to the social cohesion that occurs because individuals affiliate with and depend on the organizing principle of the "common type" (61; 84), or individuals who have "social similarities." What Durkheim calls "repressive law" reinforces mechanical solidarity by punishing criminals, whose behavior deviates from or otherwise weakens or disrupts the social coherence experienced by the common type.
It should be noted that Durkheim does not necessarily endorse social solidarity as a positive moral good, still less as an ideal type (to use Weber's term) of social structure. Rather, he seems to be devising a way of explaining the impulse toward and consequences of social organization. Thus he observes that where mechanical solidarity is "highly developed," individuals do not "belong to" themselves but are "literally a thing at the disposal of society" (85). On the other hand, individual personalities can develop what he refers to as "intensity" (118ff, et passim) that is distinct from common consciousness. Such personalities might be but need not be criminal. Instead they might cohere with each other as a subsociety of the larger society. It is at this point that Durkheim's discussion of religion enters the picture.
Durkheim rejects a definition of religion in terms of God or the conception of a supreme being. Rather, he defines it in terms of a set of beliefs held in common by individuals who affiliate based on such beliefs: "Indeed it is invariably the fact that when a somewhat strong conviction is shared by a single community of people it inevitably assumes a
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