(mentalité)
A historical form of collective unconscious (extrapolated from Durkheim, Émile’s idea of collective consciousness rather than langue’s own concept of collective unconscious) conceived by the Annales School of historians in France to explain how a large population of individual subjects can act and think in a similar fashion without direct coercion. The concept is particularly useful for characterizing the apparently spontaneous shift in national character that precedes revolutions. It is also used to discuss such longue durée processes as secularization.