task better suited to a historian anyway, rather than a sociologist or still less a criminologist). However this is also because, as a matter of fact, any society will do to refute a universal claim of the kind that Durkheim makes here: it really does not matter which society we look at since if we do not find something corresponding to a collective consciousness in even one society we will have disproved Durkheim‧s claim that some such thing has to exist in all societies. However, in case it helps the reader to follow my argument here, let me say at the outset that, in what follows, I will argue that what Durkheim says about the collective consciousness of society is not refuted by an empirical examination of early twenty-first century Britain; that we do indeed find considerable evidence here of something which I think might reasonably be called a collective and/or common consciousness of society – albeit not one general thing, believed in by more or less everyone, of the kind that Durkheim expected to find – and therefore that Durkheim's project – and along with this his general sociology – is not refuted by this particular empirical investigation.