Summary
Collective effervescence is the surge of shared feeling and energy that arises when people gather and act together. The sociologist Émile Durkheim described it in ‘The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life’ (1912), working from ethnographers’ accounts of Aboriginal Australian ceremonies: once assembled, “a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting”. Out of such moments, he argued, come a group’s sense of the sacred and its renewed faith in itself.
It has no politics. Durkheim saw it in revolutions and the Crusades, where the most inoffensive person might become “either a hero or a butcher”. Randall Collins later traced smaller versions through everyday encounters in ‘Interaction Ritual Chains’ (2004).
Rationale
Part 2 says a citizens’ assembly can create “experiences of collectivity”; here is a mechanism. Durkheim adds the caveat: the same charge runs through rallies of any politics, whatever disposition they grow.