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Émile DurkheimThe Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1912A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim was one of the leading social theorists in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his work led to the establishment of sociology as a modern academic discipline. Western culture, particularly since the Enlightenment, developed an individualistic lens through which it understood matters of reason, faith, free will, and other aspects of human behavior and cognition. Durkheim’s work was valuable in illuminating the ways that the collective force of society could impress itself on individual thought and behavior. By viewing society as an entity that was more than the sum of its parts—a complex, structural system that stood over and acted upon the lives of individuals, rather than merely being constructed and influenced by individual actions—society was recognized as a proper object of study on its own merits.
In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim examined religion as a manifestation of the influence of society upon its individual members. He attributed to society a psychical force established by the collective consciousnesses of its members, which is reaffirmed and re-experienced in the context of communal religious rituals. This was a marked departure from the established ways of viewing religion in previous social theory, which had tended to be divided between traditionalist perspectives on the one hand, which allowed for the possibility of religion as the product of divine revelation or the experience of the supernatural, and skeptical modernist views on the other hand, which tended to disregard religion as fantasy and delusion. Durkheim’s view established a third way of perceiving religion, one that acknowledged its significant place in human society and made it a legitimate object of scientific investigation without including overtones of judgment or rejection. His theory that religion was a manifestation of the influence of society allowed sociology to reframe the study of religion as a dispassionate scientific enterprise, rather than a field which courted perennial controversy.
Socio-Historical Context: Early 20th Century Sociology and Religion
Written in 1912, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life is a product of its own time, and while its contributions to the establishment of sociology and the study of religion remain important, some of its methods and conclusions are now seen as relics of a bygone era in academia. It reflects the uneasiness of European society at the way in which traditional religious positions had been questioned by academic historians and social scientists in the 19th century. This can be seen, for example, in Durkheim’s repeated insistence that his position regards religion as a real thing and not merely as a delusion, even as his theory discarded much of the traditional view on the origins of religion. Despite his attempts to avoid controversy by insisting on the reality of religion, portrayed as a system which is concerned with actual forces in the real world, Durkheim appears to hold an unstated metaphysical assumption against the possibility of the supernatural. He argues, for example, that religion in general cannot be defined by its views on the supernatural, but neglects to deal with the question of whether the supernatural in principle can even be regarded as a metaphysical possibility. His silence on the issue was common in the academic philosophy of his own day, which had largely accepted a position that denied any possibility to the supernatural, but some philosophers of religion have since called this position into question as an unwarranted erasure of one of the traditional metaphysical viewpoints on the origins of religion, the very question Durkheim was studying.
Another socio-historical issue worth noting in Durkheim’s work is his treatment of Aboriginal Australian societies. He terms such societies “primitive,” a word used in contemporary debates about the developmental arc of human society, and which implies that Aboriginal Australians existed at a lower level of social development than the so-called civilized societies elsewhere in the world. Durkheim’s case in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life posits that all human religion can be traced to the foundational concepts evident in Aboriginal Australian religion. This perspective can reasonably be accused of implying that all other world religions had begun by believing what the Aboriginal Australians currently believed, but had since developed religious systems beyond that foundational level. Further, Durkheim’s appropriation of Aboriginal Australian beliefs and concepts to make his case about religion has come to be seen as problematic, especially since it was based on secondhand, contested ethnographic data collected by means of a colonial-era expedition, though this approach was not regarded as controversial in his own day.
