The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (review)

The reception of Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life has been marked by rancorous criticism in Europe and in America. In France for instance, Durkheim's objectivist views of society as an external reality irreducible to individuals was vigorously resisted by Gabriel de Tarde, who insisted on an imitation theory of social facts. In America, Sorokin (1928) and Parsons (1968) cautioned their readership that The Elementary Forms had theoretical flaws in its objectivist views and that, in the main, it was an "untenable" work (Parsons 1968). By the 1950s and 60s, the overall view of The Elementary Formsof Religious Life was that, on the whole, it had become a marginal work and an overlooked text. ¹

All this, however, seems to be changing with two new translations of The Elementary Forms by Karen Fields and Carol Cosman. In the last decade or more, Durkheim scholars have discovered several major thematic tracts in The Elementary Forms which have become key points of theoretic interest beyond the theory of religion. The first of these tracts concerns the theory of knowledge which, at the outset of the work, poses the question of how knowledge is obtained from the objective world (Godlove 1982; Lukes 1973). In the last several years, this theme has become a pivotal issue in Durkheim scholarship, since many believe that Durkheim engaged in a series of formal oppositions against the philosophic theory of knowledge which, until that time, had held that objects in the outer world were constituted by a priori categories and could not be known in themselves (Allen, Pickering & Miller 1998; Godlove 1986; Morrison 2001; Schmaus 1994).

A second theme that runs parallel to the theory of religion in The Elementary Forms is the theory of effervescent assemblies (Allen, Pickering & Miller 1998; Ramp 1998). Here, Durkheim's discussion constitutes a formal argument concerning how groups actually congregate, given that their immediate economic necessity prevents them from being in a constant or perpetual state of assembly. In certain respects, Durkheim's discussion here rivals the theory of social cohesion first articulated in the The Division of Labor and poses, in more dramatic terms, the question of group formation that is activated in the process of social assembly.

A third theme has only recently come to light and has to do with Durkheim's formal opposition to seventeenth and eighteenth century rationalist philosophy (Morrison, 2001). The question here is: why should Durkheim enter into opposition to seventeenth and eighteenth century rationalism while putting forward a theory of religion? The answer is that, in the philosophical climate of the day, Durkheim had to demonstrate that society was a structure that must first exist in the objective order, and then secondly show how it exists in the subjective order.

The essential presupposition of Descartes' seventeenth century rationalism was that it had asserted that all objective reality was nothing more than an "extension" of "unextended thought." In this view, "outness" — all external reality — is nothing more than an extension borrowed from thought itself. This philosophic refusal by Descartes to acknowledge the independent existence of the exterior world had the effect of collapsing all the objectivist categories that needed to exist in order for Durkheim to enumerate the substance of the social world. This explains why in chapter seven, book 2 and in chapter three, book 3 of The Elementary Forms Durkheim establishes an explicit anti-rationalist tract which vitiates the extreme rationalist positions of Descartes, Kant and Hume. That move not only increased the theoretic stakes which were riding on Durkheim's objectivist argument, it also set up important theoretical and epistemological connections to the theory of knowledge which, up until this time, has not been recognized by Durkheim scholars. ²

Since it is impossible to demonstrate the individual nuances of these arguments in each of the...